Cornwall SEO

Content Marketing Blog

A Healthy Disregard for the Impossible

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Larry Page is quoted as saying, “the only true failure was not attempting the audacious.” “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely.”

I’m reading, In The Plex, How Google think, works, and shapes our lives. By Steven Levy, (I bought it on the sofa whilst watching Formula One on TV, I love my Kindle)

It strikes me odd, that on this blog – which is sometimes about how to get your website ranked in Google – that we don’t talk about the architects of the system.

Looking around it seems that most other SEO blogs do the same. One reason for this may be the sparse nature of the information about them. We mostly listen to someone who goes by the name of Matt Cutts.

But listening to the thought process and motivation of the guys who actually built the thing may help in understanding how the thing works.

After all, if you try to study the algorithm, it makes sense to study those who created the algorithm.

Indeed, it makes perfect sense to “think like an engineer“, something I now have on my wall after listening to an Ed Dale Video.

Not only think like an engineer, but get into the mindset of someone driven to an end goal that is the incredible.

And so I would say, In The Plex is mandatory reading for anyone working in SEO. If you work at an seo agency, tell the fancy car driving boss that everyone in the company should be bought a copy of the book.

If they turn to you and ask, “what’s the book about?” You should probably consider jumping ship as it can get kinda mind numbing working for the unenlightened.

I’m buying all my link building team a copy.

(it’s all tax deductible against training anyway, duh)

Social Media is about Influence not Relationships

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I have a shelf full of overpriced books on social media. I say overpriced as most are just rehashed blog posts.

And most of them bang on about “relationships”, or “it’s all about the conversation”. As if yammering away about anything and everything and connecting with everyone and her dog is all you have to do.

Well that thinking is just a big bag of wrong.

Because, “IT” is not about the conversation, “IT”, is about influence or persuasion.

Sure, the conversation or having a rip roaring relationship that transcends all other relationships ever had in the history of humanity is something which social media does very well.

But, that is not the point.

It is NOT the goal.

The goal, is for people to be influenced into making a specific action.

For example:

  • Think positively about your brand
  • Buy more of your stuff
  • Hire you for a killer job
  • Make love to you in a Ford Cortina

And before you climb up to the pulpit to proclaim sex has nothing to do with social media or influence or persuasion. You may want to look at the fundamental nature of human beings.

I thought about this as Tina Jonasen questioned me on twitter.

@lyndoman Just wondering; you say you are a “Link Builder”, but follows nobody? Maybe I´m confused between Link- & RelationshipBuilder !?

Which is an interesting question.

Humans are those who link, therefore relationships are very useful. I tweeted back a few thoughts.

@ThinkInNewAreas A link can be a result of a human relationship built on following someone on Twitter but it’s not an effective or efficient

@ThinkInNewAreas The, “shall I link to this webpage” thought process only sometimes has a “does this person follow me on twitter” component

@ThinkInNewAreas Also, I want to suggest, it’s not about “relationships”, it’s about influence. Relationship is merely a stepping stone.

I think people get wrapped up too easily in the “relationship” part of social media. Which is perfectly understandable, but you have to step back and ask, “what am I doing here?”

“What is my social media strategy?”

It will stop you building relationships with the wrong people or spending all morning trading pictures of kittens who look like members of the Royal family.

Not following anyone on Twitter is a very interesting thing to do, as it removes a sedentary proclivity (natural urge to sit on your arse and be spoon fed information) and go on the hunt for useful bits of info.

It also highlights a few other things, which I may talk about later.

Getting Ruthless with Information Overload

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This may be hard for some to understand.

But, I am going to stop following everyone on my main Twitter account.

There are a number of reasons for this and a number of advantages.

Of course there will be some disadvantages

  • Some people will get the hump and stop following me
  • I might miss out on a tasty morsel of info
  • I get behind in SEO gossip

I don’t mind if some people stop following me, as I will be using my Twitter account other than to get people to follow me on Twitter. As I have numerous searches and lists running on Tweetdeck I can still be plugged in to needed information whilst reducing distraction.

I use RSS feeds a lot and use Reader on my iPhone to make sure I get enough tasty morsels to keep me fed.

SEO gossip, doesn’t pay the rent and it can seriously suck up time.

I think I joined Twitter back in 2007, and to keep using it in the same way I used it then is nuts, because my business model has changed. And so the way I use Twitter must also change. I now run a large team of link builders and offer a specific link building service to clients which takes up a lot of time.

Distraction is a big problem for me and I score high on ADD tests, so I have to work hard to reduce the possible distractions and get RUTHLESS.

As tweeting is no longer something I need to cultivate to generate new business or do a spot of brand building, it diminishes in its ability to justify itself in the current form I use it.

So, I am going to dump all followers and use it in a more focussed form, which will probably be more conversational and reach out to new networks and new people.

I would only advise others to do this if it fits with your business model.

My tweets will be ripe and full of juice and if you are in the business of SEO, online marketing, social media etc. It will still be worthwhile to follow me.

But if not, no probs.

After all, it’s only business 😉

ps. If you think it feels like you work for Twitter, rather than getting Twitter to work for you, you may want to have a long, ruthless, think about this.

Actionable INFORMATION – Do you have a large bag of it handy?

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It’s a good little phrase, “Actionable Information”.

