Ideas on techniques for sharing great content
Everyone knows that having great content is the secret to success with content marketing, but if you stop there, that's only half the battle or you're missing half the opportunity. If you just rely on Google to find and display your content then that will only get you so far, even if you can compete in SEO which is far from easy.
The power or maybe the necessity of making your content shareable is shown by the stats below.
First we see how some companies have been successful in driving more visits from social networks through sharing content and engaging with their audiences on social networks.
Next we see the trend of the growing importance of social networks compared to search engines. Interesting and challenging stuff!
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An update on Facebook statistics at the start of 2011
Here's an interesting graphic I thought I'd share, though I know we a probably not needing reminder of the beast that is Facebook - and our obsession with it.
The infographic itself is also a simple example of shareable marketing for onlineschools.org at the same time. Cool!
If you ever need to check out the latest statistics on Facebook for a presentation, then there's Facebook's own statistics page. Three we think are important as a sign of marketing tactics as we go into 11 are:
Community - the average Facebook user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
Mobile - 200 million active Facebook users who are twice as active as non-mobile users
Widgets - 2 million websites have integrated Facebook, growing at 10,000 day and 250 million people per month engage with Facebook through external websites
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My review and recommendations on the best article sites for SEO
This is quite a tricky question to answer since the best article sites do change depending on the industry & audience you're targeting. So to start on any new sector a trial and error approach has to be used where you trial publish and through analysis refine the list to the most effective set for your business.
Still, I thought I'd share this list on my views of the top article publishing websites with some core metrics as well as my experience with each of them. A selection of these sites can often be used as a tactic in your traffic acquisition / seo strategy. Please add to / comment on the list in the comments area at the bottom of the post.
Each score is out of 10. 10 equals excellent.
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Introduction
Following on from my two previous posts on link building techniques I want to take the time to look at the use of article marketing as a tool to help generate inbound links. Article marketing is quite an intensive tactic though as with my previous post on forum marketing it can impact various KPIs such as brand searches, referral traffic as well as generating links.
Benefits
Aids becoming a thought leader in your industry (great for your brand)
Generates new traffic sources
Builds new pages / content for engagement on your own website
Starts conversations with…
A reference of major updates we think marketers involved in SEO, Pay Per Click or Social media need to know about
Each day Google makes many changes and updates to its different tools and it does a great job of announcing them through all its feeds, but it can be difficult to keep on top of what matters and what doesn't.
So on this page we'll be selective and update you on algorithm updates, new tools, policies and changes to Google Analytics we think anyone working in digital marketing or marketing needs to know about, even if they're not a search specialist. Hopefully SEO or Adwords specialists will find it useful too and can let us know what we're missing!
Significant January 2011 updates from Google
Google Keyword Tool now includes mobile volumes (12/10/11)
Importance: [rating=3]
Category: Search behaviour and Adwords targeting
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Key Internet advertising options for 2011
In a recent post, I asked readers of SmartInsights to give their views on Internet advertising. Although some who completed the survey were in favour of online advertising and use it regularly, the majority have either not used it or or tried it once and not used it again since it's less effective than other techniques.
This follow-up post is to show that there are an increasing number of options to use Internet advertising. These have the option that you can reach your audience outside of the search engines. This has the clear advantages that:
A finite number of searches occur for each keyphrase each month
The cost per click in many categories often makes Adwords expensive
People won't search if their unaware of a product type or category
Your ads outside the search engine can help increase searches for your brand term or increase conversion due to…
Its always a popular time of reflection at the start of a New Year & 2011 is undoubtedly no different for most of us. However, I want to look forwards & give some practical recommendations on how you can use new features within paid search to help you in 2011. While I may not be a 100% right in my predictions, a lot of the techniques I'll talk about are already available and you may be missing out - to help I'll link to sources to find out more.
Making some bold decisions for pushing your paid search strategy in 2011 maybe just the start to the year you are looking for!
5 techniques to review in how you approach paid search in 2011:
1. Mobile will alter PPC as we know it
The volume of people now using the internet on their mobile phones is continuing to grow as phones adapt & grow…
The start of a new year quite often means lots of reflection & sets in place new ideas / learnings for the year to come. 2011 is no different; its always difficult to remember where you were 12 months ago, but digital marketing and search as part of that came a long way in 2010. Search in my opinion has matured, enough people now understand enough for it to become more widely accepted and feared less.
The smoke & mirrors, black hat techniques and complexity that used to make it inaccessible to so many has finally been broken down. Moving into 2011 I believe Natural Search will start to work its way into marketing teams & businesses rather than outsourced to "specialists" or left to specific roles in the business, it will as my first trend talks about become integrated.
Recommended reading on SEO success factors for 2011
I've been checking out the…
A case study of a Virgin Atlantic campaign showing the factors that matter
When marketers discuss email marketing we naturally tend to talk a lot about the creative and certainly it's a great way to learn. I love the inspiring examples at the Retail Email Blog and the Campaign Monitor Gallery. But is it the creative or copy that matters most? Other factors are equally or more important.
To help as a reminder of the email success factors I created the CRITICAL mnemonic which you can apply to just about any digital tactic.
To illustrate CRITICAL, I'm going to use this example of what I think is great email creative. It's not new, in fact I've used it in training for years and it features in the first edition of my Email Marketing book, but not the second. But I thought I'd dust it off for this…
The top 10 link-building techniques
Two of the most common questions I'm asked as a consultant is, "How do I get more links?" quickly followed by, "is there a quicker way of doing it?". Quite often clients expect link building to be something you outsource or there is a "tool" that does it for you. Unfortunately this is far from the case.
During this blog post I want to quickly look at what I see as the top level methods for link building. In future posts I'll look at best practice for each of these. In the meantime, I invite you to add to the methods and also add any insights or experiences you have.
Creating amazing content
Looking at the various ways to generate links, there is one thing common between them - they all rely on content. But not just any content, it has to be exceptional,…
