SEO 2.0

Successful Blogging is Not About Becoming a Superstar

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:50:16 +0000

Last week one of the most successful bloggers in the marketing industry, Neil Patel has published a post called “How to Become a Blogging Superstar“. At first I felt like it was 2007 again, or even 2002. Why? I first started reading blogs around 2001 I think. I started my first blog in 2003.

It was a blog a about radical art mostly. For the small niche it covered and the language it was written in it was hugely successful. That’s one of the reasons I moved on to professional blogging at first and then writing in English later for an international audience in 2007.

I still earn at least half of my money by blogging, the other half by SEO.

I never was a blogging superstar though. I was successful, even popular but I wasn’t huge like many others before and after me. I think the main reason why I wasn’t is time and money. I had to do client work that paid immediately instead of blogging for revenue that would follow one day or was unstable depending on how many ads I sold etc.

So my blogging brought me more SEO clients and even blogging clients.

I started working for them and neglected my own blogs. Long story short, the last really successful blog I have worked for has gotten the UK Search Awards for the best SEO blog in 2011 due to my success but I wasn’t even invited to the ceremony. The company I worked for has sacked me instead shortly after.

I could start afresh and make my own blog as or even more successful as it was but it doesn’t feel the same as 5 years ago. It’s not just that I’m older or something and maybe a bit frustrated with building up someone else’s brand and getting kicked out.

It’s just that the days of superstar bloggers are over.

I have explained why in my stone age of blogging post and also my comment below the post by Neil Patel. That’s not the point of my post here. Whining around is not my style. I prefer to learn from mistakes and failures. I want to write about the most viable alternative for successful bloggers. Instead of becoming a blogging superstar there is at least one more preferable way to go.

It’s about being profitable on a small scale.

Neil Patel is not only a blogger, he is mainly an entrepreneur having a whole team of people working for him and earning money for him so that he has the time left to write. Becoming a superstar blogger takes a lot of time and perseverance. It takes not only effort, it also requires luck. Plus nowadays the competition is overwhelming as I suggested in my comment already:

Most established blogs have been acquired by large corporations like AOL or publishing houses who pay many writers to blog for them.

You don’t want to compete against the big guys, it’s not 2007 or 2002 anymore where blogging was new. As a standalone blogger you can’t match the manpower.

What you can do though is to become an authority in your niche or industry.

Ideally you have a business model for your blog from day one so that after a few months of hard work and steady gaining popularity you earn money with the blog directly.

You know blogging by itself doesn’t make you money.

You usually need a product or service you sell by becoming well known and respected through your blog. There are still amazing success stories like the one of Jon Cooper from Point Blank SEO, the 18 year old guy who made himself popular in the SEO industry like no other in just a few months. Still that popularity doesn’t secure you an income. As suggested above you need to earn money by something else than just the blogging.

There are several possibilities for those who don’t have a product or service to sell yet to make money with your own blog:

affiliate marketing
advertising (Google Adsense e.g.)
sponsorship

Personally I don’t like the affiliate marketing path because it compromises the integrity of the blogger too much. You have to praise affiliate products all the time and make sure people click and buy the products of your partners.

Other types of sites work better for affiliate marketing.

Comparison sites for example where you have several products compared and all of them are linked with an affiliate code. This way you don’t have to stretch the truth.

I have tried the other two models successfully though. I even combined them. I have created blogs with clients or for them in that they were sponsored. The blog has been paid by the client so that it spreads the word about the brand. The content was not necessarily about the client. It just covered the niche or industry the client wanted to get known in. The blogging worked great for SEO as well.

One of the blogs earned its money for both me and my client by Yahoo ads similar to Google Adsense but better. The blog was profitable for years until Google Panda has come. The blog was on a subdomain and as the main domain was hit the blog lost as well. The other blog has been sponsored for two years by a client who got both rankings of the main site through it and became popular as a brand.

Right now I work for clients who want to succeed the same way with their own blogs so I make it happen.

