Here’s the situation:

Text ads out of control, color combinations that hurt to look at, no social sharing links (or TOO many!) and images that barely have any connection to the text.

These mistakes can make a visitor run for the proverbial hills. A visitor to your blog is making a decision about your worth within a few seconds, sometimes nanoseconds.

Find out whether you’re making simple but crucial mistakes that turn readers away…

1. Text Isn’t Reader-Friendly

This one gets me every time: endless lines of text.

Use the four line rule for paragraphs instead of sentence after uninterrupted sentence with no break in sight. Our eyes reach the end of the sentence line and have to jump back to the left to start the next and this gets harder with the addition of more lines in a paragraph.

Don’t let paragraphs get bloated; shorten your text into easily-digested chunks. Pull quotes are another good way to extract some information from the text and make it more prominent and eye catching to the reader. Since most readers usually scan, it’s important to provide them with some focus to the more important parts of the article.

Remember how users read on the web… they don’t!  

Even the most complex content can become reader-friendly with the addition of white space as in Paragraph B

This all goes for blog post headlines, too. The Goldilocks rule: Not too short, not too long, but just the right size. If you want readers to share and retweet your posts, don’t use long headlines that might as well be opening paragraphs. Short and sweet.

2. Overuse of Pop-Up Ads

Some advertising in a blog may be necessary, and I don’t mind people selling things, but being obtrusive about it can get on your nerves. Don’t make pop-up ads interrupt the flow of reading the content on your blog.

Some pop- up advertising can be too aggressive and cause readers to click away.

3. Distracting Color Combinations

Don’t make the color of the font clash with the background color. Whenever I encounter a site with white text on a black background it gives me this optical distortion. It makes me question whether or not I should continue on reading at all.

There's a reason why most sites use dark text on a light background, it's a lot easier on the eyes when you're staring straight into a light source.

Think of books and magazines: the majority is black text on a white background which is considered the best color combination’s to use for readability, ease of use, and reduced eye strain.

Legibility depends on high contrast between foreground and background, so black-and-white is the safest bet. I am constantly reminding myself of the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

4. Too Many Social Share Buttons

Use the specific social sharing buttons that your user demographics are active on. Don’t use the all-encompassing “Share/Save” button where users have to hover over and click on what sites they want to share.

You will see more response from your visitors if you give them more focused options.

Instead, download the official share buttons (i.e. Twitter, Linkedin, Google +, Facebook, etc) from the site itself. Make it as easy as possible for users to share your content in the least clicks possible. Placing social share buttons front and center on the top and bottom of every post is ideal.

5. Cheesy Stock Photography

This photo has lost its original representation of “business” and now conjures up “overused stock photo cliche”.

Most stock photos are very bland and generic.  This is their nature – the more generic, the broader the audience. It’s too easy to use bad stock photography…instead, be original.

Whenever possible, I suggest a quick photo shoot over pre-used stock photography, but this isn’t always the most feasible solution with budgets and timelines.

In that case, I will do my best to use stock photography in a fashion that doesn’t make it look so “stocked”. However, if you own a restaurant and you’re using stock photos of gourmet hamburgers and saying they are your own you are doing a disservice to your potential customers.

When your product or service is very specific, you may need to do a photo shoot.

Don’t use the “hottest” or “most popular” search category features to choose a photo. I’ve seen (you probably have, too) the same business photo on so many sites and blogs that it’s lost the original representation of “business” and now conjures up “overused stock photo cliche”.

Try to work the image into the site or article by manipulating or changing it in some way, a simple crop can go a long way.

6. Forgetting About Rich Media

People like visuals. We go to museums and galleries, watch movies and take photos a lot. Rich media can compliment your text and  improve the overall reader experience.

Video and interactive media are very effective ways to spark an emotion and gain stickiness to your blog.

Both blogs feature inspirational speakers. The blog on the right uses video and photography. The blog on the left has links that take you to the videos.

Rich media (anything that has motion, audio, interaction, and is activated either by a user’s action, referrer, browser information, or time), can be fun and effective — making it something the user will want to see and share.  It can attract and hold the attention of a higher percentage of users for a longer period of time.

Just be sure that accessibility is not an issue, various formats require special plugins or abilities that many users don’t often have installed.

7. Updating Too Little (Or Too Much)

Again, The Goldilocks Zone is where you should reside (so far it’s been good enough for our planet). You need to be on a consistent publishing schedule.

If there are long gaps between posts your readers may take your blog too lightly if they check on a regular basis looking for new interesting posts. Conversely, if you update too much with content that is sub-par and just filler, your readers will question the worthiness of your blog and it will come off more like spam.

8. Wrong Date in the Footer

Is your blog stuck in 2009?

Not updating the year in the footer of your post signals to visitors that no one’s maintaining the site.  This is an easy mistake many bloggers overlook; you probably remembered to change this the first year you had your site, but may have forgotten to update it in quite a while (it may even have been years ago…).

Add this code into your footer’s copyright statement where you want the year to appear, and it will automatically update the year every January 1:

<?php echo date(“Y”); ?>

9. Using the “Uncategorized” Category

At some point, everyone forgets to choose a category before hitting “publish.”  This not only makes the blogger (and in turn, the blog) look careless, but also hurts your site structure.

Instead, change the “Uncategorized” category to something else, such as “Other” or “General” (and don’t forget to change the slug, too). This will keep your blog looking legit and it will CYA when you do slip up and forget to choose a category.

10. Ignoring Layout

Layout and composition are the fundamentals for aesthetics. If it doesn’t look or feel pleasing to the reader from a design or user experience perspective, they may find the material isn’t worthy and leave. Don’t bombard the users senses and put everything you can design into the layout, instead embrace white or empty space in your composition.

White space allows the eye “breathing” room; it establishes a flow and hierarchy for information to follow. Since you only have a few seconds to impress new readers, it’s critical to make your layout welcoming and professional.

Take some time looking at inspirational design sites like Abduzeedo and Dribble. See how design fundamentals are being used to create a beter user experience through visual hierarchy.

11. Not Responding to Reader Comments

Responding to a comment a human made on your blog shows that you value the community and respect the readers time and input. Conversations build relationships, it’s human nature.

Be open and encourage divergent opinions, just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t always mean that one side is wrong or right. It just means you have different opinions. Not every difference of opinion is a blog troll.

Conclusion

You only have a few seconds to capture a blog visitor’s attention and there are so many factors that make a new reader decide whether or not to stick around. No matter how strong your message is, the above mistakes can get in the way of a good reader experience.

By eliminating distractions, making your posts visually appealing and easy to read, and paying attention to the small details that can hurt your blog’s reputation, you can ensure your readers view your blog as credible and they’ll continue coming back.

What do you think? Tell us, what mistakes can a blog lose credibility?

Businesses of all sizes are beginning to realize how integral a solid content strategy should be to their marketing plans.   Even major corporations like Coca-Cola are betting everything on an integrated content strategy.   In order to illustrate this growth in content marketing, our team created an infographic called “The Content Marketing Explosion.”

Embed This Infographic On Your Site

Copy the embed code below:

<br /> <a href="http://www.blueglass.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/content_marketing_explosion_ig.png" rel="prettyPhoto"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-22962" title="IG-click-here-button-2" src="http://www.blueglass.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IG-click-here-button-2.jpg" alt="" /></a><br /> <small>Created by <a href="http://www.blueglass.com">BlueGlass Interactive</a></small>

But still, a lot of your company’s LinkedIn success depends on how your employees use it. Fortunately, there are simple changes employees can make to their profiles that can immediately improve your company profile. Encouraging employee activity in certain areas of LinkedIn can also help grow your brand on this network.

With a well-informed, active employee base, LinkedIn can be one of the easiest social networks for a company to manage and build a strong presence. Before we walk through the 8 ways employees can enhance your company on LinkedIn, let’s review how employee profiles are aggregated into a company profile…

How Employees Affect Your Company Profile

If someone has listed your company as their current employer, their information is pulled into your company profile. This information can show up in 2 different places throughout your company profile: (a) your company statistics page or (b) in the activity feed on your company profile (this activity also shows up in the main feed of anyone who is following your company).

I’ll use our company profile as an example since we’ve had some recent additions to the team and title changes, so we’re a good  example of the employee activity that shows up here.

Company Statistics

Company statistics can be accessed from your main company profile. Anyone can view these statistics, which include your employees’ education, years of experience, job function, and skill set. If only one person in your company has filled this information out, that one person will be the sole representative of your company make up. In other words, the more employees who fill out their profiles completely, the more accurate reflection of your company.

For example, this is how your employees’ years of experience is displayed (blue= your employees, green= employees at similar companies):

When someone changes their title or leaves the company, this is shown at the bottom of the company statistics page:

And this is how your employees’ skills are displayed:

Activity Feed

The main page of your company profile includes an activity feed that shows your most recent status updates, new employees, title changes, and departures.

For example, when someone joins your company, they appear in the company activity feed at the bottom of your company profile (this also appears in the newsfeed of anyone following your company):

Step-By-Step Guide for Employees on LinkedIn

Below are ways your employees can change their profiles or participate on LinkedIn that can help make your company shine on this network. The best part? You can just forward your team this post and let them do all the work

1. Stop Treating LinkedIn Like a Resume

LinkedIn is a professional social network, but that’s no reason to have a boring profile that is nothing more than a copied and pasted résumé . Personal profiles can be personalized using applications and the summary section can  be more lighthearted than, say, a cover letter.

