This is very exciting news for all of us. BlueGlass is an agency I have personally admired for a long time. Their team is packed full of world-class talent, and they are real thought leaders within the search industry–not just in the U.S., but globally.

The whole Quaturo team will be joining BlueGlass to form BlueGlass UK. We’re all hugely looking forward to teaming up and bringing BlueGlass knowledge and expertise into the UK market and to client campaigns.

Who are Quaturo?

For people who are reading this without an understanding of who Quaturo are–we are a content marketing agency based in London.

We currently have a team of five people (by the way, we are aggressively hiring right now so please get in touch), all of whom have very strong search marketing backgrounds, which have evolved into a specialised content marketing approach.

We work with a number of large brands in the UK, including Vistaprint, UCAS, Wonga, and Audley Travel.

I’ve been involved in search myself for the last ten years, and our team often speaks at leading events such as SMX, SES, a4uexpo, SAScon, BrightonSEO, and ThinkVisibility. We also write frequently on industry blogs including Econsultancy, Search Engine Watch, and Search Engine Land.

Who are BlueGlass?

BlueGlass has an incredible reputation in the U.S. as a leading digital marketing agency. Every time I see the likes of Greg Boser, Loren Baker, and Chris Winfield speak, I always feel I’ve learned something new.

I remember being very impressed with all of them at Pubcon 2011. I followed that up by going to the excellent BlueGlass LA conference in April 2012. Ironically, I’ve just found one of my tweets from Pubcon last year:

BlueGlass uses proprietary technology to offer cutting-edge online marketing services. They work with some of the biggest brands in the world, companies such as Disney, Allstate, eBay, Macy’s, HSN, Conde Nast, and many more.

Working more closely alongside BlueGlass over the last few weeks has given us great insight into how differently they do things, and how we can make a real impact in the UK.

You may have also noticed us writing on the BlueGlass blog recently, and you can expect to see more of that soon.

What can you expect from BlueGlass UK?

Quaturo has been making significant moves forward as a leading content marketing agency in the UK, and has been working with a number of big brands already.

Greg Boser, Richard Zwicky, and myself at the BlueGlass UK office

We set ourselves some big goals and challenges when launching Quaturo, most of which we are well on the way to achieving. While an acquisition was certainly not something we were seeking, we quickly found that we shared a very similar vision with BlueGlass, and it was a perfect fit in many ways.

It’s always been an ambition of mine to compete and bridge that gap between boutique/specialised and large agencies. Joining BlueGlass allows us to achieve those goals, and take things to the next level by managing campaigns together on a global scale.

BlueGlass has a proven track record of changing the way companies market themselves online with extraordinary strategies, services, and software powered by the best minds in digital marketing. We’re all very excited to have the opportunity to bring this to the UK!

Join us in celebrating the news! 

We celebrated with our London launch party last night and got to see many of you there. If you’re in the U.S., we hope to see you out at BlueGlassX in December!

We have plenty of exciting things planned over the coming months. We’ll be looking to expand our team and work with more exciting brands in the very near future. Please contact us to find out more!

The post Why We Joined BlueGlass appeared first on Quaturo.

However, hope is not lost, Quaturo are sponsoring the after party are giving away 5 free tickets to the conference!

You can immerse yourself in the content marketing world and expose yourself to 350 delegates from agencies, in-house marketing teams and business owners. On the 20th of November you can hear from great speakers such as Stephen Pavlovich from Wish.co.uk, Matt Roberts from Linkdex and our own Chelsea Blacker from Quaturo!

Our founder Kevin Gibbons is also running a workshop on the ‘Beginners’ Guide to Content Marketing- where you can still sign-up for tickets.

It promises to be a great day where you can learn from the industry experts and build on your relationships.

So how do you get your hands on one of these tickets?

You have between now and the end of the week to tweet us ending your tweet with #IWantATicket and we will pick a winner.

Hopefully we will see you there. Good luck!

The post Content Marketing Show – Free Ticket Giveaway appeared first on Quaturo.

