I am asking you to pay a micro-celebrity to write a guest post, or do whatever they do best, on your blog.

I feel like I'm on repeat with this, but the message keeps failing to stick. Pay people who always get natural links, and you will get natural links. Would it earn you links and attention if Rand Fishkin wrote a post on your blog? Would you pay for that kind of attention? Yes?

Then why aren't you thinking about your clients the same way?

Throwing Money At Them Won't Solve the Problem, but it Will Help

The “guest post culture” that SEOs have embraced has led us into a peculiar kind of entitlement when it comes to content. We've let ourselves believe that content should always be free, that it's always enough to do it just for the exposure.

Most people don't think like that. They see you asking for content and expecting it for free, and they think you're ripping them off. They think this because, if the content's good enough to capture an audience, it's true. Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal didn't become semi-famous by writing a bunch of guest posts for exposure. He did it by creating hilarious comics that inspired online discussion and sharing, like we talked about over at KissMetrics. (Yeah, I can smell the irony too.)

SEOs have grown accustomed to doing outreach without spending money because we're used to thinking of spending money as buying links. But buying the labor of a trusted, popular internet celebrity is the most ethical way you can build links. Asking for their time without compensation? That's the unethical move.

So stop basing your link strategy entirely on the “generosity” of sites willing to publish your content for “the exposure.” Stop thinking that every writer you hire ought to be a ghost-writer. Stop believing the lie that it's impossible to buy links naturally.

Start browsing Flikr and DeviantArt for high end photobloggers and graphic designers who have a large and rabid following.

Start clicking through YouTube for talking-head videos that have earned hundreds of thousands of views (and the video creator close to nothing).

Start browsing the web development forums for contributors who are there in every discussion with something useful to say, and hire them to develop a tool for you.

Start browsing Amazon for published authors and offer them money to write a post on your site.

You don't have to put them on your payroll, but you damn well better put their name on your site, bold and proud. Just buy a one-off project and watch the results.

I guarantee there will be no going back after that. You'll see that nothing attracts links better than somebody who already attracts links.

Image credit: Shazeen Samad

Create Your Framework

Before you even begin, create a solid base from which to work. If this is an extension to your business, having an optimized page within your domain is your first port of call. You can direct all event related traffic to your home page, provided it’s clear where they have to go or what they have to do from there in order to reach their specific goals. Some goals to consider would be:

• Finding out more about the event
• Booking tickets
• Obtaining location specific information
• Subscribing to feeds

Event information is shareable stuff as you’ve often got groups of friends keeping each other in the loop with what’s happening. Make sure you’ve got all your pieces in place before you “go live” so that you don’t miss out on that lucrative distribution power.

Create a content calendar with every piece of content that’s going to be shared aligned to a date, platform and even a time. Spacing out your content releases will allow you enough time in between for engagement, dealing with queries and monitoring traffic and results. If you can create the content in advance, you can also schedule and pre-load it, which will open up all your available time for monitoring and hopefully attending to an influx of bookings!

Engage People Online Before The Event Begins

A month or two before the event is hosted is the perfect time to start getting people excited. By creating an online presence that belongs to the event, you can build awareness, reel in prospective attendees and start discussing any formalities or need-to-know information. PR and blog content offer the perfect areas of focus to start promoting event information, but you could also look at other social channels like:

• Facebook – status updates , video content and imagery relating to the event will provide fantastic content that’ll get attendees excited and get potential attendees interested
• Twitter – to post up to the minute updates on plans and preparations that are taking place
• Pinterest – to post photographs of stage setups, celebrities who will be in attendance, generic imagery relating to the event
• Instagram – as with both of the above-mentioned platforms, this is ideal place to start stoking the fires of enthusiasm and get people involved in the hype

Maintain people’s interest by hosting competitions prior to the big day where fans can win tickets or VIP passes to the event. Create hashtags that are easily spread, and interactive campaigns relating to the event that are easily shared. These can all link back to the main website, or can be 100% socially based. Offer opinion polls, create infographics that count down the days and display all the milestones along the way towards the big day, get fans to take certain actions that in turn create content, such as creating their own videos or making soundclips. User-generated content is always a win and keeps your fans involved wholeheartedly.

