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Category: Digital & Content Marketing

Our blog on content marketing and digital marketing

  • What the Twitter + Google partnership means to the digital marketer

    Earlier today, my friend and fellow marketer Kevin Ekmark shared this story on Twitter about the renewal of the Twitter-Google partnership. From 2009-2011, Google had access to the Twitter “firehose” of data, but for reasons most of us won’t ever know, that partnership stopped. Then rumors of a rebuilding came about late last year. Now it’s confirmed that “Tweets are now going straight into Google.” What does this statement mean? It means that…

    • all your tweets are indexed in Google’s search engine results in (near) real time; no Google bots that take any time to search and index this content.
    • you can search on any hashtag in Google and see the twitter results
    • all your twitter content is now part of your SEO (or as CopyBlogger says, “OC/DC”) strategy
    • when you search on Google, you can directly access Twitter results, even when you’re not logged into Twitter

    In case you’re wondering, this relationship is a really big deal. Comparing this setup to Facebook’s pretty much closed environment, it means that tweets are now web searchable content. For users and marketers, that means they are much easier to discover on the web. For Twitter, it means that non-twitter users can, and probably will, be exposed to all the content on Twitter and possibly be drawn in to start using the service.

    I’m all for this type of relationship, and there are huge benefits to Twitter, Google, Twitter users, and especially for social and digital marketers. Twitter is now expressly a part of your content marketing strategy and tactics. This subject was a lengthy discussion in our recent Digital Marketing class at GA Atlanta. I have been preaching that social media marketing is content marketing. Yes, there are many one-to-one interactions on Twitter between a brand and its audience, but in every case, the brand’s user representatives should be, must be, and are representing that brand by producing and publishing content, now more than ever, since every brand-customer interaction will be fully searchable on Google.

    And when a brand creates, schedules, and executes a twitter strategy, that is absolutely content marketing. Those who have been doing this already have an advantage over those who consider social networks to be only “social”, and not content marketing.

    Social content is content, and must be an intentional reflection of the values of the brand.

  • Take a Marketing Inventory

    General Assembly published my latest article on their blog today, How to Measure Social Media ROI. That post came from a seminar that we’re now teaching regularly at GA Atlanta, and is a great example of repurposing content from one media to many others. It’s not included in the blog post, but in the class, one of the thought provoking exercises is to take a marketing inventory. It reminds me of the scene in “The Princess Bride” after Inigo and Fezzik have rescued Westley from the pit of despair, fed him Miracle Max’s miracle pill, and Westley wakes up: “What are our assets?”

    Before you begin your content marketing strategy, leading to measuring your social media ROI, take an inventory of the following items.

    • CONTENT: what content do you already have or can you create on a regular, repeatable basis?
    • CHANNELS: what social media or other marketing channels (like email) are already established or would be an obvious good fit?
    • GOALS: do you have marketing or more specific social media goals in place? Some of you are shaking your heads right now, but you’d be shocked at how many business operate with no goals.
    • TRACKING: are there any tracking mechanisms in place, such as UTM parameters in your call to action URLs?
    • MEASURING: what analytics tools are you already using or could you use tomorrow, like Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.?
    • VALUE: have you established a value for each lead, each social media engagement? How much would it be worth if someone retweeted your best piece of content?
    • REVENUE: what is your average sale amount? lifetime value of your customer? average conversion rate? Do you know any of these metrics?
    • COSTS: what are your hard costs (personnel, software, etc.), soft costs, time costs, and sunk costs?

    It’s not a contest to see how many of these you can answer perfectly. Rather, it’s an inventory of what you have, so you can make an intelligent decision on how to proceed. For example, if you have an opt-in email list with 10,000 email addresses, that’s a major asset, even if you have zero presence on social media.

    It’s always good to know your assets and your liabilities, even if you don’t have a holocaust cloak or a wheelbarrow.

  • Science of SEO Debunked in One Word

    When I started Atlanta Tech Blogs as just a project to stay on top of the Atlanta tech startup scene, one of the concepts that kept popping up was “SEO“. I was familiar with SEO, but not in a guru kind of sense. I knew what it meant and I knew that if you want people to find you via a Google search, you need to pay attention to SEO.

    Aside from that, I really didn’t know – or care – about SEO. But once I started running Atlanta Tech Blogs, I quickly realized that if I wanted more website visitors, I needed to think about SEO. Since the site is built on WordPress, I also learned that Yoast SEO plugin was the way to go. A million people can’t be wrong, right? That part was easy.

