While publishing a guest post on a more popular site doesn’t automatically make it successful, your post gets a bigger audience.

How can you truly engage the audience and make them share it? Have you written blog posts which barely get any tweets or comments?

I haven’t written much, but I did learn something important worth sharing.

Know Who You’re Writing For.

When creating any type of content, e.g. a blog post, marketing copy, subject line or presentation, have a clear customer persona in mind. This ‘persona’ might be imaginary, but she/he will be consuming your content, so clearly address her/his needs. Does your content addresses her/his problems and adds value?

My most popular post to date, “Four Easy Tactics for Becoming a Must-Follow Account on Twitter” (published on MarketingProfs.com), didn’t start as a guest post. I wrote it for my friend, Juan, who provides tennis lessons for kids in New York. My goal was to show Juan (@TennisInnovator) how he can leverage Twitter. That’s all.

It resonated with the MarketingProfs audience and got over 600 shares because many readers do this every day: explain Twitter to those they work with. With a more detailed post available, they now can send it to their clients/coworkers who are just starting with Twitter.

From Vanessa Fox's presentation. Click image to view.

Below are some great resources to get you started in developing customer personas:

• Using Personas to Boost Online Marketing and SEO by Vanessa Fox
• Why Personas are Critical for Content Strategy by Kristina Mausser
• How to Easily Create Remarkable Content With Marketing Personas by Kirsten Knipp
• Persona-based marketing: Powerful tools for connecting with prospects and customers by By M. H. “Mac” McIntosh

With much more people spending their time online, tradition media trends don’t look great. Who likes to be interrupted by TV/radio commercials, direct mail pieces, or cold calls from telemarketers? Hardly anyone. For some fascinating trends in marketing, see my infographic called “Inbound Marketing Ecosystem.”

TiVo alone is not the killer of a live TV — it is the abundance of set-top boxes, apps, or services connecting our TVs to the internet:

• Roku Box: allows you to watch certain channels / video podcasts, pulled from the internet
• Netflix: gives you ability to watch a movie / TV shows using your game console, laptop, smart phone, tablet, etc.
• Hulu: gives an access to TV shows

Podcasts (delivered to your phone) or Pandora (streamed with your phone’s internet connection) are replacing the radio during our commute. Internet and blogs like Huffington Post have replaced many newspapers.

People seem to like that “pull” thing.

According to Nielsen, people in US spend 2.7 times more time on blogs & social media than email. And as “internet generation” grows up, more and more of content will be consumed on a pull-basis. Value for value — we’ll pay for the content we want to support. Directly to the producers — without middle men nor forced packages. For example, a popular podcast “No Agenda” is 100% donation-based. Hosts haven’t became the millionaires, but they do get by.

Leo Laporte, a guy behind TWiT with dozens of different video podcasts, has an option to “tip” him on a website. He gets his yearly salary of $100K from the tips, reinvesting the balance into the business.

There is no reason I should pay for the cable companies’ “packages” of channels I will never watch. I want to go directly to the source!

How to lead in the pull-based market?

The answer is pretty simple: produce amazing content. Customers will find you whenever they realize a need for your products/services/content.

Recently, a comedian Louis CK went direct-to-consumers and topped $1 million in sales while charging $5 per download. He did not care about the piracy and files did not contain any restrictions. Granted, Louis CK had a lot of fans to begin with, but producing really good stuff will get you noticed. It won’t make you a $1 million overnight, but in the long run — it might.

Think of it as “pay-per-like” model

As I understand, with the cable packages, content producers get paid even if you never watch certain channels. With Netflix or Pandora, royalties are distributed per view/listen.

I think, we all should put our best effort every time — like we are getting paid by number of “Likes”, tweets, shares, inbound links, etc.

Imagine if artists wouldn’t get their royalty if a person listening to the song skips or “thumbs down” it?

