As a professional in the writing field (I first worked in publishing before moving over to content marketing), I spend a lot of my time reading. Reading articles on other industry blogs, reading and editing content for clients, and reading the blogs and social content of companies that I follow as a consumer and customer. And the one thing I see far more often than I should is awkwardly written content that should have never made it out of a junior high school English class, much less onto a professional business website or social page.

This is generally more of an issue for smaller and medium sized companies, likely because larger companies have more checks and balances and an editorial process before a piece of content is approved to go live. But for whatever reason, this is a growing problem and it needs to stop. So without further ado, three quick tips for writing better content:

1. Formality is Overrated. Businesses on Facebook are oftentimes the perpetrator of this writing no-no. Especially customer service responses. Let’s say you have a customer named Sue, and she leaves a comment on your Facebook wall saying that she’s ticked off because the hemming on her new dress that she purchased from your e-commerce store is unraveling.

A lot of smaller brands will have a canned response that generally goes something like this:  ”Dear Sue, we are so sorry that you are not happy with the product you received last week. Please contact our customer service line at 555-111-2222.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty insincere to me. Brands: It’s ok to throw out the rules of formal punctuation when you’re responding to people on social channels. Write in the same style that you would speak to someone. It will come off as more empathetic and authentic, and that’s the whole point of social anyway. 

2. Complex and Compound Sentences are your Friends. There’s nothing worse than reading content from a brand who uses simple sentences without conjunctions.

“We are happy to announce a partnership with Google. We are committed to providing our customers with the great service that they have come to expect!”

You know why? Because simple sentences are the hallmark of an elementary-grade reading level.  They also don’t read well. We’ve all heard the statistic that most consumers read at a 7th grade reading level. But you should always ask yourself who you’re selling to – is your target customer a C-level executive at a mid-sized company? If so, there’s a good chance that writing at that kind of reading level is not only going to be a turnoff for a potential client, it might come off as insulting too.

“We’re happy to announce our new partnership with Google, and we’re committed to providing you with the same great service you’ve come to expect.”

See how much better that is?

Simplify your ideas. This might seem to contradict my point above, but it doesn’t. Sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean often), people try to create complex sentences by padding their statements with extra words. This doesn’t turn a simple sentence into a complex sentence – just an awkward one that’s confusing and repetitive. It also usually creates some problems with sentence and clause arrangement, which can confuse the reader and cause the content to be misconstrued.

Example: “Where do your kids usually hang out in your home to spend time with friends?”

You get the gist of what that sentence is asking, but the delivery is bulky and awkward. A good way to clarify it would be “In what part of your home do your kids hang out with their friends?”

And there you go – three quick tips on clarifying your thoughts and making your written content more conversational (and understandable). What tips do you swear by to make your writing clear and concise?

The post How To Write Better: Tips for Being Less Awkward in Print appeared first on Content On The Internet.

That’s what this post is about. We’re going to dive headfirst into the swimming pool of developing tracking protocols and implementing GA wizardry on your site. If you have no idea what JavaScript is or how HTML works…Don’t Worry! I’m going to try to take this nice and slow, explain everything, and make it practical enough that even coding n00bs can follow along and get up and running with these scripts in no time. Best of all, you might even learn something.

Edit: It has been brought to my attention that Justin Cutroni did something similar last year. To which I say “Neener neener, I figured it out on my own without the help of the GA development team!”

Tracking Content Engagement

I’m not going to go into the “why” here, since I’ve already covered that in the inform.ly article. I will, however, say that the main reason you’re going to want this code is for tracking one-page visitors. These are the folks who come in through an external link, and then bounce. Since “Time on Page” is calculated based on the time-stamp from the NEXT page visited,and these visitors don’t HAVE a next page visited, you will have no actionable information about them. All you will see is a high bounce rate. Which is fine and dandy, except that it tells you NOTHING. So, here’s what you do:

 Step 1: Where’s Our Content?

The first thing you need to do is figure out where the user is on your page. There are a couple of ways to do that. Cutrioni suggests looking for the top and bottom of the <div> tag that the content is in, and that’s not a bad way, but that doesn’t help us if the user starts reading the content, then decides half-way through that your writing sucks and they want nothing more to do with it.

Instead, we’re going to break up our articles into four parts. First, find the name of the <div> that your actual article lives in. Usually, it’s going to be in something like “content” or “article”. We’re going to use our last article, How To Create an Editorial Calendar, as an example.

So, pulling up our wonderful debugging panel, we see that in this case, what we’re looking for is <div class=”post_content”>

Grab the name, ID, or class of the div housing your content.

Remember when I told you we were going to divide up our content into four pieces? To do that, you’re going to need to declare a couple of variables:


//The first three variables are shorthand, and give us
//a quick way to reference the content, the height of the
//content, and the top of the content

var A = $(".post_content"); var H = A.height(); var T = A.offset.top();

//Then we declare the 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% markers

var a25 = T + (H * .25);
var a50 = T + (H * .5);
var a75 = T + (H * .75);
var a100 = T + H;

Step 2: Where’s the Visitor?

Got it? Good. That tells you what section of the page you need to be tracking. The next step is finding out where the user is currently looking. To do this, we’re going to find out where the top of the scroll bar is and add it to the size of the user’s monitor to figure out where the bottom of their screen happens to be.

To do this, we’re going to use jQuery’s excellent .scrollTop() method. The code will look something like:

//You'll notice I use a lot of shorthand (one-letter variable names, etc.). If
//you feel comfortable with JavaScript, shorthand helps keep the size of your
//pages smaller, and thus helps load times. If you AREN'T comfortable with
//JavaScript, write out the names to be descriptive and easy to remember (e.g. "windowBottom" instead of "B"

var B = $(window).scrollTop() + $(window).height();

So now, at any given moment, you know where the user is looking. Ta Da! JavaScript is fun!

Step 3: Bringing It All Together

So, now we have two individual components that are just floating in the JavaScript void with no context. It’s time to bring everything together and give it life! To do that, we’re going to load our script as soon as our HTML document (page) is ready, using the standard jQuery ready function. If you have never worked with jQuery before, this is important to learn and memorize, as you’ll be loading almost all of your fancy scripts through something like this:

$(function() {
//first, declare all the variables we'll be using
var A = $(".post_content"); var H = A.height(); var T = A.offset.top(); var B = 0;

    //Then we declare the 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% markers
    var a25 = T + (H * .25);
    var a50 = T + (H * .5);
    var a75 = T + (H * .75);
    var a100 = T + H;

    //Now, let's bind a trigger to the scroll event. Every time our
//visitor scrolls, we want to update their window position

$(window).scroll(function() {
B = $(window).scrollTop() + $(window).height();

//And then we check if the bottom of the window is now
//below one of our markers and fire a GA event if it is
switch(true) {
case (B > a100): _gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘content’, ‘scroll100’]); break;
case (B > a75): _gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘content’, ‘scroll75’]); break;
case (B > a50): _gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘content’, ‘scroll50’]); break;;
case (B > a25): _gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘content’, ‘scroll25’]); break;;
case default: break;
}
});
});

And there you have it! Don’t worry if you don’t understand exactly what’s going on. You can look up the various things we did on your own time. Just know that what this will do is create four events in your Google Analytics setup: one for reading a page all the way to the end, one for reading 75% of the content, one for 50% of the content, and one for 25%.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. This will change your bounce rate. That’s sort of the point – if someone is scrolling through your page, you want to reflect that in the bounce rate.
2. Everyone who gets to a certain level will have fired off all the events above that level. So someone who reads an article all the way through has also read 25, 50, and 75% of the article. What you’re going to be looking for is variations from the lowest to the highest level (that is, the difference between how many people read 25% of the article and how many people read 100%.
3. You can get much fancier than this. Cutrioni’s blog (see link above) certainly did with timers and custom variables and what have you. We’ll get there, but for most people that isn’t terribly necessary. Most websites will have no real way to use that information. Instead, for now, focus on the big picture: is your bounce rate high because people hate your website, or because they only read one article at a time and come back later?

