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It’s no secret that content marketing is a key element to having a successful online presence.  Writing a blog not only creates content that can be indexed by search engines, thereby increasing your long tail search rankings, but it also helps build your reputation.  For example, I write posts for this blog that cover SEO, social media and web design.  I know that there are many small businesses looking to grow their businesses online, and they want to use SEO and social media to do that.  Sometimes they even want to build their own websites.  You might be one of them.  The traditional way of thinking about this would suggest that content marketing is suicide for someone like me.  However, in an age of information overload, I know that you can find just about anything you’re looking for.  I figure that you might as well find it from me.  I figure that if I provide you with the tools and advice that you need to tackle your search engine optimization and social media projects, you’ll start to trust me.  As you and your projects grow, and you need more help or advice, it’s not unreasonable to hope that you’ll turn to me.  However, most  business owners don’t have time to tackle these kinds of projects themselves and my blog is an open look at what I know and how I think about digital marketing.

But I Don’t Know What to Write About?

I suggest (insist) that my clients use content marketing.  The most common response I get is: “I don’t know what to write about?“

Coming up with ideas for blogging can be challenging, but it’s far from impossible.  If you have a skill, or knowledge, that people need (and you have customers, right?) you’ve got something to write about.  The difficulty comes in organizing what you know so that you can present it in an organized and coherent manner.  It’s something that every blogger (or editor) struggles with.  Even me.  So I sit down and I brainstorm.

My brainstorming method of choice is mindmapping.  There are tons of great mind mapping tools available, including bubble.us (online) and freemind (desktop), but I prefer pencil and paper – at least to start.

A few weeks ago I sat down and in about twenty minutes I came up with the map pictured below.

A quick count shows nearly thirty terminal items.  Each of those endings represents at the very least one blog post.  Many of them are broad enough to use as starting points for more specialized mind maps – which will give me more great ideas to write about.

How do you find your blogging ideas?

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Blog Post Ideas: Brainstorming for Content Marketing is a post from: Contexta – A Montreal SEO Company

Big Changes to Facebook, Foursquare hits 1B Checkins

The biggest story of the week by far is the massive change coming to facebook.  At yesterday’s f8 keynote event, Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to the way your profile works and to how your activities are shared.

Highlights:

• Your profile will now be a “Timeline”, which is kind of a centralized dashboard for all of your activities.
• Some stuff will be pulled out of the newsfeed and put into a “Ticker” feed on the right-hand side of the screen.  Kind of like a stock market ticker.  The ticker is place where you will see updates that are less relevant to you. For example, if a friend comments on someone else’s post.
• Any service or app that you connect to Facebook will now share your activities automatically.  This might annoy some people.

Mashable.com has a great roundup of all that’s coming to your facebook profile.  The new Timeline profile is being rolled out slowly, but this article at TechCrunch will show you how to do it right now.

Social checkin platform Foursquare has now passed one billion checkins.  While checking in remains low on the list of things that smartphone users like to do, there’s no doubt that it’s gaining some traction.  If you have a brick and mortar business, you can’t really afford to ignore social check ins for too much longs.

Goolge +1 For Mobile and Display Ads, AdWords Testing Built In Forms, Bing is Losing Tons of Money

In search news, the Google +1 button is now live on search results for mobile devices.  More importantly, ads on the Google Display Network will now also feature the +1 button. It appears that +1 activity will influence the AdWords auctions.  This is becomes a challenge for search marketers, since they now have to design ads that ask for two actions: a click on the +1, and then a click on the ad itself.

In other AdWords news, it appears that Google is testing out AdWords ads that have a lead capture form built right in.  This could be very useful if you are using adwords to capture leads rather than sell something online, since users won’t need to click through to your landing page before giving you their information.

It appears as though Bing and Microsoft Online Services are bleeding money – an astonishing 1 billion dollars per quarter! Over at Search Engine Journal, they point out that this translates to $11 million per day or nearly $500,000 per hour.  Even for a company of Microsoft’s size, this is not sustainable.   In the same article they quote Microsoft’s president of online services as saying that Bing needs to reach about 30% of search market share in order to be profitable.  The trouble is, Bing’s recent growth has come at the expense of Yahoo, rather than Google.

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The answer of course is yes.  If it hasn’t happened to your industry already, someone somewhere is dreaming up, or building, a tool, product or business model that will make at least part of what you do obsolete.