Imagine if royalties were distributed after you watch a movie. Let’s say you pay $8 per month for Netflix and watched 8 movies ($1 per movie). At the end of the month, you can give a “bonus” to the movies you liked by taking  some royalties away from the movies you did not enjoy.

Adopt this mindset today!

This model would force production of the best content and Hollywood wouldn’t be able to get away with just a great trailer — movie would have to meet expectations set by it.

If more talented people start following Louis CK, we might see this model in action, but even today, would it hurt to put out the best content in the world?

I took it to the dealer-recommended garage, where they took care of everything in less than 30 minutes, charging me $100, mostly labor (“part” was a piece of metal). My first thought was “since it took so little, can you charge me less,” but I kept quiet. These guys were real pros and had lots of experience fixing similar problems.

If an amateur mechanic was fixing a car and it took him 2 hours, I would think that a hundred dollar charge is a steal. Perception is not the reality!

So, who are these experts?

Experts, by definition, are GREAT at what they do. They truly deliver VALUE. They are worth the money and won’t waste your time (costing you more) on unnecessary things.

There are also fake experts, who are the opposite. They will take your money and will do everything possible to make you think that it was worth it. (Just like an amateur mechanic spending 2 hours on a repair, instead of 30 minutes, would make you perceive he worked “harder,” even though he wasted 1.5 more hours of your time.)

Fake experts will spend their time on writing a 30-page report on what you can improve regarding your website, instead of focusing on getting 2-3 things done which can really move the needle.

Real expert will admit that you’re doing a lot of things right to prevent any further time waste.

Fake experts will never admit that you’re doing things right, and will waste even more of your time.

Experts help you get something improved

Experts get hired to help you with something. If you want to convert more people on your site, a document which tells you exactly how to do it is worthless without an action. Experts will work with you on getting things done, because when implemented, your site will convert more people and you will be so much happier with your investment.

Tom Critchlow of Distilled (SEO consulting) presented about “Getting Things Done” on a seminar in Boston with the primary message: “When dealing with clients, key deliverable is change.” What did Distilled do to address that? They reduced length of documents (not many clients were reading them) and focused on things which drive change: pre-delivering everything, improving processes, training, writing specs, and improving communication.

Their advice is valuable, but when it is acted on, it becomes priceless — making sure you’ll come back for more. Great consultants know that and reinforce the value they deliver.

One thing to remember: what’s the opportunity cost?

In economics, an opportunity cost is the cost of not pursuing the next best alternative with your limited resources (in our case, your time or money). Take value of your time in account when assessing your investments!

Coming back to the car repair example.

If my time is worth $100 per hour:

• Scenario 1: expert who repairs a car in 1/2 hour for $100. In reality, I spent $150
• Scenario 2: amateur repairs a car in 2 hours for $100. In reality, I spent $300. Even if this mechanic charged me only $50, I’d still be better off going to the expert.

How do your investments look like when you account for the hidden costs?

Lately, I became more interested in mobile web and creating sites for phones. All kind of stats and trends tell us that it is already a huge market and is growing like crazy. Lots of people in the US own a smartphone with full-browser capabilities, but mobile networks are still slow to support larger, desktop versions of sites. Many website owners hurry to develop a “mobile strategy.”

If you’re one of them, I recommend watching “Mobile First” presentation by Luke Wroblewski (55 mins).

The key points are:

• People come to your site with a particular task in mind.
• Mobile limitations (small screen size, slow download speeds) allow us to FOCUS on what matters to users (instead of blasting site with pretty graphics, promotions, and banners).
• Know what your site visitors are there for, design your mobile site to complete those tasks, and then carry over the same structure to a desktop site.

I agree with Luke’s approach 100%. It makes you focus, makes your website super-fast, and helps your visitors accomplish their tasks.

Now, what’s mobile strategy has to do with the SEO?

If you follow SEO news, you’ve heard about  Google’s Panda updates which algorithmically give higher rankings to “quality sites.” “Quality” is a vague term and many site owners are wondering what it means to Google.