If you have any thoughts, questions, ideas, or sass, please let me know in the comments and I’ll try to answer them!

The post An In-Depth Look At Tracking Content Engagement appeared first on Content On The Internet.

While a lot of of companies have jumped on the blogging bandwagon, the vast majority of them are doing a terrible job. Why is this? Mostly because they’ve jumped into it with no strategy, no inclusion of search optimization, and no understanding of the editorial process. “But what’s so important about the editorial process?”, you might ask. Well, a lot actually. This study by the Content Marketing Institute points out “the ability to generate enough quality content” as one of the biggest challenges that companies have faced in the past and will continue to face in 2013. And that’s largely, if not wholly, because they didn’t have a content creation process to start with. Another reason is that they lack the internal resources to create content and publish it on a regular basis, but that’s a blog post for another day.

What is a Content Process and Why Does it Matter?

Talk to any daily, weekly, or monthly publishing professional and they’ll tell you that creating content on a consistent basis – especially when you’re writing about a niche topic or industry – is hard. There’s generally only a handful of original ideas, and so aside from reporting news and latest trends, a lot of time is spent thinking of story angles – in other words, interesting takes on old or already established information.

If you look at content creation as an in-the-moment task without putting any type of proper planning and strategy behind it, you’re going to lose steam really quickly because you’re going to run out of ideas. One way to combat this is to prepare your posts beforehand with a content calendar (or editorial calendar – ed cal for short).

Defining a Content Calendar

A content calendar is a tool that allows a writer or editor to map out content ideas (usually a year) in advance. This is not only to help manage content creation from multiple writers and editors, but to help visualize editorial topics and ideas and arrange them in a way that makes sense for a publication and their audience. For instance, we had a client who had a home goods line which was sold directly to consumers through an e-commerce store, as well as through distribution deals with retailers like Costco. Given the nature of their company, it made sense to work lots of holiday themed topics into their content calendar to take advantage of increased traffic for targeted holiday searches, as well as to place her brand name as a leader in creative home decor ideas for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter – you get the point.

A content or editorial calendar lets you look at your content ideas as a whole and then re-arrange their publishing dates in a way that makes sense and allows you to take advantage of natural traffic drivers.

What are some types of events that can drive organic traffic?

• Conferences in your industry
• Holidays
• Legislation that affects your clients/customers
• Trending news stories that relate to your industry or audience

Now that we understand the benefit of a content calendar, let’s look at some examples. I’m going to show you guys a few ways that you can go about this. The first is how we create content calendars in-house for our clients through a simple Excel spreadsheet, which you can see here (I like color-coding to help differentiate between each writer).

Even on a very bare-bones calendar, you should include a few key things:

1. The year, broken down my months (we like to create monthly calendars since we usually manage daily content for most of our clients)
2. The publish date of each piece of content (are you publishing every week day? Three times a week? Twice a month?)
3. Title of each blog post (or theme), as well as the type of content for other channels, such as Facebook updates or tweets.
4. The deadline for each piece of content (this will help you stay on track with content creation and manage team members who are blogging).

Note: We often include “Press” as a part of our content calendars as well, since having your PR reps or publicist pitch stories around the types of content you are already publishing on your blog and social channels can help strengthen your industry thought leadership – especially when press mentions drive leads back to your website to read more about you.

A lot of print and online publications publish their editorial calendars so that freelance writers will know which types of stories to pitch for their upcoming issues. In these types of editorial calendars, there aren’t specific story headlines noted, and the calendars aren’t as detailed – they focus on an overarching topic for the month. Notice the editorial calendar for Forbes below (or click here to view it in your browser) – they have the month, the editorial theme, deadlines, and publish dates.

This is a pretty basic content calendar, and if there are any specific features under each editorial theme for the month, they’ll note it, like the “Top-Earning Athletes” focus under June’s “The Investment Guide I” theme.

Other publications give readers and potential contributors a more generalized theme for each section of their publication or website, such as the way SheKnows.com sets up their editorial calendars. See it on their website here.

In fact, if you’re curious about any publication’s editorial calendar layout, you can do a quick Google search with “[name of publication" editorial calendar] and you can generally find it pretty easily.

Now, for most businesses who are creating an editorial calendar to cover blogging and, say, social channels, you’ll want to be more granular and have the actual topics for each week panned out ahead of time. We’ll dive into the step-by-step of setting up your calendar in a minute, but first, if you want a more tech-savvy solution for managing your editorial calendar and you operate on the WordPress backend, I highly recommend the Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress (which is free, I might add), since it links your blog post drafts into your calendar and makes the process pretty seamless. I actually still use a spreadsheet to first map out content, and then enter it into the calendar as an easy way to manage content development.

Creating Your Calendar, Step-by-Step 

1. Use my Sample Editorial Calendar as a base to set up your Excel spreadsheet. List your content creation channels at the top, after deadline (assuming you’re including blogging as a regular content channel)

2. Taking into account frequency of each channel publication, make an “x” in each box that correlates to your publishing date and channel (ex: on 3/3/13 I’m going to have a blog post and a Facebook update).

3. Find notable dates. This part requires a little more thought and some research. Think about what type of business you’re in and make a list of notable holidays, industry events, company milestone dates, etc. that you’ll want to create content around and then add those topics into your calendar first, since those will require specific publishing dates.

4. Add in your additional content topics for the month. Often brands will focus on a specific topic each month, for instance we might have a 4-part series, over the course of a month, that focuses on analyzing your blog’s traffic. (we’ll have an upcoming blog post on how to find content topic ideas later on).

5. Rinse and repeat (for each following month).

Voila! Now you have a basic editorial calendar that will serve as a roadmap for your content creation efforts. Keep in mind, an editorial calendar is constantly evolving, so you may need to move publishing dates around or occasionally add in additional posts to account for unexpected news or company releases.

Once you have the basics down pat, you also might want to expand your calendar to account for keywords that you’ll want to target or focus on for each post; add in an extra column for authors (especially if you have lots of contributors); or include additional distribution channels for each piece of content (ie where you’re going to post or promote your blog post, etc.).