Photo from Linkdex AuthorTank

October

Here’s where we’ve been writing this month:

• How to Leverage Google Reader for Guest Post Opportunities and Blogger Outreach - by Pak Hou Cheung
• How to Become an Authoritative Writer in Any Niche - by Jake Tucker
• How to Measure Your Link Spread - by Chelsea Blacker
• 9 Ways to Maximize AuthorRank – Focus on People, Not Metrics – by Kevin Gibbons
• What’s Your Content Performance Ratio? – by Kevin Gibbons

I also spoke at the Linkdex ThinkTank event - and ran an SEO clinic at a4uexpo.

November

We’ve got lots planned for November too – so make sure you follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date. And also come and meet us at the following events:

• BlueGlass Networking Party – London, 15th Nov – I’m speaking here about content marketing in the UK, alongside Greg Boser - the event has already sold out, but signup for the waitlist as there’s likely to be more realised.
• Content Marketing Show – London, 20th Nov – I’m running a content marketing training workshop (which you can still signup for!), and Chelsea is speaking about the art of recycling content.

The post Quaturo Recap in October appeared first on Quaturo.

Image credit: Michael Dorausch

BrightonSEO – 13-14 Sept 2012:

This week it’s BrightonSEO – and all of our team are heading down to the event on Friday, so make sure you say hi! Plus I’m running a content marketing training workshop at BrightonSEO on Thursday, where amongst other topics, we’ll be looking at:

• How to write a content audit
• How to research your content strategy
• How to create great blog content
• Community management (scheduling, content calendars, editing, moderation, community management)
• How to brainstorm creative content (infographic development, video promotion)
• Blogger Outreach
• Social Media Promotion
• Analytics & Measurement

The post Meet Quaturo at SMX East & BrightonSEO appeared first on Quaturo.

It’s just been under a month now since the Mozcon conference in Seattle – having a look through the slides, one of my personal favourites was from Paddy Moogan ”35 Ways to Get Links”.

1000 Guest Posting Opportunities

Within his presentation Paddy shares with us a list of guest blog opportunities and emails, from a Google doc.   From anyone seeing this list at first will be amazed to find this goldmine of a list and really appreciate the generosity of Paddy sharing this information with us.   However as you dig a litter deeper and try to use this data it all becomes a little bit overwhelming due the sheer volume of opportunities.

Problem?

Having over a 1000 guest posting opportunities is immense, but trying to filter the good sites from the bad sites is certainly quite tricky.  When evaluating the value of a link there are a range of metrics that you can use to distinguish whether it is good or bad:

- Pagerank

- Domain Authority

- Citation Flow from Majestic SEO

- Number of Links & Unique Domain Ratio

- Social Media Signals – Likes, Tweets, G+, etc

With over a 1000 domains you can use SEOgadget’s link analysis tool, which can be copied and pasted over sets of 200 at a time to quickly identify link quality.   In distinguishing the quality guest post opportunities, I copied and pasted the various excel sheets  into one master sheet, then filtered the sites so that there were only sites with a domain authority 30 or higher.

Next Issue?

Having a set of 300 domains that you can guest post to is definitely nice; however how do you distinguish now from those 300 sites left over which are related to your industry?  Some of the domains are a bit vague, for example:

www.infocarnivore.com

www.globinch.com

www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk

www.boxofficebuz.com

These example domains don’t give off much of a clue in terms of what type of content they accept via guest posts and what type of content they promote on their site.  One method is clicking on these sites individually starting with the one with the highest domain authority and working your way down, but with 300 domains that can be quite time intensive!   Another option is to use a Google Customer Search Engine!

Google Custom Search Engine

Using the Google Custom Search Engine means that you are able to quickly type in your keywords within the search engine and know that these sites allow guest posting.   To make sure that you are not wasting time use queries such as:

“write for us” + Keyword

“inurl:guest” + Keyword

“contribute” + Keyword

As shown below:

There you have it 300 guest posting opportunities with a Google Custom Search Engine at your finger tips which can be found below:

PRO TIP!