The once mighty Blockbuster Video is a classic, and tragic example of this.  The arrival of VHS movies was a very disruptive moment for the movie industry.  It changed how movies were marketed and how money was made and distributed in cinema.  The movie industry made a big fuss, and did everything it could to prevent movies from going toVHS  or, failing that, wring every penny out of the VHS distributors. (The exception here is the adult movie industry, which has always been an early adopter and has managed to use every new medium to make boat loads of money).

In fact, the wide-spread adoption of VHS players did not really have a dramatic impact on movie attendance.  Unlike TV.

(Graph taken from http://org.elon.edu/ipe/pautz2.pdf)

Movie rental shops popped up all over.  In keeping with other retail trends in North America, small neighbourhood  movie rental shops were soon overtaken by big box stores  that could offer better prices and better selection.   There remained (and still does) a place for small specialty stores that can offer niche content – especially if they choose their locations well.

The digital revolution seems to have caught Blockbuster completely unawares.  Obviously the spreading of broadband has made downloading or streaming  video easier than ever, and new services like Netflix and Hulu are capitalizing on consumer’s desire to watch what they want, when they want.  I was always surprised that Blockbuster didn’t get into the streaming game itself.  Offline, the arrival of automated movie rental vending machines and kiosks also took a massive bite out of Blockbuster’s clientele – as did video on demand  offerings by cable and satellite TV subscribers.

Here’s the thing, Blockbuster stopped being able to compete on almost every front.

• Price:  They weren’t the cheapest anymore.  Sure, renting from them used to be a lot cheaper than going to the theater, but recently prices for a new movie  rental were up around $7.  Putting the piracy aside, the price for a rental at the automated kiosk near me was $1.99 and video on demand is usually about $5.  Netflix costs $8/month for unlimited streaming.
• Convenience: All of the streaming and on-demand services are hands-down the most convenient, since you never have to leave your house, and you get what you want right away.  Netflix’s video by mail service also lets you stay at home. even though you have to plan a bit.  The DVD kiosk I use lets me check their available movies online and reserve the one I want, so I know in advance if I can get the movie I’m looking for.
• Service: The online, on-demand and automated services essentially take service out of the equation.  Blockbuster – at least the ones I’ve been to – had terrible service.  The kids that worked there were not particularly knowledgeable about movies, nor did they really seem to care about helping me find what I want or make suggestions.  The small, niche stores are almost always run and staffed by cinephiles and fanatics who are able to provide loads of information and recommendations.

Blockbuster obviously didn’t pay enough attention to the fundamental shifts in the media industry (although they had only to look to the music business….) and missed the boat entirely – resulting in filing for bankruptcy protection in May 2011.

This kind of disruption is coming to your industry.

The way to avoid making the same mistakes as Blockbuster is to pay attention.

• Read some important tech blogs like TechCrunch, GigaOM and Lifehacker.  These sites cover new developments in technology and new services that allow consumers to get information or products in new and creative ways.
• Watch your sales numbers.  Are you growing?  Shrinking?  Flatline?
• Talk to your clients.  Find out if they are using new tools or services that compete or completement what you do.

You can be iTunes.  If not you’ll be Blockbuster.

In the music industry, Apple created a middle ground between the ripoff of traditional CDs and ripping off artists.  Apple succeeded with iTunes by being cheaper than music in stores (especially since you can buy one song at a time) and having a bigger catalog than any store could ever have.  At the same time, it’s much easier and faster, to find music on iTunes than to hunt around on BitTorrent sites (and you don’t have to worry about the quality of the file or about getting a crazy virus).

The key to surviving and thriving now and in the future is to have a clear understand of the value that you provide your clients.  If you compete on price alone – be careful because new tools and global communications mean that someone in India or Bangladesh might be able to offer the same service of one tenth the cost.

I’ll give a personal example of a store that is competing with a giant – and keeps my business.  My two older kids decided that they wanted to play ice hockey this year.  I know that WalMart and Canadian Tire sell loads of hockey equipement very cheaply.  However, at the store there is rarely anyone to help you, and if there is, they often don’t know the first thing about fitting kids for hockey equipment.  On the other hand, there is a Play It Again Sports store nearby.  They sell new and used sporting gear, with a heavy emphasis on hockey.  The staff there are sports nuts.  They know everything about the gear they sell.  I showed up with a 4 year old and a five and a half year old, and was immediately approached by two sales people who offered to help.  They fitted my kids for new equipment, and explained to me what to look for when fitting them in the future.  They made sure that the skates we already had fit my kids properly.