While listing accomplishments and past job duties show someone’s breadth of experience, a good profile summary isn’t trapped in the past. This is where employees can focus on now, and update their summary continuously to reflect what they’re working on, like current projects, speaking engagements, upcoming events, etc.

What would a potential customer want to know about your employees? Employees should also use their summary to explain how their role at your company benefits the customer experience.

2. Use the Correct Company Name

This needs to be an exact match of your company profile name. For example, on LinkedIn we are “BlueGlass Interactive, Inc.” Anyone who just puts “BlueGlass” is not counted as an employee.

When editing a job description, a dropdown menu will appear with a list of possible company matches. Make sure your employees know which of these they should select.

3. Fill Out the Important Stuff

The most important sections your employees should fill out are the parts that are pulled into your company statistics, which are:

• Job Functions are lumped into four broad categories: research & development,  sales & marketing, general & administrative, and executive leadership. This is determined by a user’s job title, so it’s important these are accurate and not misspelled.
• Education is reflected in the company statistics based on degrees obtained and universities attended.
• Years of experience are the total number of years of all of the jobs listed on an employee’s profile.
• Skills are hyperlinks that can be added to profiles (more detail below).

4. Add Skills & Expertise

A newer feature to LinkedIn is called Skills & Expertise. A user’s chosen skills will appear as hyperlinks in their profile and also get pulled into the company statistics. Clicking on the skills in someone’s profile pulls up a list of influencers with that skill, along with related skills and companies.

To add skills, you can search for a skill, then click Add Skill. Keep in mind your employees’ skills show up not just in your company statistics, but if enough of your employees have a certain skill, your company will show up in the related companies under that skill.

Once skills have been added to a profile, more can be added and removed by  going to Profile > Edit Profile, scrolling to the skills section and then choosing to add a skill or edit to remove a skill.

5. Include Customized Links

Up to 3 links can be added to a profile, but it’s not widely known that the titles of these links can be customized. For example, instead of using the default “My Company Website” to link to your site, employees can actually put your company name. The ability to customize this text is a  plus not just for the sake of appearance, but also for SEO.

These links appear in the top section of a profile:

Links can be customized by going to Profile>Edit Profile, then scroll down to Websites and click Edit.

Select Other from the Websites dropdown menu and you can then add in custom text and the accompanying links.

6. Share Your Content

LinkedIn Today is a news aggregator that features the most popular links being shared on LinkedIn.  When someone signs into LinkedIn, they see the most-shared articles from other people in their profession. Users can also create a highly customized LinkedIn social news aggregator, which will show top headlines from any industries or sources the user follows.

For example, here are marketing headlines that appear on my home page:

In a nutshell, by sharing your content on LinkedIn your employees can help increase your number of shares and potentially catapult your articles to the top headlines. How content ends up in the top headlines is best explained in this guide about the algorithm used on LinkedIn Today.

7. Update Your Company Status

Company updates show up not only in a company’s activity feed, but also in the newsfeed of anyone following the company, right alongside updates from individuals.

Updating a company status isn’t limited to the profile admin, you can handpick any employees to be admins and have access to posting updates. You can even allow anyone with a company email address to post updates to your company profile (I do wonder if any company allows this).

Whether you don’t have the resources for one person to man your LinkedIn company profile or you want several voices representing the brand, making this a collaborative effort among a few employees can  increase the frequency and diversity of your company updates. For example, letting team members from several different departments post updates can help give a better overall picture of your company.

You can add other employees for company updates by going to Admin Tools > Edit. After selecting Designated users only, type in the names of anyone you want to be allowed to update the page under Manage Admins.

8. Participate on LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers is a place for users to ask questions and receive assistance from industry professionals. Different industry categories are given their own Answers pages which include the questions, experts, and related categories.

For example, here’s the Graphic Design Answers page:

As you’ll notice, there are Graphic Design “Experts” listed on the page. So, how does one become an expert?

Whoever asks a question can later select the “best answer” to their question. By acquiring a lot of “best answers,” a user can be featured as a subject matter expert. The 5 top experts for a given topic are featured on that category’s main page.

Encouraging your employees to become active on LinkedIn Answers is a no-brainer: if you’re trying to gain visibility in an industry, it would certainly look good to have your employees appearing as experts in the answers sections of all your industry’s topics. Additionally, users can display their expert categories in their profile.

Instead of constantly revisiting an Answers page, it’s easy to keep track of new questions by subscribing to the RSS feed for a given topic (located in the bottom right of the topic page).

Conclusion

Since a company profile is directly impacted by how employees are represented and act on LinkedIn, it’s crucial to educate employees on how to make the most out of LinkedIn if you plan on growing a strong presence on this network. The good news is, most employee activity can actually benefit your company and brand. The trick is getting your team to dust off their profiles and start particpating more. Using the 8 tips above, employees can make a huge difference in how your business is perceived on LinkedIn.

How do your employees participate on LinkedIn? Have you seen success with any of the above tips? 

P.S. Follow us on LinkedIn  for our company news and LinkedIn Today to keep up with our blog!

Reddit is a powerhouse, and has managed to maintain and build on its identity even with such massive growth.   For many reasons it represents a new evolution we’ve yet to see in other online communities. What follows is an overview of just what makes this site so remarkable.

Consider, as you read on,  the potential of Reddit and sites similar to it that aggregate and organize the content of the Internet to become more than just places to be entertained or to learn. The reality is that Reddit is beginning to shape and influence the world in ways that are only now becoming apparent, bringing a higher order of organization to content online, and allowing for an evolution in the potential of collaboration.

So, without further ado, here are our top 19 reasons why Reddit is so unbelievably awesome.

1. Being on Reddit is like sitting in a group discussion of thousands of moderately intelligent people, interested in the topic at hand.

The users with the best input have the loudest voices and take turns while not speaking over each other. This is the result of the voting based comment system that floats the most voted for comments to the top of the thread. Many front page submissions regularly have more than 1,000 comments with some submissions reaching over 9,000 comments (yes, really). Like this submission which asked, “What stupid question have you always been too embarrassed to ask, but would like answered?”

Questions range from the silly, (What is on the other side of a belly button?) to fascinating, (Is there anything resembling rhyming in American Sign Language?) to incredibly puzzling (What do you see when you look through a one-way mirror directly towards a regular mirror in a naturally lit room made of mirrors?).

2. Reddit is a magnifying glass of the Internet.

Reddit is arguably the largest social news aggregator.  Without Reddit,  countless great sites, blogs, articles, journals, videos, images and other pieces of online content would go unnoticed and unshared, lost in obscurity and never given the ability to be seen by tens of thousands.  Reddit enables the individual, and gives literally anyone who has something interesting enough to say the ability to reach millions.

While the same could be said for news aggregators like Digg, Mixx, and countless other clones, what sets Reddit apart is its size.  With millions of active users who submit thousands of pieces of new content each day, there is no place like Reddit for finding the newest and most interesting stuff online.  The title of Reddit’s home page is “the front page of the Internet,” a title many would argue it has decisively earned.

3. Reddit allows for intense and evolving communities of special interests.

Reddit has amongst its ranks some of the most active niche communities available online. The size of some subReddits rivals or exceeds the size of the largest mainstream forums and groups about the same topic, making these subReddits the largest gathering places on the Internet for many topics.

Many of the following are among the most active places online for their given topic:

1. (Atheism Topics) Atheism – 453,000+ members
2. (Marijuana Topics) Trees – 180,000+ members
3. (Fitness Topics) Fitness – 120,000+ members
4. (Female Centric Topics) TwoXchromosomes - 71,000+ members
5. (Mens Fashion Topics) MaleFashionAdvice - 67,000+ members
6. (Dubstep Music Topics) Dubstep 40,000+ members
7. (LGBT Issues Topics) LGBT 36,000+ members
8. (OWS Topics) occupywallstreet – 30,000+ members
9. (My Little Pony Cartoon Topics) mylittlepony 19,000+ members

4. Reddit is highly collaborative and easily spawns or expands collaborative efforts.

Group projects, concepts, and ideas can grow and be possible through the cooperation of like-minded people.

One example of how Reddit does this exceptionally well is RedditGifts.com – an initiative spawned on Reddit that has become the largest ever gift exchange program. This last year more than 39,000 Redditors exchanged gifts with each other. In total,  $1,073,939.88 in gifts were exchanged with an average gift price of $25.68.

Another great example was when the Reddit community collaborated to influence an online poll being used by Greenpeace to name a whale that was part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition, an initiative to raise awareness about whales threatened by the Japanese Fisheries Agency. The whale’s name was to be chosen in an online poll with the name with the highest number of votes being chosen. The selection of names were a mix of meaningful unique words like Anahi and Kaimana, with an extra silly name put into the mix as an afterthought. The name: Mister Splashy Pants.

The poll was made known to the Reddit community, and from there Reddit took charge. They easily influenced the poll, and Mister Splashy Pants won by a solid margin.