As long as you have a dedicated team who writes for the blog it still can work. One man show blogs are more difficult though. Still even today you can pick a niche too small for the huge competition and become profitable in it. Then it will still be your full time job to make it work. You can follow the advice of Neil Patel but don’t expect the superstar blogger status. You will be probably disappointed. Not everybody has to be like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. Lots and lots of bloggers can earn a living by excelling in their niche, industry or country.

I may tell you more if you want on how exactly I made my niche blogs profitable. Tell me in the comments in case you are interested.

* Lady Gaga: Creative Commons image by Graham Blackall.

in my comment below and in

Dark Horse SEO Blogs That Look Very Promising

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:58:44 +0000

You may already know that I’m one of the editors of the default /seoblogs slashtag on Blekko, the search engine contender for advanced users. After a few months of hiatus I have added a bunch of dark horse SEO blogs that look very promising to it.

Old established SEO blogs tend to become silent after a while due to the success of the bloggers

who get so much work after succeeding at blogging that they don’t have enough time to blog anymore. I’ve experienced this over the years as well.

Thus you may want to subscribe to these blogs for fresh voices on SEO and similar disciplines. Follow the links below to the actual SEO blogs:

Do you know any other SEO blogs you think are worth it to get added to /seoblogs on Blekko? Tell me about them in the comment section or engage with me on Inbound.org where I have found many of those mentioned above.

Btw.: Some of them are not really dark horse (anymore) like RKG or Point Blank SEO but far too many people still don’t know them!

* Creative Commons image by Eduardo Amorim.

Three Timeless SEO Strategies and the Tactics to Boost Performance

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:14:35 +0000

This is a guest post by Ryan Woolley, Vice President of Client Services, Response Mine Interactive.

It has been submitted to SEO 2.0 already several months ago and was never published due to some issues I encountered with it. As the techniques described here are “timeless” I think it’s not too late to post it even now. I added some emphasis and text decoration here and there.

We’ve reached our 10-year mark at RMI and it’s hard to believe that many of us at the company have been entrenched in SEO for equally as long.

SEO is a fascinating space to work in.

So dynamic, it feels like things are constantly shifting and evolving – and indeed they are. I have found however that while the tactics and the weight of their impact do change frequently, there are still some things that haven’t changed in 10 years.

This article explores both the tactical changes that occur, and well as the approaches that have been fairly constant for some time now. As far as the tactical side of SEO, we thought it would be an interesting exercise to illustrate the many tactics of SEO that we apply on a regular basis.

We rounded up our best thinkers on the subject and produced the SEO Tactics Chart. It might not capture the entire minutia, but it’s pretty close. While these tactics increase and decrease in terms of importance over time, it serves as a good snapshot of what is working for us right now.

Tactics are useless without smart strategy behind it though, and there have been a few things that have simply worked, and for a long time now. I don’t see these approaches going anywhere anytime soon. So if we are sharing the tactics, it’s only responsible to talk about some cool strategies that help ensure great performance. We’ve got lots of them, but here are three of my favorites:

1. Focus on Incremental Organic Revenue/Leads and Margin

Stop focusing so much on your rankings report. Most client ranking reports that I have seen over the past few years, well . . . suck. They are normally only a sample of what is actually ranking, and they take no consideration of the things that ultimately matter to a business. I stress the word “incremental” in this point as well, because

all too often I’ve seen SEOs take credit for things that they did not directly impact.

Seasonal lifts, or increases in brand term revenue are not mentioned – only the fact that overall revenue is up. Want to add real value to your program? Measure and show the year-over-year incremental lift in revenue, leads, and profit that you are driving. It’s amazing how quickly people stop being fixated on the rankings where they see the added revenue that is being driven.

2. Concentrate on Positions 11 through 15

I’ve seen click through rates increase 3X by moving sets of keywords only a handful of positions. Who goes to page two in the SERP anymore? Most people are refining their search if they don’t like what they see on page one. But this doesn’t mean that your page two rankings are trash. It’s actually quite the opposite.