How do you manage your content creation? Do you have a different approach to your editorial calendar? Let us know!

The post How To Create an Editorial Calendar appeared first on Content On The Internet.

We’ve decided lately that the more open we are about what we do, the more people like us, so we’re sharing our internal list with the world. What you see below is not the complete list. That’s a work in progress, and will be updated as we have time. Think of it as a work in progress, and feel free to contribute if you see something we’ve missed.

*Note: Some of the link locations on this list are blogs with do-follow comment links enabled. These fine folks are being generous, and you should not abuse their generosity. If you spam them, we will personally hunt you down and make you write “I will not be an asshole on the internet.” 500 times on a billboard in Times Square.

**Note 2: Some of these sources DO have “nofollow” on their links, but are listed as do-follow by SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer. Others are no-followed, but can still be useful.

***Note 3: DA – Domain Authority, as tracked by SEOMoz, Mod – Moderated (yes or no)

Got some more hot free SEO backlink sources?

Sharing is caring. Let us know and we’ll add them in! (submission form coming soon. In the meantime, feel free to use the comments, or our contact form, or just send us an email!)

The post Cheap Hits: The Ultimate Guide to Free SEO Backlinks appeared first on Content On The Internet.

This is good news for you.

Shoot us an email at info@stuntandgimmicks.com with the subject line “BOOKS!” along with your name and mailing address, and we’ll pop one (or three) in the mail to you.

The post Get a Freebie on Us appeared first on Content On The Internet.

Ok, that’s enough pondering. Time to spring into action. You see, Ian Lurie wrote a post on the Portent blog recently, jovially entitled “WTF is SEO?”. It was a brave re-imagining of the very idea of SEO. A bold call to wake up and mature as an industry. And it’s almost all correct, except that it isn’t, and I think he misses some key points. And oh yeah, there’s a second part to this thought, about content marketing, but we’ll get to that.

A Quick Recap

Let’s start with a recap: The post is a very well-thought-out examination of why SEO is still seen as the black sheep of the marketing world, and what SEOs can do to shed their snake-oil salesman image and move into the light. The main point rests not on SEO itself, but on how it’s packaged and sold to corporate America.

SEO isn’t an activity, or a tactic, or a strategy. GoodSEO is the outcome of a disciplined, coherent marketing & technology strategy.

Well, in one word, no. SEO isn’t an outcome, and this might be the disconnect between online marketers in general (and SEOs in particular) and the larger world. SEO is not an outcome! Not an outcome anyone who wears a tie to work cares about, anyway. At the end of the day, there’s really only one outcome that the people you’re pitching care about: the bottom line. Yes, that’s cliche. Yes, it’s one of those truisms that seems like it reduces a complex situation to an absurd oversimplification. But it’s true, to an extent (some businesses, non-profits for example, have a primary business goal that isn’t profit-oriented. Just substitute the primary goal of the organization your thinking of in place of money and it still makes sense.)

So wtf IS SEO?

The point is that there isn’t a single well-run company that declares that SEO should be their target outcome. It’s a step to something more concrete. A strategy.

It’s not a strategy, either. You can’t have an SEO strategy, any more than you can have a dental hygiene strategy. You execute on details, one detail at a time: You brush. You floss. You don’t gargle maple syrup.

Here’s one of my main points of contention with Mr. Lurie: executing on details, one detail at a time, IS a strategy. That’s the entire point of a strategy – to lay out a series of steps and details that need to be executed, one at a time, to get the desired results. A strategy is comprised of multiple tactics strung together, and can fit into a larger strategy or stand alone. Oversimplifying to “Not being a dolt isn’t a strategy” is quite simply wrong. All business strategy comes down to “don’t be a dolt”. There’s no magic in running a successful company, and there’s no such thing as an “innovative business strategy”. Just doing the right thing, over and over again.

It seems that Mr. Lurie’s main concern is that the way we’ve been treating SEO has set up a lot of false expectations. Ones that SEOs could not possibly meet, and as such it’s tarnishing our reputation. But that doesn’t sound like a problem with calling SEO a “strategy” or what have you. In fact, that doesn’t sound like a problem with SEO itself. That’s a problem with the way SEOs sell themselves, but it’s hardly unique to the field. If you go in demanding big changes for big returns, you’re putting a high level of expectation on yourself, and that’s true whether you’re taking care of a company’s SEO needs or their loss prevention needs. Imagine if you went to Wal-Mart and told them you could cut their shrinkage by 50% if only they give you unilateral power to reconfigure every store they own.

Spare Change

So what’s the solution presented in Lurie’s article? It’s a five step plan, and I think this is where I have the most issues. In fact, it was that five-step plan that made me want to write this article in the first place.

Five things we have to change:

1. Treat SEO as a multi-team goal, like loss reduction, risk management or communications policy. Everyone has a role to play.

2. Stop pushing companies and clients to create an ‘SEO department’ or team. Start pushing companies to apply the tactics that lead to good SEO across all departments and teams.

3. Stop talking about specific tactics strictly in terms of rankings or traffic. For example: Point out the parallel benefits of a faster site. If there are no parallel benefits, think carefully before you make that recommendation.

4. Constantly remind yourself and your clients/bosses where SEO fits into the paid/earned/owned media world. You’re a marketer who knows a lot about SEO. You’re not “an SEO” any more than you could’ve been a “column inch” in the 1970s. But hopefully you know the rest of marketing, too. If not, introduce yourself. Audience analysis? PR? Paid media? Nice to meet you.

5. Always discuss SEO in context. If possible, restrict the ‘oh my god your SEO sucks’ moments to a single meeting. Then immediately broaden the discussion to include all areas impacted by, and impacting, SEO. For example: Meet with the branding/UX team and talk about how particular phrases in the navigation might improve clickthru, as well as search traffic and sales. Show you’re not that SEO pest who keeps screwing up their drive for a Webby Award.

I guess the best way to sum up my reaction would be: “What? You mean you HAVEN’T been doing this all along? No wonder companies hate SEOs.” 

And Now, Why Content Marketing Sucks

In fact (and this is where the second part of the post starts), this is something that we at S&G have been struggling with since day one: It’s virtually impossible to run a marketing consultancy that is siloed into one specific area of marketing. The closest you can get, maybe, is dealing strictly with PPC. Even then, you still have to worry about things like audience analysis, landing page optimization, etc.

So in that regard, I completely sympathize with Ian Lurie. I mean, I’m a content marketer. WTF is “content” and where does it end? Do I do email? (currently, yes) Then, if I’m already writing the email copy, doesn’t it make sense for me to also schedule that email, design it, and then work to boost its response rates? Do I handle static website copy? If I’m writing website copy, should I have some input on the design of the site? The services that are offered and how they’re presented? The branding? Should I do SEO? I mean, guest-blogging is SEO, right? How about off-line marketing collateral? Should I be designing and writing brochures? I mean, a brochure is basically a pre-internet landing page, right?

Where does it all fit in, and how do you draw a well-defined boundary that represents what you and your company should ideally be taking care of?  The more cutting-edge and immature the marketing discipline you focus on, the more difficult it is to draw lines about what you should and should not be doing, but the more important it is for you to specialize to set yourself apart. This is why the second part of this post title is “Content Marketing Sucks”.