5. Reddit Helps Determine The News Cycle.

It is quite clear that reporters, journalists, and editors in local, regional, national, and even international regularly read Reddit. It is no coincidence that that stellar story seen on Reddit this morning was featured on Rachel Maddow that same evening.

Some examples of how journalists use and recommend Reddit:

1. Reddit a Fire Hose of Internet Ideas
2. Use Reddit to Find Story Ideas
3. How Reddit Controls the Internet News Cycle

6. Reddit is the ultimate investigator.

The term “Human Flesh Search” is the term used when a large group of individuals collaborate on digging up information on one specific topic or person.  Through the power of a common goal and crowd-sourced effort, some absolutely incredible feats of detective work can happen. Reddit has proven itself to be among the most powerful “human flesh search” engines that has ever existed.

Just a few examples include:

1. Reddit users tracking down the birth family of an adopted Redditor
2. Reddit uncovers a long lost childhood mystery
3. Reddit helps find incredibly obscure video
4. Redditors find individual responsible for Wikileaks DDOS

7. Reddit is a meme maker and trend setter.

A meme is defined as:

“An element of a culture or behavior that may be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.”

On Reddit, original content that resonates and lends itself to imitation is created all the time,  in large quantities. Because of this, Reddit has become the birthplace to many new memes, some of which have gone on to reach near mainstream recognition.

Examples of memes started by Reddit:

1. Troll Quotes
2. Cuil Theory
3. If you watch x backwards, it’s about y
4. Birthday Dog
5. Anti-Zombie Fortress
6. I’m with Coco
7. Zach Anner
8. Waffles? Don’t you mean Carrots?
9. Bearsharktopus
10. Keanu Reeves
11. Inglip

8. Reddit is a life saver (literally).

One of the most impressive sub-Reddits is the community at r/suicidewatch. These selfless people are there to talk to those who feel they have nothing left to live for. The community is certainly responsible for saving lives, though it is uncertain how many.

With nearly 9,000 subscribers, this community is arguably one of the largest groups in the world dedicated to suicide prevention. It is most certainly the largest 100% unfunded, 100% volunteer suicide prevention group in existence.

Here is the story of one Redditor, who planned to die and was saved by r/suicidewatch in the most dire moment.

9. Reddit is an idea engine, giving birth to new ideas constantly.

Reddit is a naming machine, and its users know it.  Although the Reddit community is often astutely aware when they’re being used for crowd-sourcing, nobody seems to mind helping people come up with names for things.  Reddit has helped people name everything from pets, to bands, to even kebab shops.   Reddit is especially good at quips and puns, as evidenced by a thread about Naming a Bar.

Another good example of Reddit’s penchant for creating and sorting ideas, you’ll find it in their treatment of inventions.  If you’ve ever had an idea for the next “great invention,” you’re not alone.  Redditors have waxed eloquent a number of times about their invention ideas that would change the world.  To be fair, Redditors are also pretty honest about the practicality of their ideas as well.  As evidenced by this thread discussing the phenomenon of invention ideas that seemed great at first glance, but quickly fell apart under scrutiny.

10. Reddit includes experts from nearly all fields, vocations, talents, and specialties. Many of whom share their inside knowledge freely.

Though the exact number hasn’t been released, there are undoubtedly several million active Reddit users contributing to the more than roughly 20 million daily page views. Among these users are a sizable number of very noteworthy Redditors. Some are highly-trained experts, well respected intellectuals, actors, celebrities, sports stars and many more.

Just a few of the known Reddit celebrity accounts can be found below:

1. Louis CK
2. Wil Wheaton
3. Ken Jennings
4. Felicia Day
5. Zach Braff
6. Neil deGrasse Tyson
7. Don Lemon
8. Joe Rogan
9. Jimmy Kimmel
10. Steve Vai
11. Stephen Colbert
12. Scientists and engineers at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory

11. Reddit allows for in-depth discussion over topics that otherwise would never ever be talked about in a group way.

In many ways Reddit can be like hanging out with a bunch of friends. While this often leads to long threads on the pointless and inane, sometimes it yields really interesting discussions over topics that many have contemplated, but never discussed in a public forum.

Here are a few examples enabled by Reddit:

1. Cuil Theory
2. The Merits of Sitting or Standing

If you’ve never experienced the joy of a “group joke” where everyone contributes to an ever-increasingly absurd list of pun’s, you’re missing out.   Reddit is famous for pun threads, and they tend to emerge in the most unexpected places.  One great example of this happening can be found here.

12. Reddit provides an unparalleled opportunity for research into sociology, groupthink, hivemind, memology, and self-selected groups.

Because of the ability of Reddit to form large groups of like-minded individuals in subReddits, an opportunity for studying these groups has been created.  For regular readers, it becomes obvious that the “personality” of different subReddits is not the same across the board. Some subReddits become known for certain types of behaviors or attitudes. Although there haven’t been any academic studies of these communities, members often take the time to set up surveys to quantify themselves, often with very interesting results.

One example was a demographic survey done in r/fittit, the most popular fitness based subReddit.   One interesting takeaway from the survey is that 50% of the community is single.

Another, more specific example can be found in the subReddit for transgender people r/asktransgender. Members of this community set up a survey themselves to document their demographic and psychographic profiles. The result of which were then compiled into an infographic report based on a on a large sample of transgender individual that provides very interesting insights into this niche community.  One interesting takeaway is that of those surveyed, 14% consider themselves “heterosexual” meaning they are attracted exclusively to the gender opposite to the one they identify with.

13. Reddit is a virtual confessional. It prompts people to tell their secrets.

On Reddit, you can be 100% anonymous if you desire. At the same time, if you have an interesting story to tell, you can get a great deal of exposure. This has led to Reddit being used as a sort of confessional: a place where deep secrets can be told to a larger audience.  The r/ama subReddit has been home to many confessions including the following stunners:

1. 9,000+ people telling their darkest secret desires
2. Several admitted psychopaths
3. A military whistleblower
4. Redditors who have killed somebody

14. Reddit is like always having the wittiest, funniest people in the room.

Collective intelligence determines the best comments and they rise to the top of all threads.  Because of the way Reddit is set up, comments can become content that is voted on and recognized on its own merit. In many instances, user comments have become some of the most talked about and engaging pieces of content on Reddit.

A great example of this is a response that was posted in response to the askReddit question:  “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?”   User Prufrock451 posted a response in the form of a short story.  The community liked the story so much, it resulted in Prufrock (real name James Erwin) continuing with the story and beginning a subReddit dedicated to the expansion of the idea. The subReddit currently has more than 8,800 people subscribed. Even more spectacular, management at Warner Brothers took notice of the short story (likely because someone internal is a Redditor) and the massive interest it garnered on Reddit and bought the rights to make it into a film.

15. Reddit can celebrate individual victory or achievement in a BIG way.

When someone accomplishes something great, getting accolades or getting noticed beyond your friends can be hard. On Reddit, when someone does something spectacular, it is often recognized in a big way.

One great example can be found in a post on a man who built a scanning electron microscope from scratch.  Reddit’s reaction can be seen here.  Another example is a great demonstration of how kind-hearted the Reddit community can be (if their love for dogs and kitties didn’t already make this clear).  Redditors are some of the first to applaud those who are kind to others.

16. Reddit can be a source of power and revolution for the people.

17. Reddit encourages interaction in a completely unique way

One of the unique aspects of the Reddit community is the idea of “karma.”  Karma is a system of points that are given or taken away from users based on how much the community likes or dislikes the content they submit or the comments they make. Although “karma” is worthless in a monetary sense, it has a social value for Redditors. The more karma a user has, the higher regard or esteem they are generally shown within the community. Gaining high levels of karma has become important to many Redditors and is an incentive for participation.

Karma is a really interesting case study in “social currency” and has clearly demonstrated that non-monetary incentives can indeed spur real community growth.

In addition to encouraging participation, karma also influences the behavior of Redditors. By having something to gain or lose through their interaction, Redditors monitor and modify their behavior in ways similar to how they might in real life. Instead of dealing with social ramifications for bad behavior, on Reddit, they deal with consequences of karma.

This system of social accountability is somewhat unique online, and Reddit is certainly a great example of how this sort of system can help sculpt the behavior of an online community.

18. Reddit is perhaps the best existing example of an entirely Internet based culture.

Large enough to have created an ethos that transcends single topic areas, this is different than forums or other communities because the constituents of the group aren’t bound by anything extremely specific.

As mentioned, there are individual subcultures that exist in subReddits, but Reddit users have a specific ethos that is more or less true of the large majority of Redditors. There is such consistency between users opinions on topics that Reddit can generally be characterized as having taken on specific positions on controversial issues.

Briefly, on a whole, Redditors are generally:

1. Anti Religion, many Atheists
2. Pro LGBT rights
3. Pro Marijuana Legalization
4. Supports Occupy Wallstreet
5. Supports Wikileaks
6. Loves Technology/Gadgets
7. Pro Education Reform
8. Pro Church/State Separation
9. Anti SOPA & Protect IP, Anti RIAA
10. Pro Geek Culture

The Reddit zeitgiest can be so consistent and homogenous that it has become the subject of some amount of lampooning. EncyclopediaDramatica has done a particularly scathing and funny (though often times true) review of Redditors.