Depending on the size of your site, the #11 to #15 approach can drive some pretty awesome impact.

We’ve worked with multiple sites that had hundreds or thousands of keywords ranking in positions 11 through 15. Solid terms too, ones that have high average monthly search volumes and strong conversion. Get to know these terms, and focus your attention on them. It will take little work to move them to page one, and the volume lift will be well worth the time it takes to move them just a few positions.

3. Put on Your Direct Response Marketing Hat

One of the best things I’ve ever done to improve my ability to think strategically about SEO was embracing paid search. To be successful in paid search, you have to get granular with the data, analyze at the keyword level, and test the hell out of things. These disciplines completely apply to SEO. In your Title and Description tags, add price points, percentages off, calls to actions, and create a sense of urgency. The impact is great.

We often see above average CTRs given the position we are ranking in when we change up our Title tag to be more direct response focused. And don’t stop with the T&Ds.

Be deliberate about what landing pages you are ranking for.

Take the time to map out your high priority keywords with the page that will have the best chance for conversion when a prospect lands there. The home page is not where you should be sending non-branded traffic.

Get consumers to the product page as quickly as you can and you’ll see the lift in sales. By combining the tactics within the SEO Tactics Chart with some of the strategies listed here, we have been able to drive amazing organic performance to sites that we work with. If you are not trying these yet it’s worth your time to test them.

About the Author: Ryan Woolley is vice president of client services for RMI, an award-winning digital agency that helps companies acquire more customers using lead generation programs. For more than a decade, RMI has generated billions of dollars in revenue for world-renowned brands in the b2b, healthcare, travel, and home services channels using its strategic customer acquisition approaches.

The Future of the Web According to Eric Schmidt of Google

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:15:59 +0000

“The Future of the Web According to Eric Schmidt of Google” is a post I have written a few months ago that hasn’t been published by the blog I have been writing for then. I don’t know why, they never even bothered to tell me about it. I guess it was too critical of Google. So here it is. Judge it yourself:

Over the years Eric Schmidt formerly CEO and now chairman of Google has been known for giving some intriguing insights into Google, the Internet and the future of technology. Some of his remarks were very controversial to say the least. Many things he has expressed were hidden between the lines.

All in all Eric Schmidt has given us lots to think about no matter how important you think Google is for your business. Eric Schmidt is one of the people who decide how the future of the Web will look like even now after having been replaced as Google CEO.

In fact it’s eye opening to read old interviews with Eric Schmidt and compare his words from back then to the situation today. Just recently I’ve reread an interview from 2007 where Schmidt stated, let me cite:

“Can users get their own data and e.g. give it to Yahoo? Schmidt says that Google has made a commitment never to track personal data (search history, Gmail etc). He says end users wouldn’t choose to adopt the services Google offers otherwise.”

Just think about it. How much their strategy has changed. They now not only are collecting all kinds of data, you can download it now as well. Many privacy scandals, the one with Google Streetview cars collecting Wifi spot passwords and reading private emails was just the worst one. At the same time Facebook has been even more negligent about privacy and people did not leave. Thus Google was able to change its approach altogether as well. They just realized that nobody really cares.

Google knew early how important user data collection is for manifold reasons. That’s the core of this quote even though it has proven to be wrong. Nowadays they use all kinds of tools to collect data about its users, Google+ being the foremost endeavor in this arena.

Siri is better than Google

Recently Eric Schmidt responded to the US senate and tried to make the officials believe that Google is not a monopoly by explaining that there is already a better new search out there. It’s the virtual assistant called Siri you can use on the iPhone 4S. While trying to convince the regulators that Google is no threat for the free market he revealed some intriguing insights about the future of search and beyond. He said that

“history shows that popular technology is often supplanted by entirely new models. Even in the few weeks since the hearing, Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S. As one respected technology site reported: “[E]veryone keeps insisting that Apple will eventually get into the search engine business. Well they have. But not in the way that everyone was thinking. Siri is their entry point.” Another commentator has described Siri more simply as intended to be a “Google killer.”

