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Creating Compelling Content That Generates Links, Shares, and New Business

posted on January 30, 2013

content-magnetToday’s post is the last of a three part series where I’ve covered SERP Analysis and Brainstorming Content Topics. I hope to tie everything together with this final post where I will be discussing content generation. In this post I will be talking about audience identification, buyer personas, content development, and strategically seeding your content for maximum visibility. This is going to be a longer post, so let’s jump in.

Audience Identification

Before you create any piece of content for your organization, you need to be able to answer the following question: Who is this content targeted at? Your answer should be one of two:

  • This content is to attract potential customers and move them into the sales funnel

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Happy Belated Data Privacy Day!

posted on January 29, 2013

data privacyYesterday was Data Privacy Day. I can’t believe I missed it. It probably slipped by me while I was carefully deleting my browser history, cookie cache, old social media accounts, personal photos and every bit of contact information from the web. Whew, that was quite a job.

While I was doing that, sites all over the internet were posting reports to show how seriously they take this issue of internet privacy.

Google updated their transparency report this month to include a breakdown of legal requests by type. You can now see how many subpenas and search warrants were issued. They recieved 21,389 requests for information from July to December of 2012.

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Would You Pay to Watch Videos on YouTube?

posted on January 29, 2013

414567_money_life_and_cyberspace_-2Is there anything on YouTube you’d pay to see? Critics are skeptical but I think YouTube is on to something with their new subscription service.

According to AdAge, YouTube is about to launch a paid subscription pilot program with a few carefully chosen content producers. These channels will put their new content behind a paywall and users will have to pony up anywhere from $1 to $5 a month to gain access.

Says AdAge;

YouTube is treating paid subscriptions as an experiment. much like video rentals when it began in 2010. The initial group of channels will be small, likely about 25 at the outset. The revenue split from subscriptions is expected to be similar to the 45-55 split that is common for ads on YouTube. Partners will also have the option to include ads in their pay channels, but its unclear what form those will take.

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Yahoo’s Latest Results Good, CEO Mayer Cites ‘A Lot of Headroom’ in Search

posted on January 29, 2013

Yahoo_homepage_mayer-580x397You do realize that Yahoo is still lurking about the place, right?

Lurking about to the tune of $1.22B in Q4 of 2012 which was a 4% increase over the previous year’s results. It’s so interesting how the Internet industry has basically dismissed a company that does that kind of revenue. If I had to guess, though, I would say that CEO Marissa Mayer might not want it any other way.

You see the only news we get these days from Yahoo for the most part is good, or at least improving, results. Mayer has two quarters under her belt and is is giving indications that Yahoo is ready to become truly viable again. I, for one, am rooting HARD for their success.

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Pinterest Tests a New Look

posted on January 29, 2013

New Look PinterestNormally when a website or service tries a new look it’s interesting but when that site is all about images it gets very pinteresting (yes, I went there).

Pinterest, the darling of the ‘I don’t like to read, I only like pictures’ set is testing a new look with a few of its members. According to the Pinterest blog

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be testing an update to Pinterest.com with a small group of people soon. With this update, we’ve tried to take your feedback into account. We’re eager to learn even more from some of you during this test. Here’s some of our thinking behind the new look:

Easier to get around

We made the navigation more intuitive, so it’s faster to get to where you want to go.

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Google+ Grabs the Number Two Spot for Active Users on a Social Network

posted on January 28, 2013

We’ve got to stop saying that no one is using Google+ because clearly, it’s more than a blip on the social radar. The latest GlobalWebIndex report shows that 25% of global internet users are ACTIVELY using Google+. That’s what it says, but I’m not sure I believe it.

globalwebindex dec 2012 users

Facebook is still way ahead of the pack but look at the close race after that. YouTube and Twitter are neck-and-neck for active users but Twitter had the most growth over the past year.

Everytime we see one of these reports, we have to question the numbers because Google is more than just a social network. Since simply logging in to your Gmail can hook you to Google+, it’s easy to inflate the number of actual users. But GlobalWebIndex says that their numbers do represent ACTIVE users defined as “Used or contributed to in the past month.”

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Huffington Post to Serve Ads Alongside New Comment Conversations

posted on January 28, 2013

The ability to leave comments is both a blessing and a curse for content sites. On one hand, they’re an invitation to drown a site in spam, they can be nasty and they can start fights between members of a community.

On the upside, they can start fights between members of a community. Come on, you can say you hate it when people start taking swipes at each other but a good text-based donnybrook can drive a ton of traffic.

The Huffington Post has found a way to capitalize on that traffic with their new feature called Conversations.  When a comment gets replies, this button appears at the end of that section.

huffpost conversation button

Click through and you get a pop-up that looks like this:

huffpost conversation