19. Reddit is kind and generous.

Reddit has done literally hundreds of good deeds. Some of them small, some of them very large. Here are links to some  “good deeds” big and small:

1. One Redditor Finds Another’s Long-Lost Art
2. Reddit Community Saves Small Business
3. Reddit Buys Young Woman A Hearing Aid
4. Reddit Helps Make Dream Come True for Dying Man
5. Reddit Correctly Diagnoses Fellow Redditor’s Cause of Severe Depression, Saves Her Life
6. Reddit Brings Family Music Heirloom to Life
7. Reddit Helps Pay For Member’s Mother’s Funeral Costs
8. Redditors Give Girl with Huntington’s Disease Given Shopping Spree
9. Reddit Community Donates Over $185,000 to Haiti Relief

Conclusion

While the future of Reddit remains unknown, its example has clearly shown the benefits of crowdsourced content curation. The Internet has a tremendous amount to offer in terms of sheer content, but the value of that offering is multiplied exponentially when that content is organized and rendered by a motivated and thoughtful crowd. In the future, we will likely see many permutations of the system pioneered by Reddit, likely with great benefit to us all.

For the reasons outlined above, and undoubtedly countless more, we would argue that Reddit is indeed the most influential site online.  What do you think?

BlueGlass LA & Raven Tools

One thing I’ve learned about event sponsorship is that companies tend to plan out their marketing budgets far in advance — which really did not sync with our conference planning of old. So when I talked to the good folks at Raven Tools last fall and presented an experiential conference sponsorship to them, the stars aligned and a partnership was born. Note: At BlueGlass we use Raven internally and absolutely love the way that data, tools and reporting are all under the same hood.

Raven Tools has signed on to be the premier sponsor of BlueGlass LA 2012 and will be representing in full force at the show with amazing demos and previews, conference signage, bar and party sponsorships, and a mid-afternoon surprise for all attendees. Raven has been a long supporter of our conference series and they are a company we feel that we have always paralleled in the pursuit of giving excellent service and ongoing innovation to their client base.

Synergy in Marketing Visions

If you have noticed, our conferences are not heavy in one discipline of online marketing. At BlueGlass we endorse the sustainable convergence of SEO, social media and content marketing. And this lineup for BlueGlass LA mirrors our ideology. Raven Tools is also not limiting itself to just an SEO or Social Media tool — it’s a toolset of multiple options, perfect for today’s climate.

At BlueGlass conferences, we cherish the involvement and participation of our audience as much as we do our presenters (and we’re pretty picky about sponsors and have turned some down) — but bringing on Raven Tools in this sponsorship role will help us make that experience all the better for our participants; helping with the open bar and making sure each and every small detail is covered to make this the best experience imaginable for every one involved.

I’d like to take the time to thank Brannan, Jon and the team at Raven Tools! If your company is interested in sponsoring BlueGlass LA (we only have one spot left!) please feel free to drop me a line at lbaker@blueglass.com and if you haven’t registered; do it today!

Your visitors have a silent voice but luckily you can tap the power of analytics to uncover that voice. Knowing what and where to look gives you the opportunity to follow your visitors as they navigate your site. By taking the journey with them, you can actually find the main issues plaguing your site. Your visitors are telling you what is wrong; all you have to do is listen.

Using engagement metrics, you’ll be able to answer the following:

• Does your website convey a reputation of trust?
• Do you have visitors that find your content appealing and shareable ?
• Do people spend time on your site, or do they visit a single page and leave?

In this post I’ll explain some basic engagement metrics and then show examples of these metrics on two different sites (one good, one not-so-good).

There are so many factors that go into a site’s engagement that it’s impossible for anyone to give a standard set of engagement metrics for which all sites should strive to reach. Every niche is different. Every website is different. Every transaction requires a different set of steps towards conversion. Trying to reach an arbitrary standard metric would be of no benefit to your site.

With that said, there are some very simple metrics that you can define within your own business, that can help you determine if your website is engaging to the user, and to uncover any issues your visitors are having with your site.

1.  Frequency of New and Returning Visitors

One metric nearly all sites have in common is whether your new visitors are becoming returning visitors. We want visitors to be loyal to our sites. The frequency in which people return, however, is not standard across all sites.

For a site that sells brake pads, that site would not need to see a high number of returning visitors in a short period of time. Let’s assume that brake pads last 30,000 to 70,000 miles. Positive engagement factors for number of visits by a returning customer for this site could be 4 or 5 visits per thirty days. In fact, this site might see 4 to 5 visits per year per visitor as a positive engagement factor.

On a celebrity news site that updates multiple times a day, that site would want to see a higher number of visits from returning customers within a very short period of time. Positive frequency metrics would be a large amount of returning traffic one to two days. Within a month’s time, this site would want to see visitors returning to the site 30- 100+ times. This would indicate that the visitor is well engaged with the site and its content.

A sign that a site of this type is not engaging its visitors would be a high percentage of return visits in the 2- 10 time range within a month’s time.

Define your Target Frequency Metrics by identifying the following:

• How long is the buying cycle?
• How often is the site updated?

How to Measure Returning Visitors

We start with the “Frequency and Recency” feature in Google analytics. This feature allows us to take a look into how often a user visits the site and when they last visited.

Count of Visits

The tab that has the most benefit within this feature is “Count of Visits.”  This tab gives us insight into the number of times a visitor returns to the site.

Site #1

The first column gives us the number of visits that a visitor has made to the site within the timeframe selected.  In the above example, 75% of the visitors to the site returned back to the site 9 – 200+ times.

The site in this example has a very high engagement with its audience. The visitors to this site are so engaged with the content, that they can’t visit just one page. They are interested in the site as a whole.

Site #2

The next screenshot paints a different picture. This is from a site that was hit hard by Panda:

The difference in the number of returning visits is amazing. The second website tells us that visitors are not finding the site useful. In fact, users are not even trying to find the information they are looking for on the 2nd site. We will analyze that as we get deeper into the analytics of the two sites.

This site has serious issues and we need to find the key issues plaguing the site and develop a strategy to fix them. This metric alone can’t tell us the problem, so we’ll need to go deeper.

2. Time a Visitor Stays on the Site

The amount of time a visitor spends on the site is another key engagement metric that can tell you a lot about the health of your website from a visitor’s perspective. With no set standard for how long a visitor should stay on a website, it ‘s important for you to define the appropriate amount of time a visitor spends on the site.

Visitors to a blog in the investment niche would spend more time on the site than visitors to a yellow page directory. For the yellow page directory, a visit duration of 30-60 seconds could be a positive engagement factor, where the investment blog would want visitors to read and digest its in-depth analysis of the industry. A low visitor duration would be an indication that visitors were simply not engaged with the content supplied by the blog.

Define your Target Visit Duration by:

• Amount of content on the site
• Length of content on the site
• Complexity of the niche
• # of steps in the conversion process, especially for ecommerce

To further complicate this metric, if the visit duration is too high, this could be a bad sign. It could be a sign that visitors are having a hard time finding what they are looking for. This is especially true of ecommerce sites.

If your site has a high visit duration and you are concerned about it, look at the number of page views associated with the high duration ranges. If there seems to be a large percentage of page views in relation to a high visit duration, you might need to look into the architecture of your site. Again, this is a site-by-site issue. Some sites SHOULD have a high page view percentage with the higher visit durations.

How to Measure Visit Duration

The “Engagement” metric will give us insight into how much time people are spending on the site and how many pages they are viewing.

Visit Duration

This tab gives us valuable insight into how much time visitors stay on the site:

This metric is of particular interest to me and I like to go a little deeper into these stats. Using Advance Segments, I select New Users, Returning Users and Search Traffic.

With these three options checked, I can segment the visitors to get a better feel for how different user types interact with the site.

Site #1

From this screenshot, I can see that all three segments of searchers spend a good deal of time on the site. The majority of visitors to the site spend one minute to over thirty minutes on the site.

Site #2

Again, let’s compare this to the site that was hit by Panda:

The vast majority of users to the second site spend less than thirty seconds on the site. There is really no comparison between the engagement metrics between the two sites. So far, the site hit by Panda has serious engagement issues.

We now know that users to the first site enjoy the content so much that they come back multiple times, and they spend a lot of time on the site devouring the content. As for the second site, not only do people not revisit the site, they do not spend any time on the site.

We still need to find the problem with the second site. We have some useful metrics, but they haven’t led us to the direct cause of the problem. So, we need to continue on our path to finding the problem with this site.

3.  Page Depth

The number of pages a visitor is visiting per session is also an engagement factor worth considering. How many pages are your visitors viewing when they come to your site? Are they coming to your site to read one piece of content, then exit the site? Are you running a forum and people are coming to the site once a day, viewing the unread posts for that day?

This is by far the most difficult metric to define because there are too many variables that go into deciding what an engaging page depth looks like.  If you are running an affiliate site, you do not want visitors viewing too many pages. Your goal is to get the visitor to click the link to the offer. If you run an information site, you want people to view multiple pages to gain their trust and give them a reason to become a loyal visitor to the site.

Define your Target Page Depth by:

• Amount of steps in the conversion process
• Type of website (ecommerce, information portal, blog, news, etc.)
• Type of desired visitor action (click an advertisement, buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, etc.)
• Attention span of demographic
• Size of website

Understanding the target engagement factors you desire for your site will allow you to create goals and benchmarks to measure success or failure in create engaging content. Once the targets are identified, the next step is creating timeframe buckets for proper measurement.