So Schmidt is trying to convince government officials that Apple’s Siri is the next big thing in search technology that actually will prevent a Google monopoly in this arena.

Of course everything Eric Schmidt says has some purpose. Here he aims to convince lawmakers that there is still some competition in the search industry and no need for regulation by the government. Likewise in the quote above he meant to explain why Google is trying to keep its users. It’s all about privacy evidently not about the Google bottom line.

Reading between the lines is always a good idea with Google spokespeople but Eric Schmidt has the special talent of the slip of the tongue. He once exclaimed that you can “just move” in case you don’t like the way Google Streetview depicts your home or that if you have something you want to hide on the Web you shouldn’t do it in the first place. Just a few months later he has silenced a former lover by removing her blog from the Web.

So any remarks by Mr. Schmidt have to be taken with a grain of salt but on the other hand they allow a sneak peek into the future search strategy of Google. No matter what Schmidt says about a particular subject the sheer fact that he mentions it means it’s important. Thus we have to listen to his words to predict Google’s next steps.

We know now that they really care about Siri. What does this mean? I expect that they will soon launch their own voice recognition based personal assistant to compete with Apple. Like with Android they will be late to the table but they will offer the better product I presume. Remember that they were late with search as well. There were dozens of search engines before Google but they have managed to overcome the first generation issues of the competing products and excel.

So while Eric Schmidt might aim to protect Google from regulators insisting on Siri being the next huge leap in search technology he indeed expresses how important this development is for Google. Google really needs to compete here as well in order to stay competitive overall in the future. It will.

Opinion is better than algorithms

What else is Eric Schmidt talking about? He explains why they acquired local restaurant review service Zagat and how they plan to introduce these reviews on Google Places and local Google search results. While he is of course keen on dismissing the notion that this move is an anti-competitive measure that endangers competing services like Yelp he points out how quickly Yelp is growing even despite the overwhelming competition from Google’s own local search results.

Eric Schmidt thus confirms how important local search and reviews will be in the future and that Google is of course planning to grab a substantial portion of this market. What could this mean in particular? I can imagine that sooner or later Google will show more of its own reviews instead of “scraping” third party content from sites like Yelp or TravelAdvisor. Both sites have complained about this practice of using their content.

So let me summarize: Eric Schmidt cares about identity, opinion and mobile search.

They want to know who you are, where you are and what you think. Then they want to use this data to provide other people with what they want. This is the future of search and the Web as a whole according to Eric Schmidt. It will be your personal assistant knowing everything about you and finding everything you need even before you ask.

* Creative Commons image by the WEF.

How Do I Get More SEO Clients?

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:22:13 +0000

Getting clients as an SEO is a no brainer in a way, still many people struggle at the beginning it seems. Recently I answered a question on Quora: “How do I get more SEO clients?” The person who asked added:

“I have a good SEO knowledge and experience, but I do not have a portfolio. Which would be the best methods for getting my first clients?”

My reply did not get the attention it deserved I think and thus I’d like to publish it here and elaborate a bit on finding clients for a SEO business.

The way it has worked for me when I started out is still the way it can work now I think. Rank first and then the clients will come.

Try to rank for local queries like [SEO your city] example: SEO Atlanta
Try to rank non-profit projects for free for their respective keywords and causes and show them off
Try to rank for SEO skills not many offer yet like [Siri optimization]
Try to rank for questions normal people ask who don’t know yet what SEO is, example [how can I succeed in Google]

Also go where the clients aka real business people already are on

niche forums
Yahoo Answers
LinkedIn Groups

Let others who already have a name recommend you or approach SEO companies whether they outsource (but please do not write generic spammy emails).

Don’t forget to socialize with your industry peers be it online or when possible in real life. Some of my best clients were a direct effect of social networking on various social site and also blogging here.

Without a blog most people won’t even notice you so it’s better to start socializing once you have some flagship content to offer on your weblog.

link out to others
mention them by name
follow them throughout social media
share their content
use a social CRM tool to manage contacts
reply to comments

Last but not least make it really really easy to contact you. You see I don’t do it here on SEO 2.0 as I have had more than enough clients throughout the years.