Drawing Lines and Making Points

As much as I think Ian Lurie is wrong in the details, I think he’s very right in the broader message: marketing needs to be an integrated effort. It needs to be connected to everything a company does and is. As an online marketer, especially a content marketer, you need to be on first name terms with your client (or your company’s, if you’re in-house) IT director, Marketing Director/CMO, COO, product manager, designers, sales reps, customer support managers, and fifty other people that I’m forgetting. Just because we work online and have fancy acronyms in our titles doesn’t mean we can silo ourselves and expect to be successful. Which means making a lot of difficult decisions about what services you can realistically offer, and what you should call yourself, because one man simply can’t do it all. Even a small company will struggle with a full-service approach. At a bare minimum, you would need a designer or two, a handful of developers, a couple of writers, some analysts, a few sales people, some SEO gurus, a PPC person or two, photographers, videographers, social media monkeys, and that’s not counting operations staff.

So I guess the takeaways from this post are:

1. SEO isn’t nearly as difficult, nebulous, or hard to pin down as Ian Lurie makes it seem, so long as you…

2. Figure out what, specifically, you are good at and can do consistently, and do that, while you…

3. Identify how and where your specialization plugs into the broader marketing goals of your customers, how it helps them achieve business objectives, but be careful that you…

4. Maintain your specialization. As a company, you have some very clear and specific things you’re good at, and some that you probably downright suck at (ask me about my designing from three years ago!). Don’t do things you aren’t good at just to make an easier sell. Don’t, as Ian says, spread yourself thin by trying to make SEO (or whatever you do) a huge multi-discipline endeavor. Yes, you need to coordinate with multiple teams, but if you think a site needs better design for better SEO, don’t pile that onto your plate if you aren’t good at design. Stress the benefits of your discipline to other marketing goals, but don’t over-promise. If you’re selling SEO, for example, don’t spend a lot of time on how your newly-optimized pages will do great things for your client’s PPC campaign. You can’t promise that, and unless you’re ready to take over that task (usually for no additional money, since “It’s basically the same thing, right, and you’re already doing the optimization. You said so yourself!”), don’t push on it. Deal strictly with what you know, and don’t over-extend.

5. SEO is not a result. Ever. Rankings aren’t even really a result. They’re half-way to a result. Traffic is a little closer, and qualified traffic is a little better still. SALES is the result. SEO is one way, out of many, to getting sales, but it isn’t the only way. SEO HAS to be a strategy, because radio advertising is, and those are the guys you’re competing with for budget. And they are sharks who will devour you the minute you let your guard down.

6. Finally, don’t over-promise. Don’t lie to get clients. Don’t “assume the best”. SEO wouldn’t have the crappy image it does now if WE in the SEO field had done more to manage expectations and policed our little corner of the marketing industry. If we had stressed from the beginning that SEO is a collection of strategies rather than one clear thing you do. If we had made it clear to clients that there was a good chance that they wouldn’t see super-strong ranking results for months, and possibly never, but that they would be getting marginal improvements in other places. If we called out marketers and their clients that did things the quick and dirty way, and weren’t so petrified of being ostracized from the community if we doxxed companies like JCPenny’s that decided to do things the half-ass destructive way.

Where To Now?

So where do we go from here? I don’t know. The barrier to entry in the online marketing space is so low, and the field is still so young, that we’re going to continue to experience turbulence for a while. But this article from Portent gives me hope that we’re finally starting to ask the right kinds of questions that we need to ask to get things settled down. I could be completely wrong about this, and Ian Lurie (who is, in all honesty, probably a lot smarter about SEO and online marketing than I am) on point, and this 2000-word manifesto is misdirected and pointless. I don’t think so, but even if it is, I think it’s encouraging that we’ve reached the point as a specialization that we can have these conversations. It can only mean that good things are on the way.

The post Ian Lurie is Wrong, and Content Marketing Sucks appeared first on Content On The Internet.

It almost always highlights a few low-hanging fruit (blog posts) that can be optimized to immediately start ranking better in search results and drive more traffic.

In fact, this works so often that it kind of shocks me that companies don’t immediately turn to old blog posts to help drive more traffic. It seems like once a blog post is published, tweeted and “liked” on Facebook, it’s forgotten – forever to be buried in the archives and never heard from again.

This is such an enormous waste of an investment, that it makes me want to pull my hair out and violently shake our clients. You pay money for your content – even if it’s created by internal staff, it still takes time and expertise. So make use of your old blogs. Don’t waste that investment!

Oh noes! I’m wasting valuable content! What can I do?!

Great question. The next time you find yourself with a spare half hour to work on your company blog, go through this quick process to get more traction out of your old posts.

1. Sort through your analytics to find the top 10 or 20 most popular blog posts on your website. Organize them (I like to use a spreadsheet like this one) in a list with headings for the blog title, permalink, blog topic, and keywords targeted.

2. Start with the first blog post and ask yourself this question: If I had to sum up this blog topic in 3 to 4 words, what would it be? Use that as a starting point for your keyword research. For instance, this blog post is about “optimizing old blog posts”. On your spreadsheet under the “blog topic” column, type the corresponding word or phase.

3. Now, once you’ve got a concise blog topic pinpointed, it’s time to figure out what people searching on Google are typing in when they’re looking for the content that your blog post contains. Pull up Google’s Keyword Tool in your web browser – we’re about to go keyword hunting! Pop in your blog topic description (those 3-4 words that described your post), and Google will generate your results: the first result will be the exact phrase you typed in and the list of results afterwards are similar keywords/keyword phrases that other people are searching for. Your results will look something like this:

Google’s Keyword Tool

For instance, when I looked up “optimizing old blog posts”, guess what I found? The number of monthly searches is so negligible, Google doesn’t report it. That means that if I use that keyword phrase in my content and my title, it’s not going to do me any good, because no one is searching for it.

4. Ok, so we’ve got a list of additional keywords/phrases that people are searching for, along with a lot of data. What does it all mean? There’s two main numbers I look at for quick content optimization: Competition (Low/Medium/High) and Global Monthly Searches (even if your business is local, driving overall traffic is still good). I like to sort Google Keyword results by Competition, and then look for keywords that have low or medium competition and searches of at least 1K so that it will be easy to rank quickly for them.

Browse through the keywords on the left to look for phrases that match your blog topic well. While I was looking through my results, I noticed that “content optimization” and “seo for your blog” both summed up my post pretty well; they both have low search competition; and they each get 1,900 searches a month.  (Quick Note: to make sure you’ve chosen good keywords, be sure to pull up an incognito window in your web browser and search for those keyword phrases. This will make sure that the phrases that you’re about to optimize for are garnering the types of visitors that you want. For example, imagine you’re a baker and you wrote a blog post about baking delicious pies and you see that there’s 5,000 searches a month for the phrases “making pies” that has little search competition. On the surface, that seems great. But maybe there’s a new pop artist in town and he just released a Top 40 hit named “Making Pies”. If you optimize your blog post for that phrase, you’re going to get a lot of angry pop music lovers visiting your blog who wanted to listed to music – not learn about pies. You’ll get a traffic influx, but ultimately they’re not the audience you want, and those visitors are going to be worthless.)