Now Play It Again knows that they can’t compete on price with WalMart and Canadian Tire.  The kid’s starter packages cost nearly TWICE AS MUCH as at the big stores.  Sure, it’s better gear – but not two times better.  Instead of chasing the big guys to the bottom, they rely on great products and exceptional service to real, tangible value for their clients.

How about you?  Are you ready for the disruption?

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Are You The Next Blockbuster Video? is a post from: Contexta – A Montreal SEO Company

Welcome to a new feature: This Week in Search & Social!  Once a week we’ll look back and review the major stories and developments in SEO and social media.

Social

Facebook introduces the Subscribe Button:  On September 14th, Facebook publicly announced their new Subscribe button.  It works essentially the same way as Twitter’s “follow”.   It allows you to see all of the public updates  of someone who is not your friend.  This will be mostly interesting for brands and celebrities.  Look for lots of small businesses and niche celebrities to abandon their fan pages in favour of subscribers.  You can actually choose to migrate your fans to subscribers, just like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has done.

In more Facebook news, Friend Lists are now getting easier to manage.  This has probably been in the works for quite some time, but can also be seen as response to Circles in Google+.  One interesting feature is Smart Lists, which create and update themselves based on profile information that you have in common with your friends… like where you work or go to school.  This is a neat enhancement, and I’m looking forward to messing around with it.  The truth is that social friend management sucks big time, and a certain degree of automation could be useful.  It could also prove awkward.

Google+ officially opens its API (and a new blog for developers).  The long awaited G+ API was announced on September 15th, giving developers access to the data on the young social network.  For the moment the API is read-only, which means applications can only pull data out to a stream or reader but external apps can’t write new data in.  This means that apps like HootSuite will have to continue to wait to add Google+ to their platform.  My take on this is that Google+ is trying to avoid become filled with autoposted garbage like Twitter.  This is especially important because links in Google+ are dofollow and are likely to feature heavily when Google’s realtime search results come back online.

SEO

Google has been on a patent buying spree recently, this week acquiring more than 1,000 patents from IBM.  The patents cover everything from Java, to wireless to search.  Bill Slawski has great run down of some of the more interesting titles over at SEO by The Sea.

Bing and Yahoo are (slowly) creeping up on Google.  A comScore report issued this week shows that Google’s market share has dipped just below 65%, while Bing and Yahoo together hold about 31%.  With all of the recent trouble at Yahoo, it remains to be seen if they will be able to stay competitve at all.  Google is aggressively pushing out new features like Instant Pages, and Bing will have really step it up if they want to become a serious competitor.  Which bring us to….

This week Bing launched it”s newest feature: Adaptive Search.  Adaptive search brings personalization to Bing search results.  The idea is that the search engine will use your search history to provide more search results that are better tailored to individuals.  The video below shows how the technology will provide different results for similar (or identical) queries to different users based on their histoy.  It’s not clear at this point (at least to me) if this will only be done by cookies or other tracking code, or if being logged in to your Windows Live account will have any impact.  Either way, this is another nail in the coffin of traditional “rankings are everything” SEO.

As a citizen and media dork, this trend toward automatic (and therefore unnoticed) personalization always worries me.  Check out this great TED talk by Eli Pariser about exactly this problem.  Best quote:

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Mark Zuckerberg

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If you are a little more sophisticated, you can even arrange to automate an @ reply or direct message to anyone who mentions the term(s) you feel are important.  (I’m not a huge fan of most kinds of social media automation, so if you want to set that up, you’re on your own)

Here’s the most important thing:  If you are going to automate a message to someone with an invitation to interact, make sure that you are actually there to interact!

I’ll give you a perfect recent example of this.  Last week, artist and designer Jesse Hebert (creator of the totally awesome bicycle wine rack) asked me on twitter about a simple solution for creating a mobile version of his wp-ecommerce site.  One of the solutions I mentioned was  Mobify.me, which provides a hosted mobile solution that works on a lot of different platforms.  I wasn’t sure if their service works with wp-ecommerce, but I figured that we could find out.

Shortly after I tweeted that idea, I got a really nice @ reply from Mobify.