    I set one goal, and that was to be on page one of the Google search for “tech blogs“. That’s it. Meanwhile, I was banging away at curating more content, automating as much as possible, and building the social media presence for @atltechblogs on Twitter. Side note: I went back and forth with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, but ultimately decided to keep them going, and even added Tumblr, really just as a test.

    And that’s what this whole “project” has been: a test. A bunch of experiments in content marketing, social marketing, content curating and aggregating. So I kept experimenting with different ways of doing things. Here’s how Atlanta Tech Blogs works today.

    • Blog posts are curated via RSS feeds, and a post is created from each feed item. If a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed, like this one, then that blog doesn’t get promoted. If you have a blog, make sure you have a valid RSS feed. It’s built in to most blogging software.
    • Titles of blog posts are changed to reflect the content of the post, rather than a title that only that blog’s organic audience would understand, so anyone can glance at the title and have some idea of the content of the post.
    • Blog links are published to the front page as rel=nofollow outbound links only. I’m still on the fence on this one, as to whether nofollow is better for SEO or not.
    • We capture whatever is included in the RSS feed (the source controls that), but redirect all traffic to each blog post back to the original blog, so that content is never seen on our website, other than the new title on the home page.
    • We include the canonical link as part of each post title link, so the original author is always recognized by Google, and so no one mistakes us as the author or source.
    • All new posts are tweeted with their new titles, and also auto-posted to Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Tumblr.
    • Every day, Mailchimp’s RSS-to-email system gathers up everything that we posted since the previous email, and puts it in a nicely formatted digest for easy clicking and reading for our subscribers.

    That’s it. It’s simple, and best of all, it has worked. Up until mid-February, Twitter generated most of our traffic by a long shot, but in the middle of that month, traffic from organic Google search surpassed that of Twitter, and the gap continues to widen. Also, at that time, we made the front page of Google search results for “tech blogs.” As a bonus, we’re very high (sometimes first) for the following Google searches:

    My next goal is to hit the charts for “startup blogs“, but we’re not even close there. Yet.

    All this is to say that, other than using the Yoast plugin for WordPress, there is no dark art or black magic or pseudo science that has gone into our SEO. Nothing. Here’s what gets us great SEO:

    • Exact match domain name for what we do.
    • Publishing new content every day.
    • Using Google Webmaster Tools (including a sitemap).

    Yup, that’s pretty much it. I don’t write code, nor do I know or do anything related to meta key words. We curate content, promote content, and change the titles of the blog posts we promote in order to give the random viewer a better idea of what the article is about. I tried using https, but that had no effect. Our WordPress theme is mobile friendly by default.

    So, what do you make of these three amazingly complex and double-secret probationary tactics? Getting an exact match domain is tough, and not always tempting. AtlantaTechBlogs.com is 16 characters (not counting “.com”), whereas Buffer says the optimal length for a domain name is 8 characters. Anyone can – and absolutely should – use Google Webmaster Tools, so no excuse there. What’s left?

    Content.

    Brand new content every day. Period. Content is king for SEO. Want better SEO results? Publish more content.

  • 5 Ways Instagram Is Different

    I started using Instagram in late 2014 for the simple purpose of learning how it works and why it’s become so popular. What got my attention is that Instagram passed Twitter for the number of monthly active users (MAU) using the service. Along the way, through teaching the Digital Marketing class at GA and using Instagram almost every day, I’ve found that Instagram is different in some very specific ways from other social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Linkedin.
    Here are five ways that Instagram is different than other social channels.
    1. Instagram starts with the image, obviously, since it’s an image sharing service. But this distinction makes Instagram stand out, because on any other social network you can share all you like without any image (not recommended). But on Instagram, it’s all about the visual. That’s the reason Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram: the killer app within Facebook is – and has always been since it was “The Facebook” at Harvard – the images.
    2. The key to getting engagement on Instagram is to share an exclusive image that nobody else will be able to see, as opposed to a meme that’s raging around the interwebz. That’s part of the impetus for Instagram’s #WHP weekend hashtag projects. They’re prompting users to find and take pictures of things that are unique, that most other people would never see, except on Instagram.
    3. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn all recommend that we keep our posts short, specifically under 100 characters, because people don’t read long form social media posts (generally). On the other hand, Instagram recommends that users tell a brief story using about 200 words, almost a mini-blog post, about the image that you’ve shared.
    4. Twitter has many studies showing that using more than 2 hashtags sends your engagement down the tubes. Instagram recommends that we use at least three hashtags, though they do limit you to no more than thirty (30!) hashtags.
    5. While it’s ok to tag people tag people on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ (I’ve inquired with LinkedIn as to why they don’t have a method of tagging people…no reply), there are limits to the number of people you can tag on Twitter (10) and Facebook (50), there are no limits to the number of people you can tag on an Instagram post (if you can find any, please ping me, because I couldn’t).

