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Kill the marketing stamp

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When people first start looking online for marketing advice they’re swamped with things to do: Make a Twitter! Do it on Facebook! Keep a blog! Google! Upload YouTube videos! Advertising!

It’s like someone’s created a stamp with these words carved into it and every new business that comes along gets it pressed on their forehead.

But that doesn’t fit for every business. Should a laundromat really keep a Twitter profile? Should a bailiff company create a Facebook fan page?

If you just do it because everyone says you should, then you’re missing the point and will get bad results. Having no profile is better than having a dead profile.

To know what and where to market, ask yourself these two questions:

  • Who is my target audience?
  • Where is my target audience?
When your washing machine breaks down and you need a local laundromat, will you turn to Twitter? No. When your business requires professional bailiff services, will you go to Facebook? No.
Flip your thinking and start looking through the eyes of your customer.
In Communication Is The Key , , , , , ,
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Goodbye SEO, Hello Content

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If you want your website on the top of Google results, stop thinking SEO and start thinking Content.

As I have explained in my Google workshops, the search engine giant has one incredible skill: The ability to learn from massive amounts of data.

It updates search algorithms up to 500 times a year and weeds out websites that try to game it. If you’ve ever read about SEO, or any sort of guide to get to the top of Google, you’ll probably be familiar with article marketing (now defunct), comment backlinking (now defunct), forum posting (about to be defunct) and link wheeling.

All these quick-win techniques either are, or will become dead soon. Why? Google has just opened its doors to receive vast amounts of data that will enable it to learn which of these websites are shit. How will it know? People are about to tell it.

For the first time, Google is allowing web-masters to tell it which links pointing to their websites are junk and should be ‘disavowed’. On the surface, its allowing web-masters to do this because lots of people have complained that competitors are creating junk links to purposefully reduce their rankings. This ‘disavow’ option is like a white flag web-masters can fly: Hey Google, ignore this link pointing at me, I don’t know who made it and it’s from a dodgy website!

Yet, think about what data Google is really receiving. Hundreds of thousands of people are telling Google which websites are dodgy, and what kind of links it should ignore. Google is being taught by the very people that tried to game it how to find false backlinks. The quick-win SEO strategies are dead.

Hello Content

So how the hell do you get to the top of Google then? The basic principles still apply: Get backlinks from credible sources such as news sites, blogs and social media. Figure out a way to create interest and get written about. This is called a ‘content-led approach’. Make something, write something, share something.

Forget the idea of creating a site, getting it to the top of Google and sitting back as the money rolls in. That never happened anyway. The web is the most competitive marketplace of all; you have to create interesting content (note – doesn’t have to be of the top quality to be successful), and distribute like mad through credible, human-edited channels.

Oddly, that sounds a lot like what PRs have been doing for the last decade.

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In Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media , , , , , , , ,
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New vs. Evergreen Content

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New vs. Evergreen Content

We Are Social is a marketing agency that has an excellent blog detailing all the latest changes in social media and how to use that for your marketing purposes. I recommend it if you want to learn what’s new.

However, it’s also an example of a New content strategy, versus an Evergreen content strategy. As social media (and the media in general) changes so fast, any blog post they write is dead within a few weeks. There’s always a new site or platform, a new button or way of subscribing, a new targeting feature or advertising method. They rely on the new to attract visitors. But could you rely on the old?

Continue reading “New vs. Evergreen Content” »

In Communication Is The Key, Marketing, Opinion, Social Media , , , , , , ,
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Pay with a tweet: a social media model that works

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In the real world, few like to share content. So how do you get them to? Of the thousands of articles that you read, how many do you share on your social media? 1, maybe 2%? When someone is searching for information and it’s there, they take it. Very rarely do they say thank you – after all, it’s on the internet, the faceless jungle where morals don’t exist. If it were in a shop, or in person, then it’d be different. But it’s not. And that’s not a problem we should be tut-tutting, it’s just the way it is. As marketers, bloggers, startups and business owners, we’ve got to man up and deal with it.

So for an open experiment of which I’m sharing the results with you here, I wrote two blog posts giving away extremely valuable information in return for a tweet (or a Facebook ‘like’, or G+):

But for users to get the information, they had to share it first. In one day, I received more shares, likes and G+ than I had altogether since this blog began.

tweets

Readers get information by sharing with a tweet

Within the first two hours of The Guardian post being published, I received 35 social media shares.

Now, I know that’s not amazing compared to some of the big boys out there, but I’m a small personal blog with a tight level of readership – and I stopped counting after the first two hours.

The question is, what would happen if the big boys did use it? What would happen if you used it?

It’s not just content that can be given in return for a tweet, but downloads too. Imagine if Google offerred its latest Android OS for free if users paid with a tweet. It’d be a global viral sensation within minutes.

So ask yourself, “do I have super-amazing information or a digital good that could be given in return for a tweet?”

If yes, then here’s the secret WordPress plugin that no-one knows about. And you don’t even have to Tweet in return if you don’t want to (but you know you want to): Like To Keep Reading plugin

In Social Media , , , , , , , , , , ,
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