Your phone number has to be big and on top (the top right corner seems to be the best place for it).
Your mail address needs to be visible as well, ideally it’s not just “info@” but something like “sales@”
Add a very simple contact form (without a captcha!) because many peopel prefer those.

* Creative Commons image by John Martinez Pavliga.

Post-Panda Link Building for Affiliate Websites in 2012

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:37:43 +0000

Does link building for affiliates work at all after the numerous Panda updates? You may ask yourself these days this question.

A few weeks ago Jason Acidre of Kaiserthesage asked me to provide answers to two questions about link building for affiliate websites for a group interview on that topic. I had so many things going on that I forgot about it until it was too late. My answers remained unpublished. My insights were quite unique I think and weren’t addressed by the other experts I decided to publish them here on SEO 2.0

Jason asked:

1. What are the types of links that affiliate marketers should be focusing on building to their affiliate sites this year?

One of my main clients is basically an affiliate site. It’s one of the oldest and largest coupon sites in Germany. It has been hit by a penalty even before Panda was rolled out in 2011 on August 12th. They hired me and then I made them change their focus. In the past they were focusing on low quality anchor text rich text links from websites. So it was the old school SEO link building that has worked for almost a decade. I laid out a new SEO strategy with the following links in mind:

authority editorial links from highly respected, old and reliable domains ideally
branded links consisting of or containing the URL or brand in the anchor text
social media links from blogs, social sites like Twitter, Google+ or public Facebook profiles
diverse natural links from real people without perfect anchor texts, including “nofollow” links

We were out of the penalty within a few weeks and when the Panda high quality update was rolled out in Germany we ended up as one of the biggest winners both in our industry and in general as noted by third party analytics tool vendors and the tech press. The combination of

authority
branded
social
natural

links was crucial IMHO. In 2012 I would focus even more on the social media and blogger outreach.

2. Let’s say you have an affiliate site, how would you build links to your product review(s)?

There are at least two great ways to build link for affiliate sites. Either writing reviews of such high quality by themselves that they are really worth being linked to or you have to provide incentives to link to them.

Examples:

One of my favorite examples is the Amazon infographic that was published by Frugal Dad: http://frugaldad.com/amazon/
It garnered lots of authority links and was a blockbuster on social media.
Some renowned SEO bloggers like Aaron Wall managed to write such comprehensive reviews that they don’t need to add more compelling content. Just search for [review] on site:seobook.com and you will see what I mean. Of course his blog is already an authority so it makes it easier to get links.
For blogs that don’t have a following yet I do contests where other bloggers who take part can win prizes related to the review, ideally the product itself.
I do a lot of Influencer and press outreach. Whoever mentions products we’re an affiliate of and doesn’t sell them as well is a potential linker.

There are a lot more link building techniques I use, some traditional ones among them and some more creative ones as well it would take longer to explain. Maybe I’ll follow up with another post on that topic.

Don’t forget one thing though, your affiliate site has to offer even more value than the company that originally sells the products. As my client runs a coupon site the value is partly there but we had to improve the site a lot as well content-wise.

Always think about the things the manufacturer itself can’t offer, even negative reviews are a unique selling proposition here. How do you approach link building for affiliate sites post-Panda?

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

Future Proof SEO Strategy: Real Life Link Building

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:25:22 +0000

Over the years I have repeatedly expressed my belief that the only way to do proper SEO in a social media world is to forge relationships. I have never elaborated on it in a single post here on SEO 2.0 as far as I can remember. The only posts that directly dealt with it was “Think Relationships not Technology“.

Recently I was engaged in a debate on Google+ whether terms like SEO or even more SEO 2.0 do make sense at all these days and what possibly a future proof SEO strategy could be. You know nowadays the tools of the trade are changing each year. The hypes come and go but one thing stays, your relationships, unless you rely too much on tools and lose your contacts in the worst case once a social site goes defunct.