    I’m still using Instagram, along with 300,000,000 millenials who are no longer using Facebook because their parents (that’s me) are on Facebook. What I like best about using Instagram is the simplicity of sharing an image, and also sharing that image across other social channels. I do wish that Twitter would allow full integration of Instagram photos, but alas…

  • Knowledge vs. Understanding

    If you know about and already use the Google URL Builder tool, you can stop reading and move on to the next blog. If you’re still with me, wondering what the heck a URL builder is, then the next 3 minutes belong to you.

    One of the major components of digital marketing is measurement and metrics. The best thing about digital marketing is the ability to conduct small, measured experiments that take just a little time, but teach us so much about what will or will not be effective. The experiments usually involve driving traffic to a web property, and behind that web property should always be an analytics tool. The biggest, baddest, and most free is Google Analytics (hereafter referred to as G.A.). G.A. allows you to see, track, and measure every activity on your website, and most importantly who arrived there, how they got there, and where they came from.

    That said, many people are only getting the knowledge that comes from seeing that you got X number of visitors from Twitter and Y number of visitors from the email newsletter, etc. What that looks like is you see a bunch of traffic from “t.co” or “email” or “Google organic”. That gives you the knowledge, generally, of where your traffic came from. But you have little or no understanding about how that visitor’s journey took them to your web site.

    Here’s a very short exercise to demonstrate what I mean.  First, Google “Atlanta Tech Blogs”. Since you’re Googling the name of my website, it’ll come up first on the search engine results page. If you click on the link, you’ll get to http://www.atlantatechblogs.com. Simple, right? No. Not simple. At this point, you have knowledge that you searched for Atlanta Tech Blogs and when you clicked on that link, you got to atlantatechblogs.com.

    That’s not good enough to have a deep understanding of your web audience traffic. So go back to that results page, and right click on the link to Atlanta Tech Blogs, then “copy link address.” Then paste what you copied into your browser or even just into notepad or whatever you take notes on. It’ll look something like this:

    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atlantatechblogs.com%2F&ei=KANUVcRJiL6CBOjKgOAK&usg=AFQjCNHi-IdD2nILrIOojDCH6YjDO0dR8w&sig2=N-Ews1iaKjmVcc93V9rcjw

    See all that junk in there? If you look closely, you can find your website’s URL in there. Everything else is what we call “UTM Parameters”, which is a big fancy technical term for “all the other data you need to track this campaign.” And you have the power to track every click from every campaign just like Google does.

    Here’s how. It’s a simple, free tool from Google called Google URL Builder. Using this tool, you can (and should) enter, and then track every aspect of each and every campaign you run. Simply fill out these fields with terms that you understand, and hit “Generate URL” at the bottom.

    • Website URL (the page you want the visitor to end up on, aka “landing page”)
    • Campaign Source (where is the campaign taking place?)
    • Campaign Medium (what kind of campaign is it?)
    • Campaign Term (Google assumes you’re using Adwords, so they ask for your key word)
    • Campaign Content (Name the content that’s driving the campaign)
    • Campaign Name (what are you calling this campaign?)

    Here’s the “hard” part. I quoted “hard” because it’s just manual, not hard. When you create one of these long UTM parameter URLs, it’s ugly, long, and you don’t want to paste that into Twitter or any other medium, so you use a URL shortener (Google has one of those, too), or make that the link behind your call to action button.

    When visitors click on that link, you have knowledge of where they came from, but more importantly you have understanding of what brought them there. Instead of “t.co” when a visitor arrives from Twitter, you’ll see the entire URL that you created, and now you can track as part of measuring the effectiveness of a campaign. Every campaign. Ideally, every campaign you run has it’s own unique URL with UTM parameters, and perhaps even multiple URLs, if you run a single campaign across multiple digital channels like Twitter and Facebook.

    That’s the difference, in digital marketing anyway, of knowledge vs. understanding.

  • What’s your zone?

    Yup, another Michael Jordan post. Way back in 1992, the Bulls played the TrailBlazers in the NBA Finals. In game 1 of the series, Jordan decided to start shooting three-pointers. He hit six threes in the first half, and ended up scoring 35 points just in the first half. After he hit number 6, he was running back down the court, and looked over at the scoring table to the announcers and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “beats me!” Jordan was not known at all for being a 3-point shooter, so the Blazers had no answer for this brand new threat from the player that nobody could guard anyway.