Look at your engagement factors for one-month, three-month, six-month and twelve-month intervals. Only looking at one time period will skew your results.

How to Measure Page Depth

The next tab worth exploring under Engagement is “Page Depth.” This tab will tell us how many pages visitors to our site are viewing.

Site #1

These stats do not look as good as the other stats for this site, so far. That is because this metric is spread out over 20 pages. As an example, 26.80% of new users visited one page on the site. That looks like a high percentage, and it looks like most people only look at one page. However, that is not the case. In fact, it tells us that 73% of the users view two or more pages on the site.

Here is the screenshot of 20 pages viewed:

10% of search traffic and 10% of new visitors visit 20+ pages on the site. That accounts for 32-43% of the total pageviews for those two segments. Even though we are using this site as a reference, I still think it is important to look into the lower number of returning customers viewing 20+ pages.

Site #2

Let’s take a look at our Panda site and see how many pages people visit on that site:

Whereas the first site had 13%-24% of the visitors only viewing one page on the site, the second site has 65%-72% of its visitors viewing one page. The first site doesn’t look so bad now, does it?

Around 90% of the second site’s traffic visits three pages or less. This gets us closer to finding the issue with the site. With 70% of the visitors only visiting one page, we can assess that the problem is with the landing page itself, not the site as a whole. We need to find out what page is causing the problem with this site so we can address that page.

Since we used human behavior to get us to this point, we should continue to be consistent and let the visitor tell us what the problem is. They have been telling us something through this journey, and we are now ready to listen.

4. Visitor Flow

We continue our investigation into a feature of analytics called the “Visitor Flow.” If the previous engagement metrics lead to the discovery of an issue, as with the one site in our study, looking into the visualization of the visitor flow should be the next step. Usually, this is where I am able to tie all the engagement factors together and find the issue.

The first thing I do is get a top level view by limiting the Country to the United States.

Once that is done, I get a nice overview of the pages in which people enter my site, along with where they go after they land on my site. I also get an overview of how many people dropped off the site and did not continue deeper into the site.

Site #1

Using the first site as a base for a good visitor flow, we see the following:

From the visitor flow, I can see that people entered the site via 503 pages. I can then see their flow through the site. If you remember from the earlier data we gathered, visitors to this site visit multiple pages. This can be seen here in the visitor flow.

The site started out with 22.7K visitors, and by the 3rd interaction the site still had 13.5K visitors. So, around 60% of this site’s visitors continued on after the 3rd interaction.

The red boxes in the corner of the grey page blocks give us insight into how many people dropped off from that page.

We know that 86.5% of all traffic to the main entrance page continues through to another page on the site.

Site #2

Let’s compare this to our problem site and see what this metric tells us:

First thing that stands out is the main landing page for the second site. It gets a large percent of the search traffic. The next thing to notice is how many people continue on to the 3rd interaction. Only 8% of the visitors make it to three interactions with the site. Our first site had 60% continuing through to the third interaction.

What interests me is the 1st and 2nd interactions. First, only 48% of the visitors make it to the 1st interaction. Second, there is one main page that gets a large portion of the visits from the 2nd interaction.

This is what stands out to me, which you can’t see because I had to blur the page names.

The top starting page and top 1st interaction page are the same page. People are either landing on that page, or navigating to that page after landing on the site.

Look at the number of drop offs on these two pages:

This page has a 91.4% drop off rate as a starting page, and a 76.9% drop off rate as a 1st interaction page. The visitors to the site have just told me where my problem lies.

I now know that I have one main problem on this site. The issue with the site is this one single page. Visitors are getting to the site, but they are not able to navigate to the pages with the information they need, so they drop off, and they drop off quick.

Remember, the majority of visitors to this site spend less than thirty seconds on the site. So, they do not even try to find what they are looking for.

As a site owner, I now know that my site is hurting because my visitors are having trouble with my main landing page. I can now develop a strategy to fix the issue.

Conclusion

Engaging users with content is important for SEO, but more importantly, the way visitors interact with the site can alert you to issues within your site. Using these metrics, let your visitors give you insight into how they really feel about your site.

Find out where your site fails the visitor, then create a strategy to address their issues. Continue to watch the engagement metrics every thirty days after you address the issues. You will find that as you fix the problems, visitors will go deeper and stay on the site longer. As they go deeper and/or spend more time on the site, you will then uncover other engagement issues.

Don’t forget: every time you successfully address and fix a problem that is causing your site to lose visitors, you are creating a  more optimal climate for your visitors to engage with your content.

I’ve known the owners of Voltier Digital for over 4  years, and have worked with them on a large variety of projects.   Since they began in 2007, I’ve been impressed by their knack for staying on top of trends – especially trends in viral and content marketing.  We became friends through our shared passion for social media and its power to help good, unique content spread, attract links and ultimately increase a company’s bottom-line.

We’re also driven by a common goal; to provide services of value that demonstrate real, clear results.   I believe it is this shared vision that makes this acquisition such a good fit.

It was important for me to make sure that the rest of BlueGlass felt the same way. We have had a lengthy courtship with Voltier that involved lots of trips to Tampa, tons of meetings with all of the teams and even the founders attending our holiday party in December (now we can finally post some of the pictures that they were in!). I wanted to make sure that they didn’t just fit in on a strategic level but also on a personal level. I needed buy-in from everyone and we got it.

The team at Voltier Digital demonstrates not only a deep understanding of how great content can be utilized as part of an integrated marketing strategy, but also a wealth of innovative new ideas and resources that can help to strengthen the BlueGlass team and our offering.   BlueGlass has had a strong content marketing offering, delivering consistent results for clients, but we need to be exceptional. We believe that the integration of the Voltier team, their IP  and their processes make us exceptional.

Check out a few Infographic examples below.  You can find more here

BlueGlass can now look forward to executing new content marketing strategies that are on the absolute bleeding edge.   Our offering focuses on bringing additional value to the popular infographic medium, as well as new executions that take advantage of the capabilities of modern browsers.   Motion Graphics, Kinetic Typography, Interactive Infographics, and variety of experimental content types that take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 and other burgeoning web technologies will help to insure BlueGlass remains a leader in the space.

Over the years, Voltier Digital has created content for dozens of clients including eBay, CEO.com, Fanhattan, WellHome, COLOURlovers.com, Greatist.com, and more.  This content has been featured on a huge variety of the web’s top publishing destinations,  as well as some of the most popular blogs.  Websites like Mashable, TheNextWeb, TreeHugger, GigaOm, SocialTimes, ReadWriteWeb, and SingularityHub, among others, are frequent publishers of the content  Voltier Digital creates, generating exposure for clients that is hard to achieve elsewhere.   Voltier’s unique and highly viral infographics have also been featured in countless popular niche blogs and websites that drive traffic, generate links, and encourage social mentions and interaction for clients.

Now more than ever, it’s become clear that high quality content is absolutely essential to launching an effective and truly viral marketing campaign.  Companies that can create content with substance stand to gain a great deal.  Companies who can further innovate and create not only great content but also explore new content mediums will win the day.  The acquisition of Voltier Digital signifies our faith in the importance of highly original content as a fuel for delivering results. So, on behalf of the rest of the BlueGlass team, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Voltier Digital.  Stay tuned, there’s much more to come….

Learn more about what this means here or check out some of their work here. Want to find out what we can do for you? Let us know here.

Why? Images not only add substance and visual interest to a piece, but they also increase sharability and draw readers’ attention to different parts of the article (which is especially important nowadays when skimming is so prevalent).

But even if you’re ready to go on the photo hunt, where do you start? Do you pay for a stock photo subscription, or do you track down free images that are available for commercial use? Even when you make this choice, which sites do you use?

All of these factors can add up to one big headache, but with this guide, you’ll know all the ins and outs of content marketing photo usage.

1. Photo Use Glossary
2. Attribution Guide
3. Photo Resources
4. What to Watch Out For

Copyright: Merriam-Webster says copyright is the legal right to sell, distribute, publish, or reproduce something (like images). Just because something isn’t registered with The Copyright Office doesn’t mean it’s unprotected. In fact, once a work is created, it’s copyrighted. (However, people who register works usually do so in order to bring a lawsuit if copyright is infringed.) Please note: You have to be especially careful not to infringe on copyright. If you use an image that’s copyrighted, and your usage isn’t exempt under the law, you can be sued for actual damages or even statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringement.

Creative Commons: Other than being the savior for all content producers, it allows authors to choose another setting other than “all rights reserved” through the use of their copyright licenses. Creative Commons’ mission is to foster creativity and digital sharing within the online realm. It provides a search tool so you can find content and images designated as free to use under certain conditions (depending on the chosen CC license).

Fair use: This concept gets tricky, but basically, some work can be used and manipulated if it’s done for certain purposes, like teaching, comment, criticism, and other reasons. (You can read the explanation here.) Commercial use generally isn’t a great case for fair use, so to be safe, disregard this as a reason to use a photo. (If you disregard my advice to disregard using a potential fair use image, fair use generally means you don’t have to cite the picture.)