Unfortunately I didn’t come up with it, Michelle McPherson did in this blog post with is replete with informational nibbly bits.

The post is good because it proposes simple solutions to a simple problem that people love to over complicate.

Hell is doing the same thing over and over again and failing and not learning and tweaking next time round to stop the madness.

You see it all the time online, I see it all the time online.

And that’s a good thing if you get it, because you can slip between the shadows and work it when others are still scratching their head wondering why they can’t fit in watching the complete Sopranos DVD boxset with online domination of the “Hamster Cage” niche.

It’s one reason I stopped reading SEO blogs.

Title tags? Really, what, put them in my web pages? Cool, thanks.

It’s not that SEO is dead, it’s just that you can learn 97% of all you need in 20 minutes. And if you then go on a 6 week course in how to crank out fancy reports you can make tons of cash as an SEO agency.

The reality is:

  • SEO is really link building
  • Linkbuilding is not about quality, it’s about scale.
  • Link building is not about scale, it’s about publishing actionable information.

You mean you have actionable information and you are not putting it on your website?

Are you an idiot?

You mean you own a carpet cleaning company and you didn’t publish an article about how much it would cost to clean the red carpet at the Royal Wedding and how many bottles of cleaning fluid you would need and wether or not you would youse a fine brush filter or a coarse one?

It’s not hard.

But you do have to think in a way that is antithetical to how you would build a carpet cleaning company.

Which is why linkbaiters get hired and why they never show you pictures of their office (it’s usually in a bit of a state).

If you have a website, you are a publisher, Do you think like a publisher? Do you know what a publisher thinks like. They think like Rupert Murdoch, Felix Dennis, Hugh Hefner. If they ran the content part of your website, what do you think would happen to the traffic?

Publishing on the web, is exactly the same as publishing on paper.

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

“Think you’re a salesman you sonofabitch?” (Points for naming the film)

It’s the same principles.

You have to go backwards, not forwards to win in this game.

If you think it’s about the latest tool, then you are the Tool. (not sure that translates but megh)

Go back about 4,000 years and you will find the first published list and it still gets talked about.

Truth is, lists work.

2nd Truth is, people moan about lists and yet for some mysterious reason still read them, share them, comment about them.

The human brain hasn’t simply changed into a new way of thinking since the Internet came along.

  • Sex
  • Death
  • Money
  • Power
  • Health
  • More sex

Things have not changed, the lizard brain is a hungry beast and will feed before any other part.

Stop being a clever arse and start being an actionable-information production machine.

Sometimes it's Worth Doing That Which Makes No Sense

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I cranked up Tweetdeck early on Friday night to do my weekly check in. Unless I have a plan to implement I only check the feed about once a week.

I’m not really a user of Twitter, more a pusher. I mostly work with a bunch of other accounts than my main one.

But, when I heard that Pampers have a “follow me” request on every packet of nappies something clicked.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter was great when it first started, noise to signal ratio was very low and the exclusivity factor was attractive.

But the Pampers thing seemed to whiff a little.

I would still advise clients to cut traditional advertising and put it into new media, Twitter being one of those. Although you really need to know the landscape to truly use it to increase your ROI

Which is the point, right.

And you can use it effectively to promote your brand and develop a following.

Although I don’t take on many clients these days I still have a healthy bunch to whom I can share cutting edge techniques with and the point about cutting edge techniques is that few people are actually doing them.

“Only dead fish go with the flow.”

There are incredibly profitable techniques out there right now. And no I’m not going to give them away on a blog, even when I do tell people the process they don’t quite get it. Some of it is extremely counter intuitive.

The point is if you are feeding where the rest of the herd are, you are going to be drinking muddy water, with the odd floater sailing by.

Twitter is one big, muddy trough. Most people don’t mind that, and to be honest it’s all they need.

Some need to be where the herd hangs out, nothing wrong with that. If you have thousands of followers and you can sell to them, it makes perfect sense.

Observing the social media scene as someone who uses it as a business tool, rather than the social aspect I see there are certain reasons that some platforms succeed and some fail, making gentle hissing noise as they go.

Most don’t realise you can actually break most rules of social media and benefit from it. Too many “How to Tweet” books out there, which I find very useful when I need to nod off.

So, I thought I would break a few rules and throw something out there, just to see. Something that was a bit of nonsense.

I had the germ of an idea and probably in about 1 hour had bought a domain name, set up the web page, created a mailing list. I hadn’t done this for years, I usually get someone else to do it and the speed surprised me.

I called it Slagster.com I will invent a juicy tale of how I came up with the domain later.

After a few jokes about Angel investors and a failed IPO and a lot of nonsense Tweeting from me – I’m sure some people thought that Charlie Sheen had hacked into my account – I noticed someone else had already signed up a Twitter account for Splagster (good luck with that) and a bunch of people signed up to the email, without knowing what the hell what it was about.

Until now.

I do have the germ of an idea, something simple, something tasty, something counter intuitive. Not something for the IM crowd, but something designed to make a lot of noise and be disruptive.

It’s a challenge, and it’s exciting.

And it probably wont happen.

But that’s not the point. The point is to do something that sometimes does not make sense, even at the expense of attracting a few WTFs. It refills the reservoir and girds your loins. Not sure I want my loins girded, but anyway.

Splagster.com, it definitely will not be what you think, but sign up anyway.