Cornwall SEO

Content Marketing Blog

What content is really about

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Human Experience

A Thought provoking piece by Rand over at Moz.com, but there is something he left out.

I always like the bear chasing story when educating about content, you have probably heard it but for those who haven’t.

Bear wants to kill two men.
One man quickly puts on his running shoes.
Other man says, “There is no point in putting on your running shoes. You will never outrun a bear.
Other guy says, “I don’t need to out run the bear, I just need to put on my running shoes and outrun you.”

It’s always been that way in SEO, you just have to get in front of the guy that’s in front of you and keep the guy behind you, behind you.

But things are a little different these days.

Actually things are a lot different these days.

There is too much emphasis on producing “killer content”.

Yes, you need to produce the best content than the other guy, but it’s the wrong focus.
You shouldn’t be focussing on building 10x content.

You need to build a brand that is 10x.

10x Content no longer cuts it in this town, baby. Let alone the “good content”, the average agency pumps out into the Universe.

Which is why Rand is wrong, the focus should not be on the content in the first place, the focus should be on, “How the hell do I want people to feel about my brand?”

Content should not be created simply by schleping over to buzzsumo.com and checking out a few search terms. It’s a dimensional shift from a keyword tool mouse click.

This stuff needs to be in your blood.

You need to be 10x passionate about your brand and get others excited about it too.

Of course you need content to get people excited, but that is only the symptom of your raging passion.

You need more than a tool, you need to know more, get up earlier, write more, meet more people, think longer, think harder than the other guy who is by now a high protein snack for the Grizzly bear.

People want to buy their stuff from people who are 10x living it. Who not only solve their problems, but provide insights into the future and a fantastic human experience.

People are hungry for experience.

Presenting a solution to a problem is becoming, megh. So what? Problems have become solvable at the click of a mouse, their value has been reduced.

But the value of the human experience has increased.

One thing I do think Rand Fishkin does very well, is that he has created a magnetic brand that is focused on tasty, human experience, which people find highly attractive. The 10x content Moz.com produces is simply a by product of that space.

But content is not about content.

It’s about the human experience, and how people feel when connecting to your brand.

Why I am spending more time on LinkedIn

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The more I use LinkedIn, the more I like it.

Yes, there are the people who still use it to dump content mentions and run. But I have found if you engage with people in a real, conversational manner time spent there can really pay dividends.

It helps I do this kind of thing for a job, although if your job is to sell “wholesale spices”, or “raw chocolate”, there are ways in which it would help out your business.

Dusting off my profile I noted my endorsements were a fantastic collection of amazing people in the field of Internet Marketing.

linkedin-endorsements

Not that I am fishing for more, but using this as a great example of social validation, and this is what LinkedIn is really good for.

I always check for the LinkedIn page of any new contact and will use any information I find to form an opinion, and if you don’t have a LinkedIn page I assume you don’t really want anyone to talk to you, or you are not doing much of any interest online.

It’s also a great place to publish content, as I did here with talking about my headline writing book.

There are plenty of guides out there to get to grips with it and any time invested will deliver a good ROI.

Cornwall Estate Agents an idea for your blog

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Not Dawn French's house

Getting ideas for a blog on a continual basis is hard work.

Getting ideas for an Estate Agents blog (Realtors in the USA) is even harder.

There are only so many “10 Reasons you should bake cookies when selling your house”, type posts. Although these “how to” posts should exist on your website as they are low hanging fruit and add to your authority and increases your branding power.

But sometimes a tasty story comes along. We are lucky in Cornwall because we do have a lot of celebrities who like to come and hang around a wild coastline, and some who are home grown.

And so this story comes along, Dawn French sells her holiday home in Fowey, Cornwall. Which you could easily turn into content on your estate agent blog that would get shares and links.

Dawn French puts 15-bed Cornish holiday home on the market for £725,000

Rightmove.co.uk were of course on it.
Dawn French sells her Cornish holiday let

However, if you are Cornwall based and a car drive away from the house on Fowey you can easily take a few original pics for your blog.

Other ideas would be “10 Celebrities who live in Cornwall and their houses”.

Note: The image above is not Dawns’ house, as I think it captures the spirit of Cornwall a little better. Check out Dawns’ house and see if you agree.

Image source

PR Job in Cornwall Hiring

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Barefoot Media, based in Cornwall with offices in London has a vacancy for a PR position.

They look like a cool bunch to work for.

PR cornwall

They have a great list of clients including, Buttermilk, Padstow Christmas Festival, Fifteen Cornwall, Watergate Bay Hotel, Polo on the Beach, Three Cheers Pub Co, The Old Quay House Hotel .

You can get in touch

01208 895089
Little Trewollack, St Wenn, Bodmin, Cornwall
PL30 5PL

 

Wait till you see what an SEO manager looks like.

The Secret to Ranking a Website in Google

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This is a great time for people building great content on the web.

buils content

Delivering the content that people want will be the ultimate factor in whether or not a website will rank.

Yes of course there will still be those anomalies which a clever SEO can exploit, but it would be  foolish to base a business on hunting down the latest thing that Google has not yet fixed.

There is nothing really new in the interview, although it is a great interview and ties together a bunch of methodologies that have been working for sometime.

  1. We all know that we should have an effective social media following on places like Twitter.
  2. We all know that we need to be producing content that is better than any other content which is currently available to the reader.
  3. We all know we should create synergy between all content and online communication output.

So nothing new there.

But how many of us really implement this? When I want something to happen I write a blog post, do a bit of Tweeting, a bit of emailing, a bit of commenting etc., until I get the result.

I already have my processes set in place, I am already a member of various online social tribes – I have my own gang of trusted creative rebels on which I can call upon. I already know my market and what is needed and more importantly how to get people to be attracted, engaged and then what will get them to react.

