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How to create new Content ideas for Blog articles, SEO Viral content…

May 18, 2015 By Lyndon Antcliff

I’ve never found coming up with content ideas a problem.

But I know others do, and this is not because I am more intelligent than them, it’s because these people have their skill set focused on another areas, such as web design, programming, seo… etc.

It’s also because their heads are full of the successful stuff they have just seen, but you can’t just copy and get away with it. You have to add another element, you have to take nothing, and create something.

A lot is talked about creating content, but very little on the process of coming up with new, fresh, vibrant ideas. This is probably because very few can do it, very few can teach it and most of those who can do it cannot explain it.

These are the simple steps you need to take to create content ideas

Ingest means first creating a state of mind that allows you to suck in as much content as possible and then deconstruct it to its constituent components. Figuring out exactly why it works.

Daydream, means to allow the mind to wander amongst its vast library of memories, create “what if’s”, or “what would they think if I did that?”. all the while underpinned by the knowledge about what excites people and why.

Go wild, means to have no barriers. Freedom of thinking and criticism. To know where the line is you first need to cross it. You wont be able to cross it if you are sitting in an office, at a desk, under fluorescent light, wondering how come the boss can afford a Porsche and not buy decent coffee for the office. You need the ability and permission to roam the desert, searching for the shamen who will give you the answers.

Write, means you have to do the work. You have to stare at the blank page of nothingness and engage. If you have a problem with this, start to write whatever is in your head. If you can’t do that you need to either train in the craft or change careers or take up something easy like SEO 😉

You need the knowledge and you need the process. This creates the state of mine, the 1,000 yard stare any content idea creator develops after a while in the trenches.

Some people think coming up with ideas is easy, but unless you are actually pushing the ideas out into the world, then they will only ever stay an idea in your head.

Brand vs Product

May 12, 2015 By Lyndon Antcliff

It’s hardly definitive but take a look at this data for a brand search and a product search.

I often have a discussion with SEO types about branding and usually it goes, “people buy things because of the thing the thing does”, when the reality is it’s more often than not about the way it makes people feel.

Brand is all about how the consumer feels, it is an emotional thing.
And it’s not even just about purchases, it’s about social media too. People share content because of how it makes it feel. People are more likely to share content from people they have met and liked that people they do not, not because the content changes, but the way the person feels about the other person changes.

You can see this if you analyse the various tribes of SEO, they tend to rewteet each other. Not because of the content, but because the concept of the tribe is being invoked.

The trick is not to get your product to connect with the customer, but to build an emotional relationship between the consumer and the brand.

This is how you rank in 2015

Brand will soon be everything in the Avocado Update

April 12, 2015 By Lyndon Antcliff

I sense a change in the search-space continuum.

I think something big is afoot.

Something that will play out over a period of the next 12 months.

I think search optimisation will change as we know it.

It already has grown men weeping into their pot noodle after their 1,000th disavow submission.

The SEO is now a glorified clerical worker.
Bad link yes.
Bad link no.
Send off disavow file.
Repeat

What is the name of the business you are trying to get traffic for?
Are people searching for the name of that business?
Are they talking about it on social media?

If not, the business is probably not worth ranking.
It’s probably a shell of a website wrapped around a keyword.
And that used to work so well.

Now we have to develop emotional relationships between our brand and ADD, caffeine fulled, sheeple who represent the human race on the internet.
And that’s OK for some of us, I for one have always said it’s people you get links from, not websites.
Now it’s going to be “the Conversation” which is going to decide who ranks.
Why should Google count links to decide what people want to rank for?
You do realise that Panda and Penguin were declarations of failure of that system, don’t you?
Don’t you?
They are hacks, pure and simple.

But change is coming, it’s in the wind, can’t you smell it.
It hangs in the air like the silence in an empty hall after a big show.

Are you ready for it?

Change is the only thing we can be sure of, and the change is getting faster.

The other day my iPad pinged me with a notification that someone was making a live video of a Waitrose avacado, using Periscope.
Lets leave aside the psychology of why someone would do this.
It wasn’t an avacado, it was a Waitrose avacado.
Do you really think something like that is not going to get sucked up and noted.
And in some massive computer somewhere the relationship between the brand keyword, Waitrose and an avacado has changed ever so slightly in the positive.
If search was to be accurate, or even improved this notice of a human being communicating evidence of sharing a branded avacado should make a difference.

So where does that leave marketers, influencer and persuaders?
Well it’s actually quite tasty for those of us who like to persuade people to do stuff.
Some of us like the hustle and the inter=play between the crowd and the promotion of thoughts that end up in their head.

The Avacado Update

I present no objective proof to support this.
Merely my thoughts on where this is all going and what I am seeing and what I feel.
It may take a few years, but all Google needs to know is everything the human race says in real time and the ability to process language in a correct semantic context which takes account of culture.

Why would you need links if you had that?

The age of the storyteller is about to begin.

You can call it content marketing if you so wish, it really makes no difference.

So what should you do?
Do you need a content strategy?

NO!

We are way beyond that.

You need a vision.

Not a goal, a vision.

It is those who have the vision who will tell the brightest, strongest stories.
The technology will be background noise.
A wrapper.
A device to enable the most wonderful of stories to be told and it will be those stories that people will talk about and it’s those stories that will build the content, that will connect the emotions of the crowd and the brand.

And the crowd shall be so fanatical and to hurtle down the hill with their credit cards brandished like weapons as if they were Iceni tribe were on a day outing in Rome.

In fact, this fanatical behaviour is already happening.

It makes perfect sense that these waves of discourse will drive the search of the future.

It really is not as simple as “get people to talk about your brand”.

The skillset needed will by that of not just a storyteller, but a creator with a deep understanding of the human condition and real time cultural knowledge.

If you can get a few million people to believe a 13 year old stole his Dad’s credit card to buy hookers, then you shouldn’t have a problem.

Now, who do you know who can do that?