Using Citation Labs Link Prospector you can further speed up guest posting opportunities by creating a campaign and exporting the domains into a new Google Custom Search Engine, giving you hours of fun guest posting opportunities!

Have fun!

Credits

First Image courtesy of Slaff from Flickr

Second Image courtesy of Paddy Moogan’s Presentation Slide

Further thanks to Paddy for using his data!

The post “300“ Epic Guest Posting Opportunities with a Google Custom Search Engine appeared first on Quaturo.

Are They The Future of Infographics?

The majority of HTML5 infographics certainly do look more appealing than your standard infographics that you will find online, however don’t feel obliged to go with them because they sound cool and are perceived by some as the next “big thing” in terms of “link bait”.  In some cases you may find that HTML5 might actually complicate what you are trying to convey and take up too much time.

Will I Get More Links?

This is probably a stupid question but one that has to be answered with the simple answer of no, you will not get more links just because you have designed a HTML5 infographic.  For any content marketing campaign regardless of whether it is the creation an infographic, there are two simple factors that can affect the success of the project:

1) Idea and Originality

This is probably the most obvious and yet it’s something that some online marketers are still not achieving.  The fact remains that if you have rubbish content, that no one cares about, no one will link to it.  If you lack creativity and ideas here are some great ways to start:

• Check out this blog post written by Amanda Milligan. She provides an extensive list of 21 tools to unlock your creative genius, helping you create fresh content ideas; 21 different tools for you to learn in 21 days, simple.
• There is a lot that can be taken away  from Rhea Drysdale’s “Blog Inspiration Series” to help you unlock that creative part of you; for example “Write in Bursts”, similar to idea generation, great ideas aren’t just going to come in one sitting. Think of an idea, leave it and revisit later.
• Once you have found that inspirational blog that really impresses you with their original content, why stop there?  Feed that imagination and use Google operator query related:rootdomain.com.  This will help you in finding other sites similar to the one requested for example: related:mashable.com, you might be surprised as to what other inspirational sites you find.

2) Content Outreach Strategy

So you have the ultimate piece of content but no one is linking, “in theory” great content produces links from all directions – however that is not always the case, here are some inspirational ways to improve your content outreach:

• If you are looking for places to upload your infographic, Paddy Moogan recently designed an infographic search engine on his website.   Type in your keywords and see what infographics pop up and then try and contact those webmasters to see if they will upload your infographic. Chances are they will, as these will be immense infographics that relate well to the websites target audience.
• A recent feature of MyBlogGuest is the infographics section where you can upload your infographic to help it go viral.
• Going back to your initial research – look for sites that inspired you for the infographic such as the sources and the data, and simply ask them if they would be willing to post the infographic.   Your chances are heavily increased as you have included the site within the infographic as a source.

Olympic 2012 Infographics

Finally in the spirit of the London Olympics, here are 3 HTML5 infographics that are definitely worth a mention, look and even a play.

Biggest, Fastest, Strongest

Looking at whether Olympians are born or made?  Showcasing 5 Olympic athletes and looking into all the attributes that make them elite athletes in their respective sports.

Could You Be a Medallist?

Since today, one of my favourite infographic of all time, built in the lovely retro 80’s arcade game style, this infographic lets you virtually compete your personal bests against a range of events from 100m running against Bolt to free style swimming.

How Would You Go Against Usain Bolt?

Like the title suggests, after watching the 100m race on Sunday night how would you finish against the current Olympic Champion?

Have any other Olympic infographics caught your eye recently?   Would be great to hear from you about it!

The post 3 Inspirational Olympic 2012 HTML5 Infographics & Some Thoughts appeared first on Quaturo.

(Image credit)

Why Google Webmaster Tools?

More link data, drill down by technique and save a load of time

The post Link Report Hacking (Or How To Drill Down By Technique & Save Hours On Link Removal) appeared first on Quaturo.

If you’re unfamiliar with who Jeremy Lin is, you can find out more about him here, here and here.

In short though Jeremy Lin is an American professional basketball player of Chinese decent who made it BIG this season in the NBA and a reason why he became so popular is because of his underdog story of everyday life struggles.  From just 1 week in February, from sleeping on his friends and family couches, he shot to fame and became a global NBA sensation.