Model release: This is generally a document that gives the photographer permission to use a photo and/or sell a photo that includes a person or people. There are different types, but you need to be wary of pictures of people (or even some buildings and other copyrighted or trademarked materials) and whether or not they have commercial releases. According to the New York Institute of Photography, if you’re selling an image for commercial use, a release is necessary.

Public domain: Creative Commons presents a great description of the public domain. Essentially, if someone releases a piece of work as public domain, he or she waives all rights “to the extend allowed by the law.” If you have a public domain picture, you really don’t have to worry much. The only downside to public domain is that it’s sometimes difficult to identify if a picture is truly in the public domain (if it wasn’t designated by the author). Here’s a pretty in-depth breakdown that might help you.

Rights-managed: Unlike royalty-free images, rights-managed stock photos means each use is priced and licensed. Sometimes images with these rights can be offered to you exclusively, which is a benefit that comes with the sacrifice of only being able to use it once unless you want to pay again.

Royalty-free: If you get or purchase a royalty-free stock photo, that means you can use it as many times as you like without having to pay for each use.

Stock photo: People can use stock photography for business purposes or creative purposes instead of taking the pictures themselves, according to Technopedia. This makes stock photography useful for commercial purposes, especially because attribution and model releases generally aren’t a problem. Stock photos usually come with either a rights-managed license or a royalty-free license.

This attribution guide only applies to images that are not eligible for fair use (which doesn’t require attribution) and aren’t stock photos (which usually involves payment and thus doesn’t need to be cited).

CREATIVE COMMONS

If you’re not using a stock photo, proper attribution allows you to credit the original photographer or artist and also increases your transparency as a content producer. Sometimes it’s easy to figure out how to cite a picture, and that’s when there’s a license attached to it.

If it’s all rights reserved, then you’re out of luck. Usually, professional photographers or anything company or brand related will fall into this category, so giving credit won’t help your case. Pull a Beatles and “Let It Be.”

However, there are other licenses that might sound similar, but differ in important albeit small ways. Many of them can be described using Creative Commons licenses, which can be found here.

There are 5 important things to keep in mind when using Creative Commons images:

1.    Every Creative Commons license requires attribution. This means that if you’re not using stock photos, the best way to go is to include a link to the source underneath the picture to its original location.

2.    Every Creative Commons license requires you state the license terms of the work. The easiest way to do that, according to CC, is to simply link to the license page. It’s probably easiest to do this next to your attribution.

3.    Only 2 Creative Commons licenses allow you to use the work commercially. This means that in the realm of content marketing, these are the only licenses that matter. Here is a breakdown of what they are:

            Attribution 3.0 Unported

(Credit: Creative Commons)

This license is your one true nerdy love. It allows you to copy, distribute, transmit, adapt, and make commercial use of the work. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Well, it is.

Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

(Credit: Creative Commons)

This is the stubborn little sister of the first license, and it’s only difference is that it has a share-alike condition attached to it. Basically it just means that if you change the work at all, it still has to be licensed under the original license. Not exactly a deal-breaker, but good to keep in mind.

Note that the pictures above aren’t screen caps of the actual licenses and are actually summaries provided by CC that present the license information in an easy-to-understand way. If you want to view the full license, you’ll have to go here.

4.    Some conditions can be changed if you get express permission from the author. For example, if you ask the author if it’s okay to not include attribution and he or she agrees, this would override the license. Check into each particular license to read the details. (In the summary versions, this information is usually located at the bottom.)

5.   Think before using pictures of people, landmarks, etc. in terms of model releases. Most of the images you come across probably won’t involve model licenses (described in the glossary) if they’re not on stock photo sites. Be careful when selecting images of people, especially ones that are embarrassing or ones you’ll be using in an embarrassing context. If the article is about drugs, failing out of school, or generally being obnoxious, don’t include pictures of real people. To be safe, go with silhouettes or pictures in which the person isn’t identifiable.

OTHER SOURCES

Images that come packaged with Creative Commons licenses make your life easy. But what if you’ve spent 9 hours on Reddit and you come across the most incredible, breathtaking picture of all time that surprisingly isn’t an adorable kitten? What if it would be the perfect fit for a piece of content you’re writing?

This is where things get tricky. Just because something’s out there without a license doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. Like it says in the glossary, things that are created have some degree of inherent copyright attached to it.

So what do you do? Take these steps:

1. Is this the original source? If you found an image on sites like Reddit, Imgur, Facebook, and other sites where users can upload photos, be wary. The same goes for blogs—just because bloggers post images doesn’t mean it’s theirs, and just because they didn’t attribute properly doesn’t mean you can take the image without credit, too: you’ll become liable. So the important thing is to identify if this is the original or a copy.

2. If it’s not, identify the original source and try to find the license. Finding the original source can be like playing a never-ending game of Where’s Waldo, except the image isn’t sporting a red-and-white striped shirt and you’ll get twice the eye strain. To make your search easier, you can look on Google Images to get some clues or use the nifty reverse-image Google search by clicking here:

(Credit: Google Images)

            When you click the camera, this will pop up…

(Credit: Google Images)

            …and you can search by URL or by uploading. This is a fine example of Internet wizardry.

3. If you find the source, but there’s no license to be found, try to contact the photographer/artist. It’ll be common that you don’t stumble upon a license unless the website says “All Rights Reserved” at the bottom or it’s a site dedicated to providing free images. However, if the person who owns the work provides his or her contact information, it doesn’t hurt to request permission to use it commercially. Ask whether attribution is necessary.

4. If you can’t find definite proof that you can use the image, or you can’t find the original source, use another image. Don’t take the risk. There’s probably a similar image out there somewhere, so play detective and go find it!

HOW TO CITE IMAGES

This is actually the easiest part! Most of the time, it’s not 100% clear what the best way to cite a photo is, but a best practice is to include the citation underneath the photo (which is what I do when I write content). Here’s an example:

(Credit: London looks w/CC License)

If you’re citing from a website like Flickr in which the author will have a username, it’s good to include the username to make the attribution more specific. There’s no hard-and-fast rule, so try to do whatever you would appreciate as the owner of a work. Also, when linking to a page, don’t link to the URL that takes you directly to the image only. It’s better to link to the main site you got it from (as long as the picture is there).

Citing underneath the photo like this will allow the author of the picture to find the citation easily and to see that you care about giving them credit. It also lets other content creators like you find the original location of the image so that they can cite the primary source. See how everything comes full-circle?

There are countless websites out there dedicated to providing content creators with quality images, some of which cost money and others that are available for free. The benefit of using paid stock photo websites is that you usually don’t have to worry about model releases or copyright as you’ve already paid for the image. The quality is usually good, as well.

However, they cost money (which is inherently a con, isn’t it?), so free image sites are pretty attractive. The key is to be careful in your site selections and to read all of the fine print. These breakdowns below will help you figure out the difference between sites and narrow down your choices.

PAID STOCK PHOTOS

Dozens of stock photo sites roam the expanse of the Internet, so it would be impossible to explain them all in detail. However, here is a look at some of the main stock photo sites, what kind of licenses they offer, and what kind of payment options they offer.

TIP: When searching through stock photo sites, look to see if it’s been automatically set to a “popular” filter. If it is, change it to a “relevant” filter so that you’re not using the same pictures everyone else is using.

ANOTHER TIP: Stock photo sites often have an “editorial only” tag. See if the site you’re using is one of them, and if an image is labeled as being for editorial use only, that means that commercial use is off-limits.

FREE PHOTOS

Now it’s time for the free options. These sites aren’t as clear-cut, and because of this, don’t quote me on everything in this graph. I did my best to determine what the site offered, but I recommend you do the same if you’re thinking about using the site. (Always, always, always read the terms of use!)

Most of the sites in the graph were posted on this Wikipedia page on free image resources, but because that page is full of sites, I tried to act as a filter, and the chart shows the ones I think might be the most useful.

Please note that in terms of model releases, if there isn’t a checkmark, that doesn’t necessary mean they do provide model releases, but it just means they didn’t say for sure that they don’t.

Also, these three promising websites, http://www.sxc.hu/, http://compfight.com/, and http://www.freestockphotos.biz/, weren’t included because their attribution rules vary. Still check them out, though.

As you can probably already tell by this post, finding images is a tricky business (especially when you’re looking for free pictures). Sometimes another factor can be thrown into the mix that will totally throw you off. Don’t panic! Use your investigative skills to figure out the problem, and don’t use any images if you’re unsure about their rights.

One recent mix-up involves the sudden appearance of a new Getty-related offer below the Creative Commons rights listed on a Flickr picture, as seen below.

(Credit: loop_oh’s Flickr)

What does that even mean? Do you have to request to license it via Getty images, or is it just an option? Seeing a Creative Commons license and the word “Getty” mere centimeters apart is a little disorienting, but instead of just winging it or assuming you can’t use it, always investigate the terms of use or help pages.

In this case, there’s a whole page dedicated to this issue on the Flickr site, were you can find this:

(Credit: Flickr)

Ah, so that tricky little sentence is really for people browsing the images who may want to license the photo instead of just use it once for free and be on their way (while understanding that other people can use this image in the future, too). Crisis averted!

Every time you encounter a situation like this, always look for an explanation. Usually, if you’re confused about something, someone else is probably just as confused and has posted about it. Gotta love the Internet.