Good Old Email Reminders

Not everyone checks their social channels all the time, but most of us check our email daily. Send out a few emails to remind people about the event and to offer them any relevant information that might be required. Weather forecasts, celebrity bios, menu items are all ideas for content that you can share in your emails.

Email also offers the perfect platform to let fans know about any upcoming events that may be in the pipeline. It’s also the perfect place to direct from, so any campaign related ideas can springboard straight from your email to your site, Twitter, Facebook or blog – wherever you need your fans to be.

Boost The Level Of Conversation

Events are naturally social by nature, so you can count on your online event promotion being a socially rich experience. By tapping into the mindset, you’re already one step further towards building up the conversation around your event and keeping that chatter going long into the event and beyond.

Before: Any representation of the event, even physical tickets, should tie in with the online activity that has now created a bubble of excitement within fans and friends alike. Fans can be rewarded for certain actions at the event, for example: get them to tweet: “Just got my ticket to XYZ event! It’s going to be off the hook! #XYZEvent” and in return they get a free drinks voucher, or something similar. The hashtag should be becoming ever more prominent as the event draws closer, the event pages on Facebook should be receiving bubbly comments of sheer delight from those who have their tickets and are counting down the seconds to the big day!

The international HOLIOne Color Festival did a great job worldwide of creating incredible hype around local events by posting weekly “survival tips” complete with images of happy, colorful people clearly having the time of their lives. That emotional link had people scrambling to buy tickets to an event that was very much unknown in most countries outside India. Tickets still sold out because clever Facebook and Twitter content marketing strategies showed people what they would be missing out on if they didn’t buy their way into the action asap.

During: FOMO (fear of missing out) is a great thing to manipulate with exceptionally clever and well-placed content. Once at the event, you can build up the FOMO for those who decided not to buy a ticket by making every corner of the event seem like it’s bursting with the most awesome occurrences of all time.

• Hashtag any occurrence within the event
• Check in so that the rest of the world knows how cool you are
• Have someone on Instagram patrol, photographing event attendees, instagramming them and hashtagging the smallest murmur of activity
• Upload video content as it happens

After: Those people who didn’t buy tickets, but are following the event will be the first in line to buy tickets to the next one. For those who did attend, encourage them to leave their reviews on your event pages. Inspire responses and shares by putting together a short video that summarizes the event in 30 seconds, or a blog post complete with a few images and an overall summation of how it all went down.

Don’t forget to send your thank you mails, status updates and tweets to remind attendees that they are the ones who made the event possible; keeping them hanging onto the last dregs of an awesome night and mentally making plans for the next one.

Image courtesy of: http://melissafoodie.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-to-write-food-blog.html

We need to change what gets measured and why. It’s time to stop managing the wrong things. Here’s how.

1. Start Measuring the Impact of Impressions

We’ve already discussed just how surprisingly weak the link is between clicks and sales when compared to the link between impressions and sales, and how to measure it. We’ve also talked about how Facebook Exchange in the feed could be a great way to capitalize on this fact. But this subject is so important to me that I felt the need to repeat it yet again.

I’m not saying you should stop tracking clicks. It’s just that you’re already tracking them. You’re probably even tracking impressions on social networks. What you most likely aren't doing, though, is tracking how impressions are impacting business.

I know it doesn't come easy. I know wrapping your head around a fuzzy concept like “correlation” is uncomfortable for some. I know that separating cause and effect doesn't come easy either. But when Facebook argues that 99 percent of the sales they are responsible for come from impressions, not clicks, it’s difficult to justify the money you’re leaving on the table by ignoring it.

The thing is, not all impressions are the same. It’s not enough to just optimize for impressions. Some impressions will create more sales than others. Some will contribute more to customer retention than others. Some will generate more viral activity than others.

I recognize that you can’t split test social media impressions the way you can a PPC campaign. If the words “regression analysis,” “confidence interval,” and “P-value” are foreign to you, you’re not alone. But I assure you, there are statistical methods available to identify which types of impressions earn the most sales and retain the most customers.