So what exactly can we learn from this young man and apply it to our content outreach effort?

Here are 5 ways:

1)  Carpe Diem – Seize the Day

The main reason Lin got the opportunity to shine was because a lot of the first team players were out due to injury and personal reasons.   Jeremy Lin could have blew the opportunity, not made an impact and no one would ever noticed he ever existed, or be known as that “Asian / Chinese” player for the Knicks.    So make the most of your chances you have available.

Every day I am creating opportunities for myself to get my clients places on high quality sites, when you get these chances make the most of them, such as Tweets, G+, Likes & other Social Bookmarks.  Make sure your Content once placed does get noticed!

2)  Do What Works for You

Jeremy Lin is no Shaquille O’Neal / Michael Jordan, he is himself, he is a passer and a distributor pure and simple, added the fact he can score points as well.   He understands well his strengths, weaknesses and understands a system in place that works well for him.

One of the most amazing things about link building is that there is no definitive answer in the “right” way in getting that golden link opportunity.  Do what you have to do in order to get those high quality links built so try out different sources such as:

- Blog Synergy - similar concept to My Blog Guest

- Google Operator Queries – Try alternative queries rather than “Write for us” / “Guest Post” try inurl:guest post / “keyword” “roundup”

- Reading different blogs about content outreach such as this one and this one.

Whatever works for you just go for it, then review your process and refine.  @BenjaminEstes recently wrote a great post on the process of finding a great tool.

3)  Hidden Talent within the Ranks

It could have been easy to just assume because Jeremy Lin was from Harvard and Chinese he probably would not have been the ideal basketball player for many teams.  However good you think your gut feeling is may not always be right.

If you manage people day to day within a company you might like to “think” you know their strengths and weaknesses, but do you really?  My colleague Sean Revell might be titled “Organic Search Specialist”, but did you know he is also awesome at content strategy and outreach?

Don’t just assume because someone has the name of ”assistant” or “secretary” in their title they have no say whether your content goes up on their site.  It might actually baffle you that these people will be the ones that get your content to go live.

4)  Originality

Jeremy Lin is Jeremy Lin, no one has said in the media he is the next Kobe Byrant or Michael Jordan, because simply he is not.  He is just himself on court and off court.

You might read on sites like, SEOmoz, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine People and other Search Marketing sites, people talking and aspiring to be like their “SEO rockstar / SEO celeb.”  DON’T!

Not only will you get a lot more respect from your peers and colleagues, you might find that you enjoy your job a lot more!

5)  Staying Humble

Lastly let’s face it fame, money and media can change people.  So with all this hype that surrounded “Linsanity” – it really is surprising how humble Jeremy Lin has been.

So you’re ranking first for the most competitive term in the world?  Firstly well done, but do you shout and rave about it – probably not.   I have been really lucky this year by having the opportunity to go to 4 conferences, and at these conferences as much fun as it was talking to some of the speakers, I found that the people who attended these conferences were equally if not far more knowledge than the speakers on their topic.

Conclusion

Anyways whatever happens to Jeremy Lin at the Houston Rockets, I wish him the best of luck for the season!

Images courtesy of Chia-Yi Hou & nikk_la from Flickr

The post What Jeremy Lin Can Teach Us about Content Outreach & Life? appeared first on Quaturo.

What is PR?

Public relations is simply that, relations with the public. It is the value of two-way communication that helps build mutually beneficial relationships. Starting a discourse, managing and sustaining relationships….that’s what it’s really about. Yet in the humdrum of marketing speak, PR often gets muddled up with other functions of the firm. It borrows a little from each of these functions but let’s make it clear PR is not:

• Selling
• Promotions
• Media relations
• Public affairs
• Advertising
• Publicity
• Marketing

PR will always be about building and maintaining relationships through discourse and communication.

So if PR hasn’t fundamentally changed…what has?

The tools we use and the environment in which we operate have changed. The explosion of the internet has placed more power in the hands of the user and the way we consume information has changed thanks to fragmented media sources. Who cares? SEO cares. Social Media cares.

