Why Does Great Content Fail?

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Why Does Great Content Fail? Posted: 02 Nov 2011 12:44 PM PDT Posted by Dr. Pete With every skirmish in the ongoing war over SEO hats, I inevitably hear someone say “I built great content, and no one cared – content marketing doesn’t work.” I’m not here to deny it – sometimes, “great” content falls flat on its face. Part of the problem is that we throw around that word like it’s self-evident (“Build great content! Tada!”), but the other part is that we just don’t give our own content a chance to succeed. Too often, it's not the fault of the content or even Google, but what we do (or don't do) after we create that content. Here are a few ideas for evaluating “great” content and putting it into action… Don’t Listen to Your Mom Before you even start promoting your “great” content, take a minute to make sure it’s as good as you think it is. Have you ever seen an American Idol audition where some kid came out spouting how they were God’s gift to singing and dancing and then proceeded to look like Charlie Sheen doing a one-man show? Apparently, they never performed in front of anyone but their mom. Don’t trust your fans, when it comes to the really important content. Find some critics and listen to them. The content that people will come back to time and time again usually didn’t get written in one draft. What Does “Great” Mean? Just the word “great” is a minefield of ambiguity. We all have some ability to judge quality, but too often our measures of greatness are based on hindsight – a blog post was “great” because it got a lot of traffic, Tweets, Likes, etc. I don’t think there’s any one recipe for great content, but I have seen some common themes, at least in my own content marketing successes. Most great content will match at least one of these: (1) Great Content Has Credibility As a consultant and subject-matter expert, my most successful content has been the pieces that really distill years of my own experience. Don’t cover a topic if you don’t know what you’re talking about. On the flip side, don’t underestimate the value of your own expertise, even if you think your subject matter is boring. (2) Great Content Takes Real Effort Not all great content has to cost a lot (plenty of unknown brands have proven that), but I think that most great content takes time and effort to create. If you know someone poured themselves into a piece, whether it’s a well-researched post, a well-edited video, or a gorgeous infographic, it says that they respect your time and intelligence. Real effort resonates with people. Respect your readers. (3) Great Content Is Actionable This is more a feature of informational content than link-bait, but great blog posts, for example, leave you walking away with something useful. Whether it’s SEO tactics, recipes, or home-improvement tips, if you leave with actionable knowledge, you’re going to remember that content. Give people useful information and help them put it into action. (4) Great Content Begs to Be Shared On the link-bait side, great content is something you instantly want to show others, whether it’s out of awe, disgust, or just to show that you’re cool. When you’re done creating a piece, are you eager to hit “publish” or are you just glad that it’s over and you can go home? Create content that you’re proud to share, not just because it might go viral, but because you’re the one who has to share it first (see below). Market Your Marketing The great irony of content marketing is that you have to market it. We’d all like to write content that everyone links to just by sheer virtue of its greatness. Some people will argue that that’s “pure” and marketing is somehow a stain on real greatness, but (pardon me) that’s bullshit. Wanting to be recognized solely for our virtues is nothing more than an ego trip. If you sit around waiting for a job because you think you’re a genius, but never apply or never talk to anyone, good luck. Your ego is in your way. The same goes for content. Content marketing requires marketing, and that starts with you. (1) Reach Out to People Remember what I said about creating content that you can’t wait to share? Well, here’s your chance. If you churn out crap just to build links, you’ll be embarrassed to tell people about it, and you should be. If you know you built something great, you’ll be eager to show your friends and peers. So, show them – contact people directly and let them know you have something great. Don’t just tweet it once and forget – email people, IM them, call if you have to. (2) Time Your Launch Too often, we put hours or days into a piece of content and then just hit “Publish” when it’s done, like 8pm on a Sunday when our whole industry is on planes to a conference that starts Monday morning. Plan your content publishing like you would plan a product launch: pre-announce that it’s coming, time your launch well, and don’t be afraid to re-announce. You’re not going to get anyone bent out of shape because you tweeted the same link in the morning AND the afternoon (as long as you don’t make a habit out of it). Only a small percentage of your followers are paying attention at any given moment. Although I think timing depends a lot on your audience, Dan Zarrella has written some great content on the science of timing content. HubSpot also has a tool called TweetWhen that you can use to see when you’re most likely to be re-tweeted. (3) Have a Promotion Plan It’s funny how we’ll pour our hearts and souls into a piece of content, but then, as soon as it’s finished, we’re on to the next project. Then, we wonder why no one cares. I have to admit, I’ve been guilty of this one too many times. Don’t forget the importance of what happens after you publish your content. Better yet, build a marketing plan that covers those next steps. Hit your social media outlets, actively build links, do guest-posts on relevant sites, etc. We see content go viral and assume it just happened by magic – 10% of the time, that may be true, but the other 90% someone hit the streets and made it happen. (4) Post It Somewhere Else It’s tough to put a lot of time into a piece of content and not let it live on your own site, but sometimes you need to go where your audience is. Take Oli Gardner’s massive Noob Guide to Online Marketing published earlier this year on SEOmoz. Oli could’ve easily posted this guide on Unbounce, but he opted to target a slightly different but still very relevant audience. Over 4,000 Tweets and almost 100K visits later, it’s hard to deny that this tactic had a positive impact for his reputation and company. Greatness Isn’t Instant One last tip: At the speed of the internet, we tend to think that every success is overnight. Some content takes days or even weeks to make its mark. I think the days of trying to make Digg's home-page left us with some bad habits, and one of those is giving up on content that doesn’t explode in the first hour after it