Once you’re sure that your new keyword/s are perfect (low search competition, >1,000 monthly search queries), type those phrases into your spreadsheet under “keywords”.

5. It’s time to optimize your blog post. This is the part where we take our newer, better, more search-friendly keyword and put it into our blog post. Now, updating your actual blog content with optimized keywords is ideal (so long as you don’t stuff keywords and keep your content readable), but this post is all about quick optimization techniques, so we’re going to ignore the body content of your blog. What we are going to focus on are the: Title, Permalink, and Keyword Tags. First things first, take the 1-2 updated keywords from your earlier research and update your keyword tags in your blog post. If there are a bunch of other keywords listed, get rid of those. As a rule of thumb, I never have more than three keywords for each blog – you want to keep it simple so that Google understands what your post is about.

6. The next step is to take the best keyword/keyword phrase out of your research (this will likely be the one that has the most searches) and work that into your title. For this post, I’m focusing on the term “optimize content”. My original title was “A Quick Tip for Optimizing Old Blog Posts”, but this doesn’t integrate either of my new targeted keywords for this post, so I changed it to: “How to Optimize Content on your Blog to get More Traffic”. Adding your keyword into your blog title will help Google realize that your blog post is about optimizing content, and if it sees this phrase in your title, keyword tags, and body content, it’ll be able to easily pinpoint that phrase and rank your post for it.

7. The last step is one that is almost always looked over, and it’s the easiest way to optimize your blog post: create a custom permalink that includes your target keyword. What’s a permalink? A permalink is the specific URL for a designated blog post. For instance, this permalink is http://stuntandgimmicks.com/blog/optimize-content. If you don’t specify a custom permalink, you’ll get a very generic looking one that’s generated by WordPress or Blogger that looks something like this “http://stuntandgimmicks.com/blog/ps325. This is bad because when Google’s crawlers browse your content, an un-optimized permalink doesn’t give them any info on what your blog post is about. A custom permalink, however, tells them exactly what your post is about and what keyword or phrase it should rank for.

UPDATE: When you’re changing your permalink, remember to create a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL in order to make sure that earlier links that may have been sent out via social media or other sharing sites don’t end up going to a blank page.

And there you go – seven easy steps to optimizing old content on the fly. Do you have any quick and dirty optimization tips that you want to share? Let me know below!

The post How to Optimize Content on your Blog to get More Traffic appeared first on Content On The Internet.

The truth is, there are a very few specific instances where real-time analytics are useful, and even fewer cases where they have a clear advantage over standard time-delayed analytics.
We’re going to talk about those edge cases today, and help you decide whether you need to ever bother clicking on that real-time button. Read on, brave number cruncher, read on!

What’s the Difference Between Real-Time Analytics and Standard Analytics?

Well, obviously, the data is coming in in real time. Duh. That’s not the only advantage, though, and to understand where the other strength of real-time analytics (RTA henceforth!), you have to understand how most major analytics suites work to give you deliciously actionable data.

First, you have to know that 75% of what you see in your analytics report isn’t technically true. Not in the objective, philosophical “This is the way the world is” sense of the word, anyway. A large chunk of data given to you by your analytics software is “statistical” true. This is because most analytics software doesn’t actually look at every single one of your individual visits when calculating a large number of metrics, at least not at the top level. Instead, they take a sample of visits, and then extrapolate from there for things like time on site, bounce rate, etc. They’ve gotten much better at it over the years, to the point where the metrics are starting to be replaced with actual factual aggregates of every individual visitor, but there’s still a lot of calculating going on behind the scenes.

So not only does RTA give you immediate numbers, it also gives you more accurate numbers. This is an important advantage in some cases.

Second, you have to know what the time delay on your standard analytics views is. Keep in mind that this varies from number to number. For example, Google Analytics is pretty good about giving you up-to-date information on things like number of visitors, source, etc. The delay there is roughly 2 hours, give or take. Other things, like time on site, conversions, events, etc. can take longer, as much as a day. The SEO section is delayed by two days, always, as Google takes that long to confirm, verify, and extrapolate query impressions and the like. So while you can see how many visitors you’ve had today, it might be a while before you can figure out exactly how many of them converted.

When Is RTA Better?

So, with those things in mind, when IS RTA better? Mostly when you desperately need to know exactly what’s going on RIGHT NOW with usability metrics. Usibility metrics, like bounce rates, time on site, and conversion/goal/event completions are usually the most delayed and the most statistically manipulated numbers found in standard tracking packages. When you need to know if your users are ABLE to use your site, and HOW WELL they can use it, RIGHT NOW, is when RTA comes in to play. So let’s say you’re rolling out a new conversion form: you want to see people as they get to it and go through it immediately, because if any technical or usability problems arise, you need to know right away to fix them. Same with new page, redesign, and other such initial deployment scenarios.

Whenever you’re rolling out a new product, the ability to get immediate feedback can save you hundreds or thousands (and maybe even hundreds of thousands, depending on how big you are and how bad the bugs are). Especially if you don’t have a long beta period. Without a long a diverse beta, being able to sit an engineer in front of an RTA display and have them monitor for any suspicious activity for the first couple of days can mean the difference between a great new site improvement or a post-launch nightmare.

The other great case when RTA makes sense is when you suspect that there might be a technical or usability issue with your site, but you can’t quite pin it down or replicate it. Now that Google lets you use standard and custom filters and segments in their RTA implementation, you can (for example) isolate your traffic from visitors using Internet Explorer and figure out why they’re converting at such lower rates. If you combine that with a pushable live chat solution, you can follow customers who are experiencing issues and intercept them right at the problem area, giving you immediate feedback on what went wrong where. This is pretty major, and can help you troubleshoot problems that have been killing your Quality Assurance, Development, and Marketing teams for months.

The last thing I would suggest using RTA for is monitoring for weird traffic surges and one-off events. Things like getting retweeted by a major influencer in your field, mentioned in the New York Times, lambasted in Congress, etc. But this isn’t something that requires steady monitoring, and is best handled by alerts, anyway. One thing to keep in mind, though, is if you do have a rogue traffic phenomenon, RTA can be great to identify the path that this rogue traffic takes and see if you can interrupt it to make it go to a place that’s more likely to convert. So if you have a blog, and you see one post getting hundreds of visitors from Inc all of a sudden, it might behove you to edit it slightly to get your visitors into your funnel. Or throw a quick landing page up somewhere. Or a little message bar to welcome the new traffic boon (check out our friends at Spinnakr, they make this easy). Find someway to disrupt their natural pathway and throw your messaging in there.

When SHOULDN’T You Use RTA?