In my opinion, any site or page which accomplished user’s task or solves her problem is a quality site. Search engines are likely to agree with this — lower bounce rates & users are not coming back to click on another listing / refine their search.

From this point of view:

• Does design matter? Your site needs to look professional, but overall — not really.
• Do fancy jQuery transitions help users get their task accomplished? Nope.
• Do custom fonts justify decrease in site’s load speed? Absolutely not. If you use Arial instead of Futura, I will still buy from you as long as you have what I need.
• Do big banners help your users find what they need? They might, but is there a better approach? You bet.

All the things above should never make a cut for the mobile site. They shouldn’t even make a cut for a full-sized site, but asking “Would it be good for mobile site?” might give you a good indicator on importance of the elements.

Furthermore, do things above matter for search engines? Nope. They are actually ignored by search engines.

So by focusing your time & efforts on creating a site which best serves your users and accomplishes their tasks as part of your mobile strategy is a great SEO strategy as well.

Things which help complete visitor’s task are important.

If you have an e-commerce store, what will be good for a mobile site?

What’s good for mobile is good for SEO. What’s bad for mobile doesn’t help SEO. Focus on the user and rankings will follow (along with the happy users).

You have certain goals for your website, whether it is to sell products or generate leads. You need to focus. With monitors going up in sizes every year you have a lot of real estate on a homepage, but how much of stuff really matters? I’ve seen homepage banners actually detracting from site’s value — after doing A/B test, results showed that clicking on a banner distracted visitors and made them LESS likely to convert.

Look at your website from prospect’s point of view. 

Is is helpful? Contains necessary information? Finally, for each element ask: “Would I have this on a mobile site?”

First – emphasis on “View All” pages.

No changes required for your site, as long as your ‘View All’ link/page is crawlable or all pages have a rel=canonical pointed to the view all version.

Maile mentioned that they found out that users prefer to get full content rather than clicking “next” multiple times, AS LONG AS it doesn’t add too much latency. Perfect use – text-based content like news article, which won’t add extra seconds to download it. However if you own an e-commerce store, showing 200 items at the same page will get very slow because of the pictures… Read on.

Exciting second announcement: Google now supports markup for the “series content” (paginated): rel=”prev” and rel=”next” – both need to be specified in the <head> section of the page. Official announcement is located on Webmaster blog.

There were a lot of questions regarding the use and whether it will work better for paginated content (e.g., an article broken down in pages), archives (e.g., New York Times topic page about Obama) which only has links to the articles, or for the user-facing, paginated sitemap. Maile made it clear that Rel=Prev or Next has been designed to address all of the above. 

So, why is it super-exciting for e-commerce sites?

Most of the e-commerce websites have a natural problem of “thin content” on page 2, 3, … n of category pages. You might have invested in a great content on your 1^st page of kitchen widgets, but we cannot repeat the same content on other pages (you’d run in the duplicate content issues). So now when you implement rel=prev and rel=next, Google will treat your category page as series:

What’s really cool too, your inbound links and PageRank will be aggregated for the “series content” & Google will try to show a most relevant page to the searcher.

So for example, is your Page 1′s PageRank is 4, but pages 2-3 don’t have any PageRank, now PageRank is carried over and pages 2-3 get the relevance of first page’s keywords in addition to the content already on the page.

Another GREAT use of Series / Rel=Next, Rel=Previous are in reviews on product detail pages.

If you have a product with lots and lots of reviews, they need to be separated at some point. Pagination is inevitable, but do short reviews REALLY bring enough unique content so they are indexed separately? Doubt it. Moreover, in my experience, Google won’t even crawl pages beyond 2 and 3.

With implementing Rel=Prev, Rel=Next, you will be getting:

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!! Notice that now you’ll be able to rank for ALL the long-tail keywords customers have added in their reviews!

Things to keep in mind.