Conclusion

This is definitely a lot of information to absorb. Searching for usable images can take a lot out of you, especially when you’ve been researching and writing all day. I’ve found that after some practice, you’ll start to find the best places to locate pictures and you’ll get the hang of the whole process.

Familiarize yourself with the lingo, the best photo sources, and the proper ways to attribute, and you’ll be well on your way to aesthetic success.

*Please note, I am not a lawyer (thanks John Andrews for the IANAL reminder) so if you’re unclear about the specific rights of an image, it’s always best to check with a legal professional or the copyright owner* 

“What’s it like?”

“What makes it different?”

“Why should I go?”

Here’s the best way I can answer those questions….

Want to be part of the next Internet Marketing Experience? Find out more about BlueGlass LA 2012 taking place on April 23rd & 24th in Los Angeles, CA. But act quick, there are less than 50 tickets remaining…

Overall, brands need to:

1. Identify what others are already doing in the space, and how successful they are.
2. Identify areas of opportunity and weaknesses within their specific vertical.
3. Identify what tactics a competitor is using to gain a competitive advantage.

What We’re Doing

We approach competitive research with these fundamental questions:

1. What is their link building strategy?
2. How are they leveraging social media?
3. Identify areas of weakness or opportunity in their strategy (notice whether they’re focusing strictly on their brand, or expanding into other social areas for maximum reach).
4. How all these facets work together: focus on their overall “marketing strategy” rather than segregating them into “search” and “social.”
5. Continuing the stalking with tips and tools.

What We’re NOT Doing

There seems to be this “screw the competitor” mentality out there, which can hurt your brand in the long run. If you’re working on competitive research and looking to improve your brand’s overall visibility, focus on learning everything about the vertical overall, your competitors, and open opportunities to excel.

It’s not worth expending negative energy to try to destroy a competitor when there are tons of holistic and sustainable strategies to compete in most markets. Do not use this as an opportunity to call out negative tactics that a competitor might be using. You want to understand the space and get a foothold where there’s an open opportunity.

Now, we’ll walk through the major components of gathering competitive research. Here are some quick links for referencing each section of this guide:

• Getting Started
• Link Building Strategy
• Social Media Strategy
• Continue Stalking Your Competitors
• Useful Sites & Tools

We’ll go into this guide assuming that keyword research has been completed across all categories of your website and a visibility score has been calculated so you can identify how your brand is performing across the span of keywords that you’ve researched and who your organic competitors are. I emphasize organic because often times brands confuse “brand competitors” with “organic competitors” when many times they’re not one in the same.

A “brand competitor” is dominant in the space and can be considered a competitor by the target demographic, or in online and offline marketing and branding efforts. It’s like saying Boscovs (Ha! Remember that store?) is a competitor to JCPenny’s because that brand might be “like” them, but they aren’t performing well enough to compete in the actual SERPs.

An “organic competitor” is one that’s performing well in the SERPs across either your whole industry space, or across certain categorical areas that you’re focusing on, including keywords that are money phrases or important to bringing traffic and conversions to your site.

Skipping ahead, we’ll assume that you’ve identified your top competitors performing well over your keyword sets as a whole. Competitive research should have some basic goals that can help focus your effort, before you dive in and get bamboozled by all the available data and avenues that you can travel down.

Analyzing Your Competitor’s Backlinks

Internet marketing has tons of different techniques and tactics, each with their own strengths and sustainability. When researching your competitors, backlinks are going to become your best friend. If you have access to a paid backlink tool such as Majestic or Open Site Explorer, I suggest running your competitors through there and extracting their backlinks, top backlinks and anchor text data.

Let’s look at a few areas in here without diving too deep down the rabbit hole.

Top Backlinks

Top backlinks are a quick way to see what kinds of partnerships or relationships your competitors might be building or leveraging that are quality and/or high authority.

When looking at the top pages, make note of what kinds of sites are considered to be “top backlinks.” Are they:

• News sites where they may be distributing press release information?
• Other prominent sites within the industry that they may have a relationship with?
• Are they reaching out to large publications or networks?
• HOW are they obtaining links on these sites? Are they contributing guest posts, or are they sending information through specific editors?

When sifting through their general backlinks:

• Are they contributing to blogs or publications as a guest author?
• Is content marketing a part of their strategy? If so, what types of content are they actually marketing out there?
• Is there an abundance of site-wide or footer links?

Anchor Text

What keywords are important to your competitors? Some brands still live by the “build tons of exact match for the phrase you want and that’s all you need to do to rank number 1” tactic. That’s unfortunate for them, but very fortunate for you when you’re snooping around.

• What exact match phrases are they targeting? Are they targeting them excessively?
• Are they ranking for the exact match phrases that they appear to be targeting? (This can be done with manual searching, or by using a tool such as SEMrush)
• What percentage of those phrases are coupled with branded terms?
• What percentage are strictly branded phrases?

Greg Boser wrote an excellent post on SERP profiling that has some incredible knowledge nuggets to aid in your competitive research.

There are many different tactics for building links and it’s important to identify what your competitors are and are not doing.

• Do they have a press release strategy?
• Can you find any links that look “paid”?
• Are they submitting their site to directories?
• Are they utilizing blogger outreach and content marketing?
• Are they building partnerships or sponsoring events with universities or schools that might contribute to .edu links in their backlink portfolio?

If you’re new to digging through data dumps, there are quite a few ways to make it sexy so it’s not such an eyesore, and you can find exactly what it is you’re looking for. If you set up your data into a table, you can segment the URL column and start sorting.

Press Releases

A press release strategy is an old, but still common, strategy amongst established brands. Not to mention, a mostly free one if you’re looking in the right places for publication. That said, it’s hard to build up the actual page authority of these press releases even though they’re (sometimes) sitting on domains with a high authority.

Analyzing these can give you a good idea of the dates that they’ve done product launches, promotions or made strategic shifts in business. There are plenty of free and paid press release services that you should look for in your competitor’s backlinks.

Sort your “Source URL” column for the domains below. These just touch the surface of press release sites but can help move the process along:

• Prweb.com
• Newswire.com
• PRnewswire.com
• PRlog.org
• Free-press-release.com
• i-newswire.com
• Onlineprnews.com

Directory Submissions

Niche directories can be useful not only for link building, but to actually gain clients/customers that might be searching for specific businesses. It’s true that not very many people search through directories to find what they’re looking for, but it doesn’t hurt to leverage these.

• What directories have they submitted their site to?
• Are they using brand or exact match anchors? Note: some directories are extremely particular in the anchor text used.
• Are they listed in niche directories?
• If they have physical locations, are they listed in local directories which can also serve as citations?

For industries/verticals with physical locations:

Because citations are so important in establishing authority and confirming that your business is “real” and located where it’s listed in Google Places, getting citations wherever possible is a tactic that you need to consider. Finding out where competitors are listed can be an excellent starting point for where to submit your business for citations.

Here’s a great list of 50 local directories where you can start queries for your competitors if the backlinks are too daunting to sift through.

Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach comes in many different shapes, sizes and colors, and the ability to build links this way requires competitors to leverage current relationships or build new ones. It’s apparent when brands are trying to link build without really having strong relationships in the industry, because the quality of the sites aren’t always the best or as relevant as they should be.

While some marketers (WARNING: big generalization) think that “any link” is a “good link,” that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

For outreach in general, look at:

• What’s the domain authority of the sites where they’re obtaining links?
• What’s the overall quality of the site and relevancy of the links?
• Is the same editor working with this brand or does it look like there isn’t an established and strong relationship with one editor in particular?
• Does the blog look to be catering only to that particular brand in its vertical? Could they have an exclusivity agreement with them?

Often times, editors are open to working with more than one brand in that particular vertical because they’re interested in bringing fresh news and industry updates to their readership. Unless they have an exclusivity agreement with that particular brand, they’ll be open to working with your brand, too, over time.

If you spend some time sorting and sifting through the backlinks, you’ll be able to identify sites where the brand might have contributed guest posts or reached out for brand coverage. If you  take blogger outreach tactics and reverse engineer them, you can start to get into your competitor’s heads and profile their marketing strategy.

When looking through their backlinks, you should be able to recognize industry blogs that they’re posting on:

Content Marketing & Promotion

It’s no surprise that content marketing is taking the industry by storm. It’s been an ongoing diamond in the rough that many brands weren’t taking advantage of in their strategy even though it’s been a tactic for quite some time now.

Because content marketing is becoming a larger and dominant part of the overall marketing strategy, it’s worth investigating what kind of content a competitor is creating and sharing. Understanding your competitor’s content marketing strategy both on-site and off-site can help kick start your brainstorming on potential topics to create by using what’s been successful and also looking at areas that haven’t been covered.

Looking into your competitor’s content strategy can:

1. Give you an idea of what topics are interesting to their target demographic.
2. Determine how socially successful these pieces were.
3. Uncover what networks their blog/site content is being shared on.
4. Identify areas of opportunity in content marketing that you may not have otherwise considered.
5. Understand what off-topic content was successful.
6. Discover if they’re creating content to share on-site, or on third party sites.