Pretty much every other time. The thing with analytics is that they mean almost nothing outside of the larger context. Your bounce rate on any given day is absolutely meaningless. Nine times out of ten, you aren’t looking at metrics: you’re looking at CHANGES in metrics over TIME. The one time out of ten that the isolated metric is critical is either when you’ve just changed something (see above), or when you’re contemplating changing something. And even in the latter scenario, it’s far better to look at trends and averages over time and over large numbers of visitors. Staring at your RTA and trying to make good decisions based on a small sample over a small time frame is the surest way to over-react to statistical noise and make poor business decisions. Don’t do it.

So while real-time analytics are important, and should be familiar to every analyst and marketer out there, I think we’ve spent way too much time over the last year and a half going crazy about it. Good things come to those who wait, haste makes waste, patience is a virtue. All of those things are doubly true when you’re trying to make guesses and inferences based on incomplete data (which is all any kind of analysis is – it’s very incomplete data, even at the best of times). Making that data even LESS complete is a critical mistake, and one that we shouldn’t be making. So turn off the monitor, step away from your desk, and go get some fresh air. I promise your data will still be there when you come back, and it will be even better than real time.

And since I’m sure I’ve left off or forgotten tons of valuable use cases, I’d love to hear all of the awesome (or disastrous) ways you’ve added RTA to your well-balanced online marketing program!

The post Real-Time Analytics: Should You Care? appeared first on Content On The Internet.

1) Effectively measure success

2) Find places for improvement

3) Realize things are going south and fix the issues

I think most marketers these days agree that collecting, interpreting, and reacting to data is the foundation without which their efforts go largely in vain. That said, it’s shocking how poorly informed most marketers are about the proper way to interpret the information they see. You can blame public schools that don’t teach strong stats-based classes, blame the under-emphasis placed on math skills in humanities-based major programs, or just blame people for sucking at math; I prefer to find solutions. So, here are five incredibly common and easily fixed mistakes most marketers are making right now, and how to fix them:

1) Relying on Tired Cliches – Correlation != Causation

Yes, we all know that correlation does not imply causation. We know this because people with an elementary grasp of statistics grab on to this mantra like the last life-vest on the Titanic and hang on for dear life until they eventually freeze to death in the icy cold waters. Because that’s what happens if you grab on to this terribly misunderstood cliche and use it to inform your marketing decisions.

Yes, correlation does not imply causation, and should not be taken as proof of X causing Y. It DOES, however, imply a relationship, and a relationship implies that you had damn well better look into things to see what’s going on. Searching for correlation should be the very first tool you pull out of your analysis toolbox every time you get a new data set. Not because you’re going to base your 6-month budget based on correlation, but because identifying and isolating relationships gives you an idea of where you should focus your more involved investigation. Without checking for correlation, you can spend hours, days, or weeks trying things out and running experiments that don’t get you any closer to your marketing goals.

The Fix: Looking for correlation is to your web data analysis what finding a corner is to assembling a jigsaw puzzle: it lays out some constraints for where you should focus later research. If you notice a pattern and it can be shown to be strongly or moderately correlated (r >= .3 or so), you don’t have proof of causality or a true relationship, but you have a strong POTENTIAL for one. Once you isolate the correlated data, you should conduct a rigorous (or as rigorous as is possible on the web) experiment to determine whether the two (or more) variables are REALLY related, and what causes a change in what. This will focus your testing and analysis, and limit the amount of time and money you waste chasing after results.

2) Data Analysis by Leaps and Bounds – Jumping to Conclusions

Don’t base your final analysis and actions on half-analyzed data. Just don’t. Don’t just look for a pattern and call it a day. This may seem like a contradiction of the last point, but it isn’t if you read both closely. In fact, this is the polar opposite of the last point, and as with most things being at either extreme is very very bad. Too many marketers without a strong background in statistics look for patterns, invariably find some, and then file their final report and call it a day. “Well, we posted three blog entries last week and bounce rates went up! We need to post less often!” This is wrong. Very wrong. Every time you say something like that, Avinash Kaushik punches a kitten. Won’t someone please think of the kittens?

The problem is that many marketers, or at least those without a strong stat/math/science background simply don’t know what to do next. It’s fairly easy to identify a pattern. Unfortunately, it’s just as easy to identify a pattern that either doesn’t actually exist or doesn’t mean anything. It’s even easier to identify a pattern, create some meaning out of whole cloth, build a half-assed action plan around that half-assed analysis, and be out of the office by 4:30.

The Fix: First of all, learn how to calculate Pearson’s Coefficient, that is the level of correlation between two data points. The formula is:

r = (n(Σxy)-(Σx)(Σy))/√([nΣx²-(Σx)²][nΣy²-(Σy)²])

r, the correlation coefficient, is going to be a number between -1 and 1. 0 means no relationship, 1 means the numbers are perfectly positively correlated (as x goes up, y goes up by the same amount), -1 means the numbers are perfectly negatively related, 0 means the numbers are completely random and unrelated. You should not be worried about r values between -.3 and .3. There’s not enough of a relationship there to matter. Once you find something with a significant correlation, your work isn’t done. You need to go and test for causality. Before you can claim that your math means ANYTHING, no matter how strong the correlation, you need to test it to make sure it isn’t simply a coincidence. Don’t even think of composing your final report unless you at least recommend an experiment to test causality. For the kittens.

3) Enough Isn’t Enough!

A lot of novice marketers (and way too many veterans of the field) have difficulty with quantity in their analysis. The problem is one of sample size: it’s very tempting to just look at the last couple of data points and declare a trend. This may be fine and dandy for talking heads, pundits, and gurus who live carefree by the motto “Three points is a trend”. Unfortunately, this isn’t how things work in the real world, and it certainly shouldn’t be how you run your analysis.

Any kind of statistics depends heavily on the idea that you need a minimum number of data points in order to draw conclusions that are meaningful, that is: it can be said with a reasonable amount of certainty that the results are representative of the population at large. Essentially, the smaller the ratio between the number of data points in your sample and the number of data points in the population at large, the more likely your results are to be a fluke and not representative of the real world. This is closely tied to the concept of confidence intervals. The other thing you want to make sure of is that any results or conclusions you draw are the way they are because of a legitimate pattern, and not completely by chance. This is called significance, and is an incredibly important concept in statistics. This is particularly important in determining whether specific events are important or not.

The Fix: You need to familiarize yourself with the idea of sample size, significance, and confidence interval before trying to draw any conclusions from any piece of data. Why? To keep from making boneheaded mistakes. The long and the short of it is that you need to stay away from the tendency to draw trend lines through too few data points. A week-long traffic spike to articles about cats COULD mean that you need to write more articles about cats. Or it could much more likely be a complete fluke and fade a week from next Monday. A conversion optimization that tints your site bright pink could be preferred by 6 customers out of 10, but unless your site gets less that 100 visitors a month, that sample size is so small as to be completely meaningless. It’s just as likely that your site was visited by 6 weirdos who are obsessed with pink as it is that your customers really like the new color scheme. Read up on sound experimental design, or better yet use one of the great testing tools that take human error out of experimental design and implementation.

4) If it’s Not A, it Must Be B!