Your social relations on the Web have to be tool-independent.

That doesn’t only mean that you have to backup your contacts from Gmail, Twitter, Google+ or whatever medium. You need to remember the people you are engaging with ideally without having to use a tool like Twitter at all. You have to make sure that when Twitter or any other site you usually use goes down and you email a person who knows you from there or even call that person, that s/he knows who you are.

I remember in the early days, when everybody was still using nicknames, yes it was before Facebook and LinkedIn, people would literally gasp in surprise when I called them up after “meeting” them on the Internet.

I’ve done that a few times. I wasn’t stalking people. I was just contacting them by the phone after having engaged with them for years on social media of that time, like mailing lists or forums. So for me it was a logical or rather even overdue next step in our relationship. For many people the virtual and the real life have been two very separate things back then it seems. That has changed.

In the SEO industry people are meeting in real life all the time at conferences.

I rarely take part in conferences for many reasons I don’t want to explain here. When I do it’s like meeting a bunch of old friends. Even when meeting people I have never met before. Why? It’s our online past where they have linked to me or supported me in other ways I remember. I look up to other people based on their writing on the Web. Sometimes it’s both of the reasons to feel at ease with people you have never seen before.

How come these people recognize me? They only know my nickname, my avatar or even less, they only remember an article of mine. That’s sometimes enough to build a real life link. An article that has changed their approach to SEO might be powerful enough to be remembered ten years from now. Sometimes a little gesture may suffice. Beginners are often shy and consider industry icons to be untouchable. When such a person who is well known replies to a comment by someone who is new to SEO they will remember it for the next decade.

So it doesn’t take a lot of time and effort to form a relationship. You do not have to be friends in real life and meet every week in the pub. It may be fun but you don’t have to.

Some of my best friends have never seen my face.

Not that my face is particularly ugly or that I would hide or something. It’s just economic reality of the Internet times. You don’t meet everybody you know online unless you socialize only with real life connections from the start.

I have repeatedly explained how you can make people remember you. Giving before receiving is still the best thing you can do.

link out to peers on your blog
write about those who inspire you
approach people you admire on social media
converse with those who speak about the same topics online
stay in touch using different tools.

While link building as in collecting hyperlinks is often tedious and overtly technical the real linking happens between people. A hyperlink may break quite quickly but a relationship may get renewed on each new platform seamlessly. So ideally the people you exchanged links with years ago have befriended you on Facebook and now Google+ or maybe already on Pinterest. Whatever the ranking signals today are they may provide you with them.

So from now focus on real life link building via relationships with people not just the short-lived technical aspects of SEO.

Let me summarize by citing myself from the recent debate on Google+ I had with Lyndon NA. I added some text decoration:

How is SEO 2.0 future proof? It’s about the people not the tools.

I don’t care whether it’s StumbleUpon, Twitter or Google+ – The people remember me. When Google decides to ditch social media altogether the people will still know me and I will resort to swapping links with them ;-)

I don’t build links I build relationships with those who link no matter how they do it and independently of the tools and acronyms they use. They can call it LOL instead of SEO and I still will get the support.

Every tool and technique that aims to influence solely the current Google algo is just tactical. A long term SEO strategy has to venture beyond that.

More recent posts on SEO and relationships from other authors:

Image: Out of Milk by Voyager212.

LOL: The New Positive Brand of SEO!

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:22:03 +0000

SEO is ugly. Most people who hear SEO think spam. Inbound marketing is not SEO and can’t replace SEO. Nobody wants to go the easy route and say findability, after all clients would understand what’s going on and thus the magic of SEO would vanish. There is only one solution to rebrand SEO in a positive manner!

We need a new acronym!

I have ruminated in my cage in the mountains for a few weeks and now I have come up with the perfect solution! We have to adopt an already existing acronym everybody knows. Also it has be a very positive one. So no, we can’t keep SEO and just attach an 2.0 or something we need something better! LOL! Yes.

LOL as in Love of Links!