-          You still need a unique <title> for each page (e.g., add “Page n” at the end).

-          If you’re currently pointing rel=canonical to the first page, you need to stop as it is designed for duplicate content pages and will advise google not to index paginated content.

-           It is good for ALL paginated content.

Read more:

Google Official posts: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”, View-all in search results

Vanessa Fox’s post on SearchEngineLand

Photo by Joelk75

When you shop for yourself, does it take long to buy something? Usually, not.

When you shop together with a spouse, how long does it take you now? (Let’s say you want to get a great gift.) You may be a great shopper, but it would still take longer than shopping for yourself and making decision on your own.

Having a particular problem in mind (a gift), deadline, responsibility which comes with your selection, and another decision-maker increases your time-to-purchase and begins to look a lot like business’.

Businesses can’t afford making an impulse purchase or not considering alternatives, which altogether makes B2B conversion funnel longer. Whether you cater to mom n’ pop shop, bakery, or a nonprofit, they all need to pitch few alternatives to co-workers and confirm they decision with somebody else. Buyer wants to make a good decision and end up “looking good” in front of others (will you look good when your gift is opened?).

Businesses catering to other businesses want an immediate sale.

Far too many PPC and SEO efforts in B2B industry focus on an immediate sale. Whether you shop for business cards, new copier, or promotional products — the majority of companies will land you on a page and call your attention to that “buy now” button. Yes, small fraction does end up buying right there, but over 90% are simply in a research phase. What do you do about them?

Address their problems.

Linda Bustos of Elastic Path recently wrote Personas 101 post, which talks about developing buyer personas. Basic idea is that your visitors aren’t the same and different groups (“personas”) look for different things. You goal is to know how can you solve their problem effectively. Some ideas might include creating:

- Guide (“12 things to watch out for when buying a copier”)

- Checklist (“Ultimate checklist for first-time buyers of promotional products”)

- Tips or Advice (“10 things to know before ordering business cards”)

Depending on value of your content, consider making it a downloadable PDF and asking for some of the prospect’s information before letting them download it. Congrats, you’ve just generated a lead!

Other tips regarding your awesome content.

- Have a landing page + short URL for your content piece.

- Have a common question on the phone? Direct those first-time callers to a landing page.

- Brand it and have social sharing icons (shared content = landing page).

- Only ask for information you know you’ll use (e.g., for segmentation). Extra fields will negatively affect your conversion rate.

- Provide value first, soft-sell second.

While visiting your typical tourist places, one thing kept striking me — if you want to take pictures, you need to pay. Varying from two dollars (Rundales Pils in Latvia) to as high as ten (Romanian Palace of The Parliament), you got to purchase that sticker!

Instead of allowing visitors to take photos & show to their friends, share on Flickr, do free advertising and cause others to say “Wow, where is this?,” museums are so shortsighted and prefer short-term earnings.

While you aren’t likely in business of attracting tourists, what other roadblocks do YOU setup to prevent your customers promoting you?

• Did you set up a Foursquare account so people can easily check-in?
• Do you have a free Wifi at your place of business?
• Do you have social icons placed throughout your website?

Sinaia, Romania

Make SPEED your competitive advantage! (While you can.)

Yesterday

In the past, some companies would invest in process automation. This company would reduce their costs and make itself more competitive. Over the time, others would implement similar automation and this would level the playing field for all. In fact, automation+efficient processes would become a requirement to enter the industry.

Point: be first to gain first-mover advantage; be last to catch up with competition.

Today

Companies like Zappos or services like Amazon Prime make speed their competitive advantage. Order shoes today, you’ll try them on tomorrow. Order any household item, you’ll use it in 2 days. What a difference from placing a catalog order a decade ago!

Speed is not limited to processes

Processes are very important, yes, but speed optimization is not limited to them.

How fast does your website load? Research, done by multiple companies, shows that slower load time impacts your exit rate and ultimately, conversions. Moreover, slow user experience negatively impacts long-term behavior.