Repeat after me: You do not EVER prove the null hypothesis. Now back up a second: what is a null hypothesis? In any analysis or experiment, the optimal method for determining anything is to set up a hypothesis. So, let’s say you have an eCommerce site, and you want to know if changing the color of the “Buy Now” button from yellow to red will increase conversions. In order to test this in a rigorous and meaningful way, you can’t simply state your hypothesis, you have to formulate a null hypothesis – a default statement that captures the essence of you being wrong. So in our case, the null hypothesis could be something like: “Changing the ‘Buy Now’ button color will have no effect on conversion rates”(Note to stat-heads: this is intentionally bad). This is the default assumption. So you run a split test, and after thousands of visits, you check the data. Much to your surprise, you realize that there is no statistically significant difference between the two groups of visitors.

TA DA! You have now proven that yellow buttons convert better than red buttons, right? Well, no. No you haven’t. All you’ve proven is that the data doesn’t support rejecting the null hypothesis. It’s a technical difference, but it’s important to note. Why? Because calling it a day limits your future testing. For starters, the null hypothesis is terrible. It’s way too vague, and precludes the possibility that maybe red just wasn’t the optimal color. This highlights the importance of being very clear and very specific in your testing. The bigger reason for thinking that you have proven, or disproven, the null hypothesis is a mental one. It precludes you from the potential conclusion that maybe your experiment was bad, and the results are not to be trusted. Now, I am not suggesting that you become paranoid and reject result after result. What I am saying is that just because you ran an experiment once and got a particular result doesn’t mean that you shelve that line of investigation and move on.

The Fix: Understand that your results, even experimental results, are possibly incorrect. If it’s technically and financially feasible, I strongly recommend re-running old experiments occasionally. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that you just got really unlucky and got a weird batch of subjects. When you claim proof, or disproof, you create a mental block that pushes your thinking down a specific corridor. One that it is incredibly difficult to escape from. Especially when you present your findings to decision makers who are NOT analysts, and who will latch on to results as if they came from the mouth of god himself. Just don’t do it. Give yourself enough wiggle room that you have the freedom to change your answer later without having to patiently explain to your boss why you gave him a contradictory answer a year ago.

5) I’m an Analyst, and If I’m Not Analyzing, I’m Not Working!

Over-interpretation of results is probably the biggest no-no you can commit as an analyst. It’s also one of the easiest mistakes to make, because that’s how the general public is used to seeing statistics presented. I blame poor journalism. How many times have you read pop-sci coverage of a clinical study where the headline blared something ludicrous like: “Eating raw lobster cures cancer!” You get excited, read the news story, and in the very last paragraph, you learn that what the study ACTUALLY found is that a certain tribe of Pacific Islanders who eat raw lobster regularly have a much lower incidence of eyebrow cancer. Well, that’s what analysts across the country do EVERY SINGLE DAY, without the slightest bit of shame. In fact, sometimes it’s much, much worse.

Granted, over-interpreting a study/experiment/data-set is less a specific error, and more some combination of one or more of the other problems we’ve talked about here, but it’s still important to mention on its own. Too many analysts feel like they need to make bold proclamations on a daily basis in order to justify their paycheck, and this is not only hurting their companies and clients, but the very field of data analysis. It also makes life hell for the employees of people who read analyst reports and take them as gospel. I once had a boss who read an article years ago about green being the best color for website buttons. He insisted that EVERY BUTTON EVER needed to be green. Not only did it clash with the company’s color scheme and make the website absolutely hideous, it also ruined any potential benefits of using green as a call-out color since ALL buttons were green. This could have easily been avoided had the article writer simply made a point to emphasize that this was ONE result in ONE situation that did not necessarily apply to everything at all times and in all contexts.

Bloggers and gurus are especially bad about this. In their effort to write headlines that capture eyeballs and links, they are incentiveized to contort data to say things it has no business saying. Don’t help them!

The Fix: You are a data scientist, act like one. Couch your analysis in the terms of scientific inquiry. Things are not certain. Data from one sample doesn’t necessarily apply to another sample or the population at large (“Our sweater store converts GREAT in Minnesota. California has way more people, so we’ll sell even more sweaters if we start selling there!”). A trend line, no matter how validly arrived at, can’t be extended to infinity (“We made $100 selling pogs two years ago, $1000 last year, and $10,000 this year. In 5 years our revenue will be $1,000,000,000!”). Carefully consider the practical significance of any analysis, not just the statistical significance (“Performing this complicated, technical change to the website that will cost thousands will increase our conversion rate by 1%! It’s statistically significant, so we HAVE to do it!”). Remember, you are a scientician! Try to act like one.

The post 5 Things You’re Doing Wrong In Your Data Analysis appeared first on Content On The Internet.

I bring this up because even with this maturity, there are still a shocking number of brands that are simply doing it wrong (to recycle an old meme). With as many great resources are there are online and off, there is simply no excuse for companies failing so miserably at content marketing of all stripes. The saddest part is that the reasons for many of these failures are just so abysmally bad, and most of these failures can be fixed quickly and without needing more than a fraction of the ad budget that these guys can throw around. So who are the biggest offenders, why are they offending, and what can they do to get out of the dog house? Read on.

#1. Indochino Doesn’t Do Content Marketing Wrong…They Really Just Don’t Do It.

The Problem: Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. They actually do a great job on social, maintaining an Engagement Index (Talking About This/Total Number of Fans) of about 3%, which is not terrible for a page approaching 100k fans. They also do a great job with their Travelling Tailor events. So what’s my beef? They can and should be doing SO MUCH MORE. There is no blog on their home page, and finding their social media profiles requires actually going to those networks and searching, because they don’t have any links on their homepage. Their email marketing leaves a LOT to be desired, too. Sure, I appreciate the high-quality images and design, but there’s no content. I thought we were past the “Here are some random products. Buy now!” style of emails.

The Solution: Indochino is uniquely positioned to provide a ton of value on top of their already great products. How about a style blog that tells me what I need to be wearing this season? I have no idea, so it would be great to get some pointers from a company whose products I love. How about tailoring their emails to my style based on my buying habits, and actually giving me tips on what I should be wearing? How about not making the social profiles impossible to find? They don’t even need a full daily or weekly content schedule. A great style guide with explanations that’s updated once every three months or so would do wonders. And some emails that treat me like a person and not a prospect would be great, too.

The Lesson:  Sometimes being “almost there” is worse than being nowhere close. The really frustrating part is that Indochino is a young, small company that can implement these changes virtually overnight, yet they don’t. My other frustration with the brand is that it’s clear why they aren’t doing it: they were the first to market, and enjoyed significant market share right off the bat, so they simply haven’t felt a need to do much content other than the previously mentioned gorgeous photo spreads. First, that’s a stupid reason not to add valuable content. Second, their market share is eroding. Competitors are jumping in left and right, and given that it’s a business that doesn’t require a huge amount of upfront capital, it’s only a matter of time until they are dethroned unless they fight for their top spot. Don’t get complacent because of an early lead. Turtle, hare, etc.