    After the NBA Finals were over (Bulls won), Jordan was asked in an interview why he was not regarded as a great three-point shooter. His reply was epic: “I’ve never shot the three before.” In other words, Jordan wasn’t known to be great at it because he hadn’t yet tried it.

    In that same interview, Jordan said he was “in the zone.” He said the basket looked like a swimming pool and he just couldn’t miss and he knew it. I can recall a half dozen times or so when I was playing competitive soccer when I was in the zone. I couldn’t see anything around me. No distractions. Like I was wearing blinders, and yet I couldn’t miss.

    Have you ever been in the zone? You’d know if you had. Well, that’s a really long intro to a meeting I had today. Thanks for sticking with me here. :-)

    I met with an experienced entrepreneur today to talk about his business. The business is very much product centered at the moment, and they have several add-on products that they are planning to launch very soon. That’s what he was very excited about as he described the great experiences their customers are having using their product. As he talked about his products what they have built and are building, he was in his zone.

    Throughout the discussion, we talked again and again about how they’d like to engage in content marketing, but they didn’t know where to start, and their entire team is made up of engineers. Creating code for them is child’s play, but blogging and creating a content strategy? Nah. They could do it, if they were horse-whipped daily, but they would never get near “the zone.”

    But when he’d ask me questions and get me talking about content and strategy and telling your story…that’s when he looked at me and said, “You’re really excited about this stuff.” I didn’t even realize it. That’s a great feeling: loving what you’re doing and being able to evangelize about it without even knowing you’re doing it.

    What’s your zone? What are you really excited about? That’s what you should be doing. Go do it.

  • More Speaking & Teaching In May

    We had so much fun last Saturday offering the Digital Marketing Bootcamp at General Assembly that we’re going to do it again in June! It really was a great class, thanks to the 14 future digital marketers who attended and shared their visions for what they want to do in digital. We’ll be offering that same Saturday class again on Saturday June 20 from 10-4pm.

    But before we get to that, here’s what’s coming up in the next two weeks:

    • Advanced Social Media Strategy – Wednesday May 13th from 1-4pm – Social media marketing is an extension of content marketing. In this half day class, we’ll walk you through practical best practices for each social marketing channel, what not to do on each channel, and how to really engage your customers using simple techniques that anyone can practice on a daily basis.
    • Blogging Bootcamp – Need to blog? Silly question. Everyone needs to blog, especially startups and small businesses. But not everyone has a WordPress developer at their disposal. The good news is, you don’t need one. In this Saturday bootcamp, you’ll start with nothing, and leave with your own domain, a fully functioning WordPress blog with all the necessary plugins, a content strategy just for you, and your first three blog posts ready to go.
    • FailCon – You read that right: FAIL con. A conference about failure, because we all fail, have failed, are failing, or will fail at something. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing. I’ve failed a lot, so this one’s going to be just a little more personal than a bootcamp. If you’re up for some heartbreak, some joy, and some fun, please attend FailCon Atlanta on May 21st.
    I hope to see you at one or more of these events. They’re all going to be lots of fun. Thanks to GA for hosting all these great events.

  • The [DGM] Breakfast Club

    No, this was not us this morning, but I did spend an entire Saturday with 14 future digital marketers at General Assembly.

    The genesis of this offering was the 10-week Digital Marketing class that I led from Jan – Mar of this year. In the final session before Demo Night, we did a complete review of the entire course in a little less than three hours. That went so well that we decided to create a one-day “DGM bootcamp”, and that’s what we delivered today.

    First, thanks to everyone who attended and participated. It was a great group, with lots of unique marketing challenges, opportunities, and questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed leading this unique offering.

    We broke down the 10-week DGM class into 6 parts, walking through the nuts and bolts of each section, as listed below.

    1. Brand creation – starts with your core values; brand is everything you do; we used Atlanta Tech Village as an example of intentional branding & culture, and showed the Simon Sinek TED Talk on “Start with Why”.
    2. Measuring & metrics – measure everything, focus on 2-3 KPIs, analytics tools; we introduced the Google URL Builder as a very simple way to track each click in each campaign to have understanding vs. having only knowledge.
    3. The marketing funnel – reach –> CTR –> landing page –> conversion –> revenue –> loyalty loop; we watched the short Dave McClure (500Startups) video on “AARRR!“
    4. Owned content marketing – everything we produce is content; social marketing is content; we looked at Salesloft’s success in content marketing to build their company from nothing to $6M+ ARR in 2 years.
    5. Paid content marketing – Adwords and ads on social media channels are inexpensive, highly targeted, and powerful; we investigated how simple it is to advertise on Google Adwords, Twitter, and Facebook to conduct fast, cheap experiments to determine where your audience is and the best use of your digital marketing ad dollar.
    6. Marketing calendar – nothing hurts like a date and nothing helps like a plan; a plan implemented with a marketing & content calendar like the Insightpool freebie gives you freedom to win like Arby’s and Oreo and countless others.