A New Tool

Social media is a communication tool that organisations use to communicate with their consumers. It’s a tool that gives consumers a voice and so there has never been a better way for organisations and consumers to have an actual conversation. Social media allows PR to reach people directly (whether it’s other businesses, customers or a target demographic). It removes the 3rd person journalist or blogger (bye-bye press release).

The guidelines brands should use to communicate on social media mirror basic PR principles. People on social media value trust and so organisational activities need to be more transparent. The attention span of internet users is greatly diminished so messages need to be punchy and relevant.

Link Building

Any SEO will tell you the importance of link building to any online marketing campaign. It not only helps you rank better but can bring you traffic, the type of targeted traffic that your website really wants. SEO’s have realised that key to building those great links is developing relationships with the people that can give you those links. And who is great at building relationships and having meaningful mutually beneficial conversations….the PR people!

PR people aren’t becoming search engine optimisers. Moreover SEO’s are recognising that they have to learn the skills of PRs to better do their job attracting those high value links.

Ever Changing Environment

 The fundamentals of PR have not changed. However new tools and changing environments are forcing other disciplines to collaborate with the PR department in new creative ways.  The future of digital will value people with PR skills as there is more of a need now to feed consumers appetite for engaging, high quality content. Firms need to know the avenues to push their content in order to reach their target audience and additionally know how to encourage those people to share and talk about that content.

The post The Changing Role Of PR appeared first on Quaturo.

Optimising local business pages effectively is such an easy way to get a heads up on the competition when it comes to ranking for a geographic location and a service (like “Southend + key cutting”), it’s a silly not invest in quality location pages.  Especially as mobile plays a larger role in search patterns, there hasn’t been a better time for businesses to brush up on their local pages.  Here are tips on how to create unique pages for individual locations which will stand out against competition and rank higher.

#1 – 3 Unique Sentences. Talk about the neighbourhood, what makes the building stand out, when the business moved into this location, the square footage, and other brick and mortar facts. Even Google’s Head of Web Spam Matt Cutts believes in this 3 sentence rule, having recently said “2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine.”

One stand out example is Heals of Guildford who give brief history of the Tunsgate Shopping Centre, how many square feet the location is, and what local landmarks are nearby.

#2 – Real Staff. There are people behind these businesses, so let those location managers shine through. Between photographs of local staff, small bios, and quotes, locations are much easier for users and search engines to contextualise.

One brilliant example I found was ABC Selfstore who feature images of the staff at each location.

In addition to this, they’ve gone the extra mile and provided quotes from the managers about what makes their location unique to others in the chain.

#3 – Authentic Quality Images. Instead of stock images of one storefront, real images of each location lend a hand to bringing environments to life. Search engines favour high quality images, so be sure your pixels are clear and bright. I’ve encouraged my clients to hire professional photographers to tour the country taking images of every single location to ensure each location page has a range of unique images.

John Lewis Oxford Street location has taken an artsy twist on this with a funky angle, women in bright coats, and a clear view of the logo – they’re trying hard to make an ugly building beautiful!

#4 – Relevant Title. You’d think this one is obvious, but having a relevant H1 tag seems to escape quite a few major company websites. Be sure the title includes the business name and it’s location.

For instance, Hertz may want to include their company name or the term “car rental” in their title “Old Kent Road – East London” to give the page a bit more context.

And lastly there are the basics – these alone wont help your content stand out, they are the minimum.

• Opening Times. Make sure these are accurate and match the Google+ listings
• Address. Simples.
• Map. I have a bias towards the Bing maps, which I’ve found lend a bit more colour & local details (like parking lots) to location pages like in this example of Foxtons in Woking.

In short, investing in quality local pages will pay off big time as relevant local searchers find your business.  Gathering accurate images, collecting quotes from staff, researching the location does take effort (and perhaps a summer intern), but it’s such a simple way to stand out.  Do you have any additional tips or tricks?

The post 4 Tips to Optimise Local Business Pages appeared first on Quaturo.