#2. JCP: “Cool” Isn’t Enough. Especially When You Aren’t Very Cool

The Problem: What can I say about JC Penny that hasn’t been said to death already? A surprising amount! By now everyone knows the story of the failed rebranding by a former Apple retail exec. The goal was to make the brand “cool” in an effort to attract younger, more affluent shoppers. The problem was younger shoppers have never been interested in shopping at JC Penny, and other than changing the logo and the marketing campaign, nothing was done to try and change that inclination. Sorry, guys, but offering free spotty WiFi is far from all it takes to get my business. Besides just the failed rebranding, JCP failed to provide any kind of content that could have overcome the branding issues. You can’t try to radically alter your target demographics without throwing a bone to either your old shoppers or your new shoppers to ease the transition.

The Solution: The sad thing is that the solution is right there in front of their faces: Sephora. The makeup giant is targeted at exactly the crowd JCP wants to attract, and they’ve been opening smaller retail stores inside of JCP locations. So how does Sephora manage to hit that young, hip market so well? By producing great videos, how-to’s, blogs, and social content that seem by all public measures to be strongly resonating with the 20-something crowd. Why isn’t JCP tapping their marketing team to help transition the rest of their online marketing? Why are they clinging desperately to the ledge, too afraid to let go and jump, too stubborn to climb back to where they were? My only guess: ineptitude. Remember, this is also the brand that got publicly caught (and penalized, and shamed) thanks to some very black-hat SEO tactics. You would think with an ex-Apple guy at the helm, they would be able to figure out digital. You’d be wrong.

The Lesson: You can’t do a rebrand half-way. You just can’t. You’ll piss off your old shoppers, and fail to attract your new shoppers. Content marketing is a great way to manage the transition. Instead of starting your rebrand from the top and working down, start at the bottom. Start by producing the kind of helpful, insightful, cool content that your new demographic is interested in. Use traffic and email segmentation to simultaneously present your messaging to your traditional customers in your traditional voice, and your new customers in your new voice. THEN once you’ve eased the old base into things and built up a groundswell in the new one, ONLY THEN do you pull a radical shift. Oh, and no amount of “cool” will overcome a crappy shopping experience. Remember, the first rule of content marketing is to be useful. That rule applies DOUBLE to your product or service, and everything you do before content marketing.

#3. Bunim/Murray Is Shouting At A Wall

The Problem: Bunim/Murray, the legendary production company behind hits like Real World, Project Runway, and countless other cruft that fills up the attention of the clinically bored, has a secret. They kind of suck at managing the social profiles of their stars and shows. Which is odd, because with a roster of personalities that have no problem eliciting reactions on small screens, you’d think they would have no problem translating that personality to Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, the engagement index for most of their properties hovers under 1%. Keep in mind, average is about 2%. Actually, the numbers are worse than they seem initially (if that’s possible), because most of that publicly trackable “talking about this” number ends up being likes, the least valuable (and increasingly less valuable) possible interaction fans can take with your updates. The ratio of likes to comments sits at around 7:1, significantly higher than the typical 5:1 for most pages of comparable size.

The Solution: STOP. SHOUTING. AT. PEOPLE! Sure, BM (heh heh heh) produces some great content. They kind of have to. The problem is that instead of engaging with fans across their social properties, they dump all of their extra content as “exclusives” without bothering to try to build a conversation around the bonuses. This is so stupid, it almost hurts. The number one rule of social media is you make it about the fans. Instead, pages for shows like Project Runway and Bad Girls’ Club end up being little more than glorified highlight reels, with fan interactions happening DESPITE, not BECAUSE of the company’s involvement.

The Lesson: It’s not about you. It should NEVER be about you. If it is, you’re doing it horribly wrong. Producing great content is just half of the work: the other half is fostering conversation and engagement around it. Otherwise, you may as well just go back to TV and display. If you make your content outreach revolve around taking a big, steaming B/M on your audience, it won’t matter how good your content is.

#4. Louis Vuitton Swings and Misses

The Problem: In our last newsletter, we spotlighted a post about a content marketing fail by Louis Vuitton. Well, we think it’s such a big missed opportunity that we’re going to talk about it again. The short story is similar to Indochino: Louis Vuitton wrote a check their content couldn’t cash. It came in the form of an email with the deceptive subject line of: “Ideas for the Perfect Outfit”. Instead of, oh I don’t know, ideas for the perfect outfit, it instead was a standard old-school flyer-style email with little else besides some generic accessories.

There it is in all its glory. Where’s the content? That’s not an idea for a perfect outfit. That’s a direct mail flyer. What am I supposed to do with that? Other than hitting the “Mark As Spam” button as soon as I can.

The Solution: This one is simple to fix, and runs in the same vein of my advice to Indochino. Give people something useful. Maybe an annotated catalog that talks about the latest in men’s styles and how LV products fit into those? How about using the information you have on someone to come up with a personal style guide. How about talking about how LV’s accessories fit into the latest trend? I get between 50-100 spammy, useless advertising emails daily, and I’m sure I’m not alone. If you don’t give me something interesting and useful, and if I don’t see it within the first couple of seconds, I am not going to respond.

The Lesson: Don’t mislead with your subject lines. Better yet, create great content and then give it to your customers. If you have money for that extremely professional and well-done photo, you can certainly afford to hire a writer, or better yet a content team. In fact, pull some of the budget out of these direct mail-style emails and put it into content. LV can’t possibly be seeing a great return from these.

#5. Google Hides the Pot of Gold

The Problem: Ok, I will admit that I am a huge Google fanboy. And I actually love all the content they put out. Their quarterly magazine, Think Quarterly, is one of the most well-written and well-produced pieces of content marketing out right now. What? You didn’t know they had a quarterly digital magazine? What about the mountains of primary research, much of it coordinated with some of the biggest names in marketing research like Forrester’s? No? What about the huge cache of resources, from sales presentation layouts to stylized statistic call-outs? No, probably not. And that’s the problem. Google produces a ton of content aimed at the users of their products. Their marketing microsite, Think With Google, is an amazing piece of content marketing that simply isn’t given the exposure it needs. In fact, unless you are VERY serious about advertising on the Google platform, odds are you’ve never heard of it, despite there being enough information in there that anyone doing anything on the web can find something useful.

The Solution: This is a bit of a tough one. Google’s homepage is iconically minimalist, so there’s really no way to fit in more ad space. Of course, Google does have the largest PPC advertising platform in the world, so it might be worthwhile for them to invest a little more in that, since currently I rarely if ever see any of their Think content come up in search or ads. That’s the avenue they have for spreading this great content, and it’s a shame that they don’t spend more on it. Of course it’s possible that the guys at Google Ads think the content is already reaching everyone it needs to, but that excuse rings hollow with me. What about the people who don’t know they need it yet? When I first started doing marketing, I would have killed for a resource like this, despite not being able to articulate exactly what that resource would be comprised of. Google needs to do some SEO, and get the word out there beyond the small, insular SEO/SEM community.

The Lesson: You can have the best content in the world, but if it’s not out there it won’t help. Also, if you have a minimalist page design, you need to limit the amount of content you put out to make sure all of it is discoverable, or spend a lot of money getting it out into the while.

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