How fast are you to reply to customers’ emails?

To spot a tweet mentioning your brand?

To fix a problem?

To come up with a cool idea and send it to theChive?

Become obsessed with speed

Recently, I read “In the Plex” by Steven Levy where I learned that Google is obsessed with speed.

In the early days of Google, Larry Page spoted tenths-of-a-second delays when delivering search results and ordered to improve load time. This kind of obsession paid off big time! Are you ready to improve your speed?

1. Getting a Buy-In From Others

Getting buy-in might seem like an easy task, given that testing will allow you to make data-driven decisions. However, changing the company and introducing this “culture of testing” might be harder than it seems.

You (the person/team in charge of conducting tests) need to be involved in every new web project and estimate an impact of it. You’ll need to pick good candidates for the AB test and advise web development/design teams on how to best implement the test. Sometimes, this might delay the project, since testing complicated functionality changes like a checkout process will require programmers to run 2 code sets simultaneously. Also, something that marketer would like to implement immediately to 100% of visitors (“that has to work!”), will now need to be split tested, delaying full impact of the change.

Unless you have a buy-in of the whole company, people might avoid discussing new changes with you, since it creates more work and/or delays their project.

2. IT Involvement: More Than Just Implementation

Companies providing testing software like love to say that after an easy implementation (couple javascript codes + marking up testing areas), ecommerce group is then on their own and can test without an IT involvement. Technically, it is true, but only if you’d like to be limited to testing static elements like headlines, colors, call-to-actions, etc. To test bigger (and remember, big impact rarely comes from small changes), you’ll need to have IT involvement and resources. Like an example mentioned above (testing a checkout process) or anything else dynamic like product details page, cross-sells, pricing — you’ll need to have your developers involved.

3. Statistical Validity of Results: Need Conversions!

Small websites are affected by this more than the bigger ones. Ideally, you’ll need lots of traffic AND about 100 conversion for a standard A/B split test in order for the results to be statistically valid. Test will need to run for at least full two weeks (to compensate for weekend/weekday traffic) to show you lift/drop in conversion. If that change is relatively small, test will need to run even longer to conclude which recipe performs best (confidence level should be at 90%+).

This is something to take in account when deciding on the next test. While you technically can run test on any page, it all comes down to the time you’ve got for the test (e.g., you don’t want to test something for 6 months to get statistically significant results).

4. Multi-Variate Test (MVT)

MVT is a common feature, which uses sets of AB/N tests and Taguchi methods to decide statistically, which combination of elements yields best results, without actually having to test all possible combinations.

Doing a multi-variate test sounds like a great idea, but, again, it runs into the problem of generating enough traffic and conversions. MVT takes longer. Because it’s based on AB tests, you need to decide whether you’ll run several AB, testing one element at a time, or a single MVT — testing them all at once. Unless you own a big website, MVT really shouldn’t be a selling point for you.

5. Small Changes ≠ Big Lift

To conclude, I’d like to mention again that most of the time, big changes will yield big wins (or losses). You’ll need to know that your company is ready to test BIG, to implement the testing culture, and to take bigger risks.

Some posts worth mentioning:

- A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: Exceptional Web Copy by Cameron Chapman / KISSmetrics

- See what Seth Godin has to say about “A culture of testing”

Tweet

Yes, I’d like to spread Seth’s ideas & according to the list he presented, I’m spreading it because:

• Seth is expert in business/entrepreneurship
• Posts are timeless
• He’s generous & shares expertise (even though webinar isn’t free, his blog is)
• He writes short posts
• He doesn’t post off-topic
• He doesn’t interrupt posts with links
• He doesn’t promote himself or his books
• Makes me look good & smart
• I appreciate him generously blogging (for free) and want to give back by spreading his ideas
• I’d miss his posts if they disappeared from my feed

What about your company’s blog? Why customers follow it & would they notice if you stopped posting?