Cornwall SEO

Content Marketing Blog

Lyndon Antcliff

Why you need to stop building “Quality Content” and start solving problems

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Quality content

A huge amount is written about content, which is all fine and dandy.

But your job is not to produce content.

“Hold on, yes it is. I am a content creator.” You may say.

That may be technically correct and it may be what it says on your Linkedin Page.

But what you really are is a communicator, an influencer, a persuader.

The content is merely a container to carry your thoughts into the mind of the reader and get them to think a certain way or to perform a specific action.

This is very important to understand because it underpins how you create your content and also how you promote it. Before the initial idea you need to think about the person that you want to influence and understand what drives them.

This is why “Everyone”, should not be who you are creating content for and that the more you narrow down your focus the easier it will be to create content that will influence.

For example, lets say we wanted Stephen Fry to tweet our content or even link to it.
Well, Mr Fry has a thing for gadgets and he has a thing for Apple.
But that is not nearly enough, as there are huge amounts of content about gadgets and Apple.
Content needs to be unique to get noticed.
But Mr. Fry has also played Oscar Wilde and has a thirst for interesting literary characters.
So we combine the two.

  • 10 Gadgets Oscar Wilde would love
  • Why Oscar Wilde would be a Mac Man
  • What Oscar Wilde would do with Twitter

Having trouble creating content? Just think of one person you know, and if you don’t know anyone invent a character who represents people in the space you operate in and create content that excites them, that fulfils a need. And that need can simply be a list of cool things to buy that solves a specific problem. You don’t need so called “quality content” or even amazing content, you simply need to solve a specific problem that an individual is having at that moment in time.

To influence and persuade, that is the purpose.

Link to me and see how much I will like you

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Links makes likes

I really like it when people link to my websites, it’s different to a retweet or being told your cool by a stranger over email just before they ask you to publish their guest post about a new device that removes hard skin from feet.

A link is the most genuine of recommendations.
A link is powerful stamp of approval, even more so in these times, as fewer people seem to be linking out.

The Google hack, the sticking plaster that is “Penguin” which attempts to fix a failing system has turned a lot of SEO agencies into “penalty removal” agencies, rather than what they should be which is, “cool content” publishing agencies, building brand over multiple platforms.

Blegh, that last sentence was spiky, but sometimes you need to get a bit jargony to communicate effectively to the tribe.

However, (FU Gove*) people in the niche of online marketing tend to go overboard with jargon, terms like “content marketing” miss the target putting the focus on the content rather than the reader. And wanky terms like “inbound marketing”, which I still don’t quite understand seem to permeate like a rank fart in a bean and chile, festival tent, where the extractor fan has broken and someone left a dead meerkat under a chair for a few days.

The first thing I look at when someone is asking a favour for me is, “Do they link to me?”.
I love linking to people I like, like Taylor Swift, although I wouldn’t recognise here music if I heard it she faced down the greedy gits at Apple who wanted to give her album away for free for three months to build THEIR platform.

We don’t have a “Link to your friends day”. But maybe we should.
Maybe everyday should be “Link to your friends day.”
I do bit by linking to people and business on my SEO Services UK page. Make sure you link to those who do good things for you.

Feed your allies, starve your enemies.

* Michael Gave, aka "Twat", has told us we should never start a sentence with a preposition such as "However,". I am not of the "these are the rules for writing English and you shall keep to them on pain of death", group of writers. You will find those who do chastise usually break the rules themselves and the rest have rather arid sex lives.

Image source

Is User Interface Design the New SEO?

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If the user interface on your website smells, do you think it will get links?

SEO is never about links, except when it is.

Design is even more important now, which is hard work for me as I am mediocre to terrible at design.

But it can be learned, and designing for a human being is a learned skill.

The SEO as always must adapt.

uxb

Courtesy of: Designmantic.com

The most useful thing about the phrase “Content is King”

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I love it when people spout off, “Content is King”.

It allows me to know how much brain power they have devoted to the problem of producing content that works to get people to your website and persuade them to feel good about you and your brand.

Anyone with half a brain can see that content is not King, and yet people still use the phrase.

I doubt that Millennials use it much, they know too well the value of content.

The truth is, people are king, not content.

As proved by this chart which I just made.

King

Joking aside, it’s clear that it’s people you need to focus on, simply churning out stuff does not work. Whenever people lay out their case for “Content is King”, they always pick out the best content as an example, but most content being produced right now is going to have viewing figures in the single digits.

It’s only the content that is crafted for people, rather than it’s own existence is ever going to have a positive effect.

Think about the people you want to consume your content and then create the content

What can Don Draper teach us about Creating Content

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Yes, I was a Mad Men fan. Everything that needs to be said about the show has already been said, by people with larger expense accounts than mine.

Seeing a distilled wisdom presented in the infographic below, I realise how much it told us about the creative process and you can easily apply this to modern content creation. Not only that but I like how it takes apart the process.

The thing that resonates with me, is “get in the frame of mind”. Storytelling is a natural, innate skill that most humans have buried just beneath the surface. It’s not so much mechanical as it is printed in our DNA, we simply need to feel it.

Of course, language is mechanical and rule based, but too many rules stifle the creativity. If Don Draper taught us anything it was that if you never break the rules, you will never fulfil your creativity.

Is your SEO Cheeky Nandos?

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Let me make one thing clear, I probably only understand about 20% of what the term “cheeky Nandos”, actually means. And that is exactly how it should be as I only need to know enough to be able know if it fits my publishing strategy.

It’s a brand new term that is tearing up the UK social media pipes.

This chart depicts searches for KFC vs cheeky Nandos over 30 days in the UK.

Cheeky Nandos Stats
Cheeky Nandos Stats

As you can see from the data it briefly overtook searched for the US Corporation, although now we see it dropping as the mainstream get in on the act and the tabs cover it.

Metro

But what does a “Cheeky Nandos” mean?

Lincolnshire Echo

The main point of slang is to create an us and them. You are not supposed to get it if you are not in the tribe. And it’s probably something to tut at as you buy your Moroccan Houmous from Waitrose, (another phrase that you may not fully understand the cultural implications of.

But that’s OK, we don’t need to fully understand some terms to make hay with it. We are publishers not readers, we are dealers not junkies. When stuff like this happens we need to be on it and see if it fits in with our publishing strategy.

Those people who tweet, “WTF is cheeky nandos”. They are not in our tribe and will distract you from your goal of content marketing Nirvana. But those who plug the term in Google Trends, search on Twitter for it, measure and asses the cultural capital of the term and question if it reaches our demographic. Now there is someone you need to pay attention to.