Get a statistician onboard. It’s worth the trouble.

And if correlations are too abstract and don’t feel real enough for you, start surveying your customers. Yes, you’ll be measuring what they say, not what they do, but it’s better than nothing.

By the way, I’d advise taking a similar approach with brand mentions. Since it’s impossible (as far as I know) to measure the number of impressions you’re getting from each brand mention, this data is a weaker starting point than raw impression figures, but it’s still worth measuring its impact on sales.

2. Start Measuring Retention

If social media is about building relationships, as is so often claimed, then retention should be top priority. You need to measure how your social media efforts are contributing to repeat visits and repeat sales, or you have no way of knowing that social media is having any effect on your relationship with your customers.

We’ve discussed before how to measure repeat visits from Facebook, at least in the context of repeat clicks from Facebook. But, as should be obvious from the section above, clicks aren’t everything, and you need to go further in order to truly measure how many repeat visitors you’re getting.

To do this properly, you really need to get first touch attribution set up in Google Analytics. Will Critchlow has already written a great article on the subject, so I won’t go into the details here. The important thing to understand is that you want to know how many people who were referred from social networks came back, and how often.

Keep in mind that a large portion of your direct traffic may actually consist of referrals from social networks. My estimate, based on correlations, was that about half of the referrals from social networks actually came in as direct traffic. Again, this is why it’s important to measure the impact of impressions. While it’s impossible to attribute a specific direct visitor to social networks, you can estimate how much of your direct traffic is the result of social activity, and project how many repeat visits this leads to.

These repeat visits aren’t the only way to measure retention, of course. Repeat sales, even if they’re made offline, are incredibly important. The only way to get first touch attribution on a repeat offline sale is to survey your customers. You can incentivize this with rewards. It’s best if you just take a small sample and offer a reward high enough that you get a good response rate. If too many of them don’t respond, it can skew the results.

3. Only Measure What Matters

This may sound like a bizarre thing to say after arguing that you should hire a statistician and look for correlations in complex data sets, but I’m sort of with Tim Ferris on this one. As a general (and unscientific) rule, about 20 percent of the things we do are responsible for 80 percent of the benefits. Meanwhile, another 20 percent of the things we do are responsible for wasting about 80 percent of our time.

I’m of the opinion that the basic structure of measurement should be simple:

1. Define a very small set of metrics that matter

2. Conduct exploratory experiments to discover new metrics

3. Toss out new metrics unless you find a strong correlation with the metrics that matter

In other words, you should constantly test and try new metrics, but you shouldn't bother sticking with them unless you find out that they have a strong influence on your KPIs. Otherwise, your list of metrics will just continue to grow, and you’ll eventually end up consuming too much time.

It’s true that what gets measured gets managed. It’s also true that if you manage too many things, you’ll end up with a pile of red tape and not much else to show for it.

That’s why I don’t bother measuring Facebook Likes, retweets, or any of the other vanity metrics. I don’t see a meaningful relationship with the metrics that matter.

What are you measuring?

Image credit: aussiegall

SEO

How to Divert Competitors’ Customers With ‘Bling’ Keywords

Sending out news releases using Vocus or PRWeb tools featuring news, updates, and developments about your company is a great way to build marketplace awareness of the solutions that you offer. Implementing a search engine optimization plan that enhances your website content with the right keywords is a great way to attract business and potentially increase your company’s search rank.

Graph Search Optimization: The New SEO and What it Means for Social Advertisers

Facebook introduced Graph Search in January signaling a major shift in social search. Graph Search matches natural language search terms with content from the searcher’s network (social graph) to identify and return relevant results based on several factors.

How Will The Next Penguin Update Effect You?

As a SEO Consultant I have seen a lot of fear and panic over the last 12 months from owners and marketing directors of businesses of all sizes. Now due to the announcement from Matt Cutts a few weeks ago regarding the next Penguin update I am getting a lot of questions.