Which of course I should know having been doing this for quite some time now and having the good fortune to work with some brilliant, clients in a variety of sectors. Getting the client to do what is needed is the hardest part of the equation as results are not obvious before the process begins.

Even though I can show that doing something very specific like producing an infographic on going to Mars can get high quality editorial links from the likes of Wired.com, Mashable.com etc. It still takes large amounts of energy to create presentations that leads the client along the path.

But the client thing is a tangent and not crucial to the core thing being discussed.

What is important

I think it helps if we think along the lines of publishing something popular, than creating quality content. Quality is a relative term and means different things to different people, whereas we can easily define popularity.

Popular content, not quality content.

This is my experience over the 15 years I have been creating web pages to get links out of people. It’s that you need to be creating content that people really, really want to consume.

Thing is, most of those in my industry are more interested in paying a writer £15 to produce an article than £1,500.

Which is absolutely fantastic, because you are competing with people who only have enough juice to get up half of the hill. If you “get it”, you can dominate. That is the secret.

What’s also interesting is that the regular business person finds it hard to get to grasps with the aspects of content marketing, yes I know there are success stories out there, but relative to their whole sector they are tiny. The second secret is that this will always be the case.

There will always be opportunity for those who can create popular content

People in my industry, and I am one of them, are always babbling on about the latest technological advancement in blogging or social media. It becomes this huge wall of noise, and mostly it’s relatively unimportant as it’s not the technology that attracts. It’s the content

It’s the content

It’s one thing of course to define and understand this, another thing completely to implement it in a fashion that delivers an effective ROI. Which is where I tap my 15 years experience in the industry, I have seen and studied huge numbers of real time campaigns that have both succeeded and failed in this time.

A very, very small percentage of websites out there currently implement best practice content marketing, seo, blogging, social media etc. You may not think so because you spend all your time only consuming the good stuff and so think that is all what exists.

Local is getting very tasty

When you talk to the people who are experts in local online marketing, it gets very interesting. As it doesn’t seem to take that much investment for a local business to get a good ROI out of local online marketing. Obviously this is because of the geographical parameters being fixed, and that is not going to change.

Local requires a change in the mind set, but at its basic it is a similar methodology to the huge corporate beast.

Learning from the Tabloids

To the people who I personally coach in this area, I tell them to think like the Economist and create like the Sun, newspaper. To be a dealer and not an addict. To think about the reader as being hungry for a specific type of content and simply creating that content and promoting it.

It’s simplistic, but the complexity is in the cultural awareness and defining the thing that people want at that specific time. It’s impossible for the business person running a plumbing supplies website for example. They do not have time to sit on Reddit, Twitter or consume the latest from Huffpo or find that smaller story that fits their niche perfectly.

You need an experienced, culturally aware individual who understands what gets people to link and create social signals and how that folds in to the websites brand development.

Even I can only count about 30 – 40 people who can do this to the required level.  Most of them are highly creative, maverick social rebels types. Most freelance and wouldn’t be caught dead working the 9-5 in house or for an agency. Not that in-house, or agency people can’t do this, but it’s not for people who crave security or who can only operate if they have a defined working structure.

The creativity needs to flow in an environment that is unstable from a business POV or at least looks wonky when you look at it through a business lens.

If you find one of these creative geniuses who can connect all the different parts and implement, delivering and effective ROI, make sure you give them what they want to work on your stuff. Do not let them go over to the opposition, because it’s really hard to find these types of people as they are rare.

If they are aware of their value then you will need to pay premium rates, but if your business model is set up to soak up extra business then it’s worth it. I cannot tell you how many client servers I have crashed because of all the traffic I send clients.

 

Image source

 

 

 

 

Why you should use psychographic profiling when building links

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psychographic profile

The above is the most clipped slide from my Content Publishing Strategy presentation on Slidedeck.

This presentation forms the backbone of the content strategy training I offer and the aspect of the “psychographic profile” is always the most interesting to people.

People think content is king, but this is wrong. Content is merely the vehicle for the idea.

The real action happens in the mind of the reader. It’s not the content that the focus should be on, but the psychology of the person it is aimed at.

The mind of the target reader must define the content, not the creator’s whim and fancy.

I’ve worked with a lot of creatives and a lot of them seem to be focussed more on a particular aspect they are interested in such as infographics, or a new javascript trick, than the actual job which is to communicate and influence the reader to perform a specific action.

But that’s not what Shakespeare and Hemmingway did, they were true artists!

No.

That is exactly what they did. They looked at what triggered the audience to action. What ideas infected the minds of their target audience. Shakespeare was a brilliant content publisher and we could spend a few hours discussing this but lets not get distracted.

Lets get back to links.

Forget most of the guff talked at you by PR people who wear very heavy watches that are advertised in magazines with pictures scantily clad women.

Links are the key, they are what get you ranked in Google.

Ranking in Google is still the best way to get people to your website and buy stuff.

To get links, you need to influence the people who give links.

To influence people to give links you need to know what would make them link.

Content is not the trigger, it’s the idea behind the content. Thus it’s all about what is happening in the mind of the reader who can link.

  • Who are these people?
  • What do they read?
  • What websites do they look at?
  • How old are they?
  • What apps do they use?
  • Are they an Open World, MMO gamer or do they prefer Candy Crush on a smartphone.

These and a hundred more questions such as these, need to be asked in order to know what actually communicates to and influences your target linker.

Because it could be as simple as a picture of a kitten, or as complex as an interactive HTML5 driven infographic.

Getting links used to be simple, but cutting edge, link building theory has become a lot more complex.

Psychology and neuroscience are subjects that need to be studied if you want success in the digital marketing landscape of today.