    GA served up Chipotle for lunch, and we had a couple of minutes left for Q&A discussion. I think this offering is a great way for new marketers to get a solid overview of the digital realm, for those considering a career in digital marketing to see what they’re getting into, and for managers and leaders to understand the basic ideas and functionality behind digital strategy.

    I look forward to leading this class again on Saturday June 20.

  • Buffer, Kabbage, and Suster agree: blog.

    I preach every day that every company should blog, especially startups and small businesses with limited marketing budgets. Pushing your content out via your blog is the starting point for your entire digital marketing strategy, which encompasses your content marketing strategy. Blogging requires only your time, and your organized thoughts put to keystrokes that tell your company’s story as it unfolds.

    But don’t listen to me. I’m just a lowly blogger who preaches and teaches this stuff. Listen to the people you’re already listening to, or you should be listening to them anyway.

    Buffer, a leader in social media marketing tools, had this to say about their social media presence:

    Our blog content is a key component to our social media strategy. Ninety percent of our social media updates are based on content we’ve written on the blog.

    Ninety percent of all of Buffer’s social media updates come from their blog. Like I said above, the content of your blog is the lifeblood of your digital & social strategy. If you don’t have a blog, then what are you posting to your social media channels? Yes, there is a whole internet full of stuff that’s relevant to your business that you can share, but it’s not yours. Do you want people to trust you for original thought in your area of expertise? Then you have to create content.

    Side note: what’s in that other 10%? Personally, I think it’s the freedom, mindset, and brand to pay attention to the world around them and make ultra wins like Arby’s and Oreo have done simply because they can.

    Still not convinced? OK, let’s bring it a little closer to home in Atlanta with Kabbage, a rapidly growing small business loan source. In a blog post earlier this month titled, “5 Steps to Outpace Your Competition in Google Search on a Shoestring Budget,” the author of the post put it more simply than I ever could:

    First and foremost, you should have a blog on your site where you create compelling content.

    Couldn’t agree more. Kabbage has been very successful, and they have a very strong content marketing team and plan. Another Atlanta startup has taken a turn towards very aggressive content marketing by teaching their audience how to use their product, from beginning to end. Codeguard’s latest series of blog posts is driven by video content on how to use their product.

    Finally, from your startup turned VC hero Mark Suster, you get a one word response to the question, “should you actually write [a blog] if you’re a startup?“

    “Absofuckinglutely.”

    Any questions? Survey says you need to blog for your startup.

  • Got Presentations? Create Blog Content.

    The average American reads approximately 300 words per minute. The average time that a speaker talks per slide of a presentation (one with slides, of course) is at least 30 seconds, and, depending upon the complexity of the content, up to three minutes per slide.  For the purpose of this blog post, let’s assume it’s 2 minutes per slide, so for a 30 minute presentation you would use approximately 15 slides.

    Now let’s do the math. If you talk for 2 minutes per slide, that’s approximately 300 words x 2 minutes, or 600 words, which is longer than the optimal length of a short, SEO friendly blog post. The image at the top of this post is a good example.

    The image is one slide out of 45 slides that I used to deliver a 3-hour seminar on “Advanced Social Media Strategy” at General Assembly last week. (Shameless plug: the class is offered again Wednesday, May 13 from 1 – 4pm). From this one slide, highlighting best practices for using YouTube videos to market your business, I was able to create a 622 word blog post, which is a 2-3 minute read.

    Unfortunately, I can’t make a blog post from every single slide in that presentation, since some are topic introductions, session dividers, examples, etc.; however, if I can use even half of those 45 slides, that’s a series of 20+ posts on one subject, each post a short, easily-digestible chunk of usable information.

    This technique is what’s commonly known as re-purposing your content. I spent about 3 hours creating the slide presentation, and about 20 minutes creating this first blog post, which can be shared over and over and over, not to mention I’ll be teaching this session again.

    If you or someone at your business presents slide presentations regularly, you already have TONS of content, and that doesn’t even include video of the presenter in action!

    How much content do you have? More than you thought.