The message was perfect.  A quick thanks for mentioning them, and an invitation to connect: to ask questions or give them feedback.  My first reaction was “Great!  Here’s a company paying attention, maybe they can actually tell us if they can solve Jesse’s problem”.   So I asked them if mobify works with wp-ecommerce.

And then… nothing.  Now I know that it’s only been a few days, and there was a long weekend… but given that the first reply to my mention came within an hour or two, I figured that they could get back to me just as quickly.

See, I actually thought that there was a real person on the other end of those messages!  Obviously there wasn’t, and that was really disappointing. The real value of the social web comes from making real connections with real people.  The social web amplifies this by letting us share those connections with others.  There’s no value in creating fake connections.

I’m not trying to be a Mobify hater.  The websites that use their service are attractive and easy to navigate.  Some of their clients are major players (like Wired.com).  I’m just pointing out that if you’re going to use social media to reach out and invite people to connect, someone better be there when they do.

What about you?  Have you tried to connect with a person or brand that dropped the ball on Twitter or Facebook?

UPDATE:  I still haven’t heard from Mobify, but clearly they’re not the only ones doing this badly.  Check out Chris Reimer’s (@rizzotees) breakdown of an epic fail by Scotts Lawn Care involving (of all people) Mitch Joel, Amber Brooks and Scott Stratten.  Apparently, Amber Brooks left out an apostrophe when referring to Scott (thus typing Scotts instead of Scott’s), which led to an automated tweet about lawn care, 800 number included.

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Technorati Verification is a post from: Contexta – A Montreal SEO Company

If you have a small business or are using your personal brand you’ll often run in to a situation where another individual or company has the same (or similar) name as you do.  One way to increase your global presence and rankings for branded searches is to use outposts.  Think of it this way:  Your homepage (you have one, right?) is your headquarters online.  It’s the space that you own and control outright.  You bought the domain, built the site and pay for the hosting.  No one is going to change the design or terms of service while you’re not looke (cough… Facebook..cough).    You can then extend your presence on the web by creating profiles on social media sites.  Because social media site are so popular, your profile on those sites will start to rank well.

Take a look at the screenshot below – it’s the first page of results for my name (michael lautman).

  You can see that my blog is there, as is this website and my profile page at the college I teach at.  Interestingly, the first result is my LinkedIn profile, and my Facebook, Twitter, Google, Slideshare and Quora profiles fill the rest of the page.  There’s also my old daddy blo (which I haven’t updated in ages – and should be a reminder to never abandon your web real estate without redirecting….).

So, how can you make this work?  The first step is to create profiles on social sites THAT YOU ACTUALLY USE!  This is especially true for sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  These are sites that involve direct interaction with other actual people (mostly, I’m looking at you twitter). If you have profiles on these networks you need to use them.  Post updates, even occasionally, and respond when someone mentions you or send you message.  There’s nothing worse in social media than a twitter profile page with no tweets and the goose egg avatar.  On other networks, it’s less important, like slideshare, flickr or scribd.  However, it is still very important to fill out your profile completely – especially with a link to your homepage.  Outposts are always strongest when they have a good link to headquarters.

Next, make sure you use your real name (or your brand name) as your user name.  Look at the URLs in the image above.

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/michaellautman

http://www.facebook.com/michael.lautman (for facebook, you’ll have to set up a vanity URL – just visit facebook.com/username)

http://twitter.com/michaellautman

Get the idea?

Google doesn’t let you do that yet, giving you a seriously ugly URL, but since it’s a Google profile, they do a good job of indexing (shocker).

So go on!  Get out there and build your outposts.

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If you like getting your hands dirty, you can edit your theme’s template files and add the button code where you need it.

If this doesn’t sound appealing (and believe me, code grease is HARD to clean off)  a slew of new plugins that allow you to easily add the button to posts and/or pages on your site.  As of writing, there are no less than 23 plugins that do this job.

As with all things, not all +1 plugins are created equal.  On this site, we have played around with Easy Google +1 and the Google +1 Button plugin.  Both worked well, and allow you to customize the look and size of the button. The Google +1 Button plugin puts the +1 button at the bottom of your posts by default, and there’s no obvious, code-free way to move it to the top, which is a big negative.

However, if you want to include multiple social sharing buttons, I suggest using Social Media Counters by Phil Hancox.  It allows you to easily place Facebook, Twitter,  LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Google Buzz and Google +1 buttons on posts and pages.  You can choose between thin and tall buttons, and you can

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