Infographics

There are a couple of infographic sites that you can search manually to see if a specific brand is submitting infographics on their own, if others are submitting infographics they’ve created and shared on their site, or what infographics are being created that integrate their brand.

Below is a snapshot of Visual.ly, an infographic aggregator and submission site. A lot of brands will host infographics on their blog first if they’re new to content creation and marketing, so try querying your competitors to see if they’ve submitted their work.

Social Bookmarking

You can also try manual queries on sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to see what content on their actual blog/website is being shared socially. This can give you an idea of what their target market finds interesting enough to share with others.

StumbleUpon is pretty annoying to search from the site (unless you’re just stumbling for the hell of it) so setting up a simple query in Google can help you find if posts or pages on your competitor’s sites are being added.

Adding the site: operator into a Google search will allow you to search for specific keywords or URLs within a site. If you want to search StumbleUpon for, say, Ikeahackers.net to see what posts have been shared off their site:

(enter your competitor’s URL here) site:stumbleupon.com

Free tactic

Once you identify the name or an infographic peice or linkbait article that was shared, you can also Google that title to see if you can identify the trail of other sites that have picked it up.

Paid tactic

You can also drop the original URL in tools like Majestic or Open Site Explorer to see what sites have linked to that particular piece of content. These can be sites that you add into your blogger outreach campaigns as well.

Twitter

You can also manually search individual links on Twitter to see where they’ve been shared. This is another way to check out the reach and scope of your competitors on other social networks. It can also give you an idea of users that you should start following and engaging with if you plan on reaching out and marketing your own content.

Simply put the URL of your competitor’s post in the search field on Twitter, and the rest will take care of itself.

Google Places

This is especially important if you and your competitors own a local business or have physical locations. Doing a brand query in Google, with the location set to whatever city their physical building is located in, can bring up a Google Places page.

1. Do your competitors have Google Places pages for their physical locations?
2. Are they gaining reviews/star ratings?
3. Do they have calls to action on other social networks or their own site to encourage customers to review them?
4. Are they taking advantage of the descriptions and categories area, which are areas annotated in the screenshot below?

Below is an example of sites that are leveraging their current customers and clients for Google Places reviews:

The above location is asking for reviews, while the company below is offering loyalty points for those that review them. This is not only helping to solidify their authority, but it’s also giving current clients/customers an incentive to visit them again.

When working as a search marketer, you may not pay as much attention to a competitor’s social strategy. With social signals and engagement playing a bigger factor is rankings, it’s important to sniff out what major social networks a competitor is participating in, and what niche networks they (or your brand!) might be missing out on.

Social media competitive research is a process that we spend a lot of time on at BlueGlass, so I’ll just touch on a few basic points for what to look for on some major social networks.

The Spot Check

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take one basic step that can help pave the way for the remainder of the social research. Do a quick spot check on their site. This can save time trying to find competitors on social networks since some don’t use their actual brand name for a handle.

This is a great way to tell what social networks these brands are extremely active on, and what they consider important to their own social strategy.

Are they allowing users to socially share the homepage in specific? In the image above, you’ll see that Search Engine Land is allowing users to publicly +1 their homepage.

Gaining +1s to your homepage not only allows it to show up within a user’s profile, shown in the screenshot above, but the amount also reflects in the search results below. It’s still unclear how much personalization and +1s are going to affect the search results, but a competitor who is encouraging +1s and sharing of their site might potentially have a lead on your brand that isn’t.

If your competitors tend to use the same name across all networks, you can also use tools like NameChk or Knowem to get a quick bird’s eye view of what other popular or obscure networks they’re using.

Social Factors to Consider

It’s important to understand the ins and outs of what they’re doing, who they’re following, how they’re engaging, what types of content they’re sharing successfully and more importantly: what is their reach and who is listening?

Really understanding how your competitors are leveraging social media successfully (or unsuccessfully) can give you a solid understanding of what your target audience will be receptive to. Once you’ve located the social networks where they’re most active, examine the following:

1. What are the networks listed on their site that they consider important to their strategy?
2. Are they on any niche networks that your brand could potentially build a presence on?
3. How often are they sharing and engaging on these networks?
4. What types of content are they sharing? Is it self-centered and self-serving, or is it industry related? Off topic?
5. For Twitter, what kinds of lists are they curating? Are they on any lists? How are they engaging?
6. For Facebook, are they taking advantage of all the features such as the photostrip, applications, tagging, etc? Who are their featured likes?
7. Are they leveraging these platforms to aid in any kind of promotions or contests they’re running?
8. Competitor’s YouTube channels can be an excellent opportunity to learn what topics the YouTube audience in your vertical respond to.

There’s an exponential amount of other factors to look into socially, especially with the personalization and changes that Google + is bringing to the table. The key takeaway from social is that all things equal, having a strong social strategy could be what’s giving your competitor a leg up over your brand.

Did you think that once you did your initial research, you were done?

WRONG.

You’re not. This isn’t a “said it and forget it” deal. Just like you, your competitors will be continuously changing and adapting their marketing strategies.

To stay on your toes, you’re going to need to consistently monitor what your competitors are doing. There are a bunch of paid tools that can be used, but I’ll go over some free tips and tactics that can be used for monitoring.

Tracking Search Queries on Twitter

Tracking a competitor’s brand mentions in Twitter can help you understand the conversation around the brand and their audience’s perception of them. Twitter has since pulled the ability to grab RSS feeds from searches, but you can use this URL and change out the blue query at the end for your specific search term. It’ll bring you to an RSS page where you can change the method to Google and have it pulled into your reader.

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=blueglass

Saving Searches In LinkedIn

You can save any kind of search that you do on LinkedIn, so if you’re interested in keeping tabs on employees and who is joining/leaving the company, short of stalking their brand page, this would be an easy way to do it. Depending on who joins and leaves the company, you can get a good idea of the direction a company might be going in. For instance,  if Linkedin reflected that Apple hired the VP of Marketing at Pepsi, it might tip you off that they’re moving into a stronger product marketing cycle.

You can query the brand name under “people” and it’ll list everyone that has that particular brand listed in their profiles.

On the search results stream, click “Save” on the top right, and you’ll be prompted to choose a “name” and “frequency” for which you want to receive these updates.

Also, you can stalk their actual company page to keep up with new hires and departures.

Set up Google Alerts

Google Alerts is pretty overlooked, but it’s one of the easiest and quickest ways to keep many eyes on competitors. Track variations of your competitors’ brand names so you’ll be able to see where they’re gaining mentions, if they’re making the news for something positive/negative, if they’re releasing a new product or update, etc. There’s no limit to how many alerts you can set, so you should also set some for your own brand.

You can set the types of results you want to monitor.

As well as the frequency so you’re not getting more email alerts than you can handle. Plus, we all get enough email right?

Pull an RSS of Search Queries

Not many people know that you can pull RSS feeds from various services to keep track of certain search queries. Google reader (or any other RSS feed tracker) can pull these into one easy place for your viewing pleasure. Anything with an RSS feed can be tracked.

Using Google News as an example:

Enter in the search query you’re interested in. If you’re tracking strictly brand mentions, try different variations in quotes so you’re minimizing the chances of getting irrelevant results.

Scroll down to the RSS Feed button at the bottom of the SERPs. You can also create an email alert, but having it in an RSS feed allows you to view everything all at once. And plus, we all get enough email don’t we?

Grab the appropriate links to pull the feed into Google Reader. For Google News, you’ll want to grab the actual URL after you click the RSS feed button, as shown in the screenshot below.

Add the subscription into Google Reader.

Custom Queries

Of course, there’s also good ol’ manual searching.

You can use the search parameter link: to find all sites that are linking to the URL of your choice. If you’re looking for recent news, limit the date span to the past week or month to weed out irrelevant and dated results.

link:(competitor’s URL)

To tie up this extremely long post, here are a few other tools and sites that haven’t been mentioned above to help you research your competitors.

Social Mention

Social Mention  allows you to search brand mentions across various social and blog platforms. You can also setup email alerts or grab an RSS feed from there for constant monitoring of your competitors.

Ghostery

Ghostery is an awesome plugin that allows you to see what plugins, pixels, trackers, ad networks or tools a competitor might be using to gather private data. For one, it allows you to see what analytics platform they’re using, so you can get a good idea of how in depth their segmenting and analysis of traffic is.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is another great tool allows you to see what your competitor is using as a CMS, their framework, server, analytics platform, etc.

Conclusion

Be Where They Are

Look into forums, Linkedin groups, Twitter chats and other areas that the brands are participating in. Subscribe and participate so you can get a better view of what’s going on in the industry, and what they find is important to share and participate in.

Look for Opportunities

Finding your competitors weaknesses and their areas of success can open the door to strategic brainstorming to expand the scope and reach of your marketing.

Competitive research is an extremely lengthy, time-consuming and constant process. After reading this post, you should be  better equipped to research what your competitors are doing throughout the online marketing space, using  (mostly) free resources.

The main thing to remember is that every channel affects the other. It’s not enough to only concentrate on competitive research in search without understanding what a competitor is doing socially as well. While there are instances where you want to drill down and look into very specific things, overall competitive research should encompass each facet of Internet marketing as a whole.

Remember, it’s important to research from inside the trees, and outside of the forest.

What are some of your favorite techniques, tricks or tools for competitive research?