What is the most important thing both in SEO and SEO 2.0? It’s the links. In SEO you would swap them or buy them in SEO 2.0 you get them by building stronger real life links with peers, aka jaamits. In any way it’s about links, love and relationships. Thus LOL is the one logical rebranding of SEO.

I hope many people in the LOL industry will join me and spread the gospel of LOL.

LOL can even include the black hat SEO aspect. You just explain it differently: “Lunatics Offering Links” for example. In any case clients that is people who don’t get SEO also don’t get LOL so we can sell LOL to them for lots of money while findability and such crap could only bring meager revenue.

So from now on LOL is the new positive brand of SEO!

More recent posts on the bleak future of the SEO acronym:

* Creative Common image by Teodora Vasileva.

Why Google+ Engagement Surpasses Twitter Activity

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:05:07 +0000

Why there is more engagement on Google+ than on Twitter? Is there? You may ask. For me there is.

In the recent weeks some tech writers have complained about the perceived lack of engagement on Google+ – They base their complaints on a statistic by a third party that compares Facebook and Google+ time on site per month. In short according to the study people spend hours on Facebook and only minutes on Google+

We don’t have reliable data from Google itself so the FUD spreading.

Many already claim that Google+ is dead. Others focus already on the next social media darling Pinterest.

I don’t want to point out the fallacies of the report. Who am I to debate with some renowned tech writers. What I will do is to reflect upon my own experiences. In recent weeks and months my social media activity gradually shifted from Twitter to Google+ to the point where Klout says that over 85% of it takes place on Google+

I was quite wary of Google+ at first, I have wasted lots of time on Google Buzz and other failed Google services.

Nonetheless there have been several issues with Twitter and advantages of Google+ that made me in the end an avid Google+ user despite my longstanding success on Twitter where I have an active and often very helpful following. Naturally many people who follow me on Twitter also added me to to their Google+ circles but I have still approx. four times as many followers on Twitter than on Google+

How come then that I get engagement on each and every post on Google+ unless it’s really off topic and often my tweets remain unnoticed?

One of the main advantages of Google+ is that there are several kinds of engagement possible.

vote [+1]
reblog [share]
comment
mention [+name]
message [+name]

You may argue that you can do all of these and more on Twitter

favorite [star]
reblog [retweet]
comment [@name]
mention [@name]
message [dm]

Ask yourself though:

How do you use the favorite star compared to the +1 button?
How often do you DM people on Twitter and what for?
How often do you comment on tweets and why?

Your answers my differ from mine but usually these features are not inherently social. You favorite once in a while to remember a tweet. You DM people instead of mailing them for quick messages. You only comment on tweets when they are broken links or you disagree completely. At least that’s the way I do it and I see people do it who follow me.

I know that there are people who favorite a lot. There is even a site collecting the most favorited tweets. They are usually humorous or celebrity tweets. Some popular people also get lots of DMs on Twitter. When I ask direct questions that aren’t either too specific or too global I also get replies from my followers.

Nonetheless I see that most posts on Google+ get a few +1 votes, some comments and/or shares depending on the kind of message I share of course. On Twitter my impression is that only some tweets get a reaction at all. This is frustrating. It’s like talking to a wall. I don’t get that feeling on Google+

Another reason why Twitter sometimes appear to be an empty room full of chatter is that most messages are recorded or in other words automated.

I get so many links on Twitter in my timeline that I simply get overwhelmed. Of course I follow more people so that I get more links but it’s also beacuse people share via RSS feeds and many tools that schedule tweets. So it feels as if you are blind person amidst all kinds of people talking without knowing that you are the only real person in the room and all the others are just recorded messages.

It’s difficult to follow debates on Twitter. Google+ is like a blog. You have a comment section and the comments are viewed chronologically. You get a notification each time someone replies. On Twitter by default you can’t even add more than one @name in a reply or mention.

Most people have also hopelessly overloaded timelines so that they won’t even notice a debate. On Google+ the hotly debated items are obvious for all the visible interaction numbers around them.