A Successful Google Penguin Recovery Story

It is coming up to a year ago now that we were employed by a big company here in the United Kingdom to recover their website from a crash in Google rankings following the Penguin update. On 17 April 2012, their website was hit by the Google Penguin update. Unsurprisingly, their traffic plummeted, losing more than 50% of their daily visitors which were in the 10s of thousands.

How to Write SEO Copy That Works

There’s a lot more to writing SEO copy than keywords. If you want your SEO copywriting to work–to attract more natural traffic AND convert visitors to subscribers and leads–you’ve got to do more than stuff blog posts with keywords. Follow these 6 steps to write SEO copy that works.

Organic SEO or Pay-Per-Click?…That is the Question!

One question that many businesses struggle with is “Should I do Organic SEO or Pay-Per-Click?” This is not a straightforward answer as we are comparing two completely different items. Did you know, there are over 200 million searches done on search engines every day.

How Do You Keep Up With the Hockey Stick Growth of SEO Changes?

The hockey stick graph has been used (sometimes controversially) to illustrate the rate of global warming, population growth over time, etc. The rate of change in growing and changing industries like search marketing feels pretty rapid even if it’s not exponential. I like to call it the hockey stick of change because getting hit with accelerating rate of change sometimes feels like getting hit with a hockey stick.

Integrating Your SEO And Social Campaigns

In the past, social media and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) were two very different, very separate things. Social media was a way to write funny and annoying statuses, SEO was a way to make search engines like you. Nowadays, however, social media and SEO are well and truly joined at the hip.

Content Marketing

Why Mad Men are Becoming Math Men

In our digital worlds, it is safe to say that advertising is becoming more dynamic and complicated than ever. In advertising, Mad Men are becoming Math Men. Some would say that mobile devices, technology and advanced consumer behavior have made it a complex art and science of anticipating how, when and where someone will respond to a brand’s message.

Link Building – Don’t Hate The Player, Hate The Game

It is a long shot I know, but someday I hope Google releases an algorithm update that completely changes how Link Building works. From my experience of digital marketing and more specifically SEO, Google and the SEO industry have been in an arms race, where SEOs develop a new link building tactic and Google then counters with an algorithm update.

Resource Roundup: How to Migrate Google Reader to Feedly

Today is the start of a new series that will highlight resources and tools designed to simplify the everyday management and monitoring of your social media efforts. Each one is something I use within my own business and will hopefully be a benefit in yours as well.

14 Blog Writing Tips for Creating SEO-Friendly Blog Posts

If you’re in charge of your company’s blog, SEO is just as important for you as creating quality content that inspires engagement and generates leads. After all, if you’re not getting traffic, you’re not getting engaged readers or leads, either.

3 Practical Tips for Creating Magic Content Flow

When you are entering the Internet world, you will see that there are many people searching for something to meet their needs. The core medium to find information online is by using a "search engine." Search engines have become the best resource for the people to get relevant source of information in terms of content, image or many other things. What happens if people don’t get the information which they want?

The Content Marketing Landscape Infographic

If you didn’t already know – content marketing involves elements of everything from analytics to content generation and SEO to social. As one of the UK’s leading content marketing companies we wanted to create an informative infographic that highlights how all these important disciplines come together.

Social Media Marketing

18 Fresh Stats About the Current State of Social Media Marketing

As a data-driven and social media-loving company, we’d like to set the record straight: Social media is here to stay. So we’ve combed through some of the hottest new social media research -- including the new 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report -- to highlight some of the freshest stats that reveal the truth about the current state of social media marketing.

The State of Social Media [infographic]

It’s Friday so it’s time for another infographic. This one, like the one I recently shared about social media and business, has some interesting thoughts and ideas around the data and what it means. I thought I’d add to the conversation, throw in a few useful links and of course I’d love to hear your points of view as well.

Making the Most of Hashtags in Social Media

Have you noticed all the buzz around hashtags recently? You're used to seeing 'em on Twitter, G+ and Instagram. They pop up on the screen when you're watching your favorite TV show (read: Shark Tank) or the commericals that air in between contestants' business pitches to the sharks. (We're still talking about Shark Tank, right?)

10 Steps to Developing A Niche Following on Google Plus

Do you want to get a head start on the untapped market of Google Plus for your business? Google Plus has an audience of more than 500 million users, and uses what you share on it to impact your companies search results. It’s not rocket science to see that you should be a part of what’s going on sooner rather than later.

Mobile And Social Media Go Hand-in-Hand

Customers are increasingly engaging with brands on mobile social media—and not necessarily for the reasons you might think, according to a studyby mobile video advertising firm Rhythm NewMedia.

7 Things Marketers Should Know About Tumblr

As the 32nd most popular website in the world, Tumblr is a big opportunity. But you can't approach it as you would other marketing strategies.

Use Tracking Codes with Your Social Media Sharing Buttons

Given the rapid increase in people using social networks to share and discuss content on the internet, it's no surprise that the majority of websites now have social media sharing buttons integrated alongside their content. However, measuring the success of these buttons is by no means straightforward.

This month we'll leave you with a video from resident Google genius, Mr. Matt Cutts, who addresses the top SEO mistakes that webmasters are making.

So where do you begin? There are so many options to choose from and they are all successful in one way or another, but finding the tactics that apply directly to your business can be tough. So why not look at someone who has already tried and tested various tactics against their business model and benefit from their experience? Investigate and analyze your competitors’ inbound marketing tactics.

Email Marketing

The age old method of email marketing still remains a stalwart. While many have already written off the simple efficiency of email in favor of other newer, sparklier options, statistics show that email marketing still shows promise in terms of conversion. There are almost three times as many email users as there are Facebook users, email is more cost effective and you can channel information to designated groups, based on their preferences. So how do you see what is working within your niche?

Sign up for your competitor’s emails and use yourself as a test case. Ask yourself a few questions and record your findings:

• Was the email triggered based on an action you carried out?
• When was the mail sent?
• What time?
• Did the subject line attract your attention?
• Did it prompt you to click?
• Was the content enticing and easy to read?
• Did you read all of it?
• Did the design aid in improving or hindering your user experience?
• Were you prompted to click on any of the links?

Customize the questions and track this over a few mails and see if you recognize any patterns developing. Perhaps you can even apply ratings to the mails and see if the subjects, design or content had any influence over this.

Keyword Research

Using your competitors emails and subject lines, you can identify a number of patterns that they would have researched before relaying their marketing mails to you. Punch these into Google Adwords or Ubersuggest and see what other options you come up with. Use these as a base for your own email marketing campaigns, and measure your success in the same way you rated that of your competitors.

Content Creation

We all value the importance of content, especially in light of fairly recent Panda updates. With such a huge emphasis on creating content that users actually want to absorb, it’s equally as important to get a feel for the content that’s already out there and whether or not it’s working. Enter some more investigative work that delves into the efforts of your competitors.

Take the keyword research you did and punch some of the results into Google, but also try an advanced search by typing - site:competitorsite.com “search query”. By doing a little background check on all of your top keywords, you can identify the troughs and peaks of content produced around various topics. The peaks might prove to be really popular topics, while the troughs present space for potential content that is needed.

Social Stalking

We’ve all done it in a personal capacity at some stage or another, so why not stalk your competitors on their social networks? Do you follow them on Twitter? Are you a fan of their page on Facebook? If not, why not? You need to keep your finger on the pulse, and perhaps their social spaces are where it’s currently pumping. This is the easiest way to keep tabs on what your competitors are up to but it’s also a perfect indication for you to be able to see what works for them and why.

Pay attention to things like:

• Are they only tweeting their own content?
• If they tweet or post about other people’s content, how do they choose it? What do they post?
• What time are they tweeting or posting?
• How regularly?
• Do they include personal design?
• How do they engage with their users?

It’s easy to track these points by creating a table that lists likes, retweets, shares and comments, as well as engagement, content specific information and timing. As with the above tactics, you’ll start to notice patterns that you can apply to your own business. Use Topsy to highlight the positively influential people within your selected social spaces and see if you can get them to do the same promotion for you.

Have you got any other ideas on how to use your competitor’s inbound marketing tactics to your advantage? Let us know.

Image courtesy of: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1828523/keyword-competitive-intelligence-101