I could go on like that for a while. The little things matter here. It’s not that Twitter was a hot start-up once which it isn’t anymore now that there are new hypes each year. Google+ is not better for engagement because it’s run by Google. That’s rather a disadvantage.

The whole Google+ set up is more conversational and shareable than the one Twitter where the people had to invent retweets first. That’s why Google+ engagement surpasses Twitter activity subjectively.

I still get much more traffic from Twitter than from Google+ despite all the engagement. Twitter is for quick and dirty link sharing. Google+ is for engaging in real debates. Do you like it? Does it make business sense? That’s a different question. I sometimes log out of Google in order not get distracted by all the Google+ chatter which is quite demanding. You could reply all day. I have work to do though.

At least all that Google+ engagement results in me being among the top 100 results for “people and pages” when you search for [seo].

You can’t eat engagement by itself. It’s still better than talking to a wall, even if some people hide behind it. Thus I share many more links by now on Google+ than on Twitter. I don’t care about amorphous traffic. I care about real people. I want real people to react to my shares and writings.

Your Business is Not Boring – Your Content is

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:00:05 +0000

People often ask me: How can I promote my boring business using SEO and social media? What they really mean is: I don’t want to create engaging content.

In fact most business is boring when you take that approach. Who cares for blenders for example? Why anyone in their right mind would ever share a blender site on social media? Yet one of the most successful social media campaigns of all time I would describe as “SEO 2.0″ is about blenders.

This is #3 in my 10 content strategy mistakes series. I have covered #1 the content definition and #2 content quality. So this is #3 boring content.

To me there is no such thing as a boring business.

In a way SEO itself is the most boring if you use the definition these people use. I mean there is nothing spectacular about SEO. Only a few experts understand it at all. There are no great visuals. You can’t make viral videos about SEO. After all it’s not skydiving or something. Real people do not care about SEO, only webmasters do.

I don’t want to explain how you overcome the boring business syndrome again. I have done that in the past. Just read my classic post: How Can Websites about Boring Topics Succeed on Social Media?

Today I just want to show that every business is potentially interesting to a much larger audience.

You just have to spice your content up a bit.

Some of my colleagues do it all the time and call linkbait. Thee days the buzzword for is content marketing. I prefer the matter of fact flagship content creation. It sticks out like a flagship but it’s just about creating the right content.

One of my clients in the early years of my freelance SEO career was selling toner refills. Now that’s a boring topic! Back then blogs were still so cutting edge that I couldn’t sell one to him. I did article marketing back then by writing for so called article directories. I have written dozens of articles about toner refills. I never even hesitated before starting to write one. Sometimes it took me just half an hour to write an intriguing one.

This German site still has its top rankings years after we parted. The client employed another SEO for a few months but asked me half a year later to come back. I was already booked a year in advance so I had to say “no”. The site still ranks after years despite article directories being virtually extinct in Germany after too many people abused them submitting low quality “spun” duplicate content.

What we also did was adding content to the site itself. Your content strategy needs to combine both off- and onsite content.

One issues with toner refills as and still is the impact on health. It’s not only the refill process, it’s laser printers by themselves. Conflicting studies claim that they are harmful or not. We didn’t dismiss the warning I just compiled a list of all the press articles from reputable sources. This list is still ranking number one or two for half a dozen of relevant search queries.

So for many “boring” business and markets all it takes a a bit research, creating a few pieces of valuable content and that’s it.

You don’t have to create viral videos about blenders blending iPhones or infographics about Amazon. Those can propel you to rank for competitive terms though. BlendTec, the company behind the hugely popular “will it blend” videos ranks behind the 3d software called Blender, Wikipedia, an entertainment site called blender.com as the first producer of blenders.

So think twice. Your business is not boring – your content is. You can change that. Create new better one.

Btw. you can create viral videos about SEO. There is even an SEO song created for exactly that purpose by one of the best ranking SEO companies in the world now at #6 for [seo] behind Google, Wikipedia and a “false friend” site. Only SEO.com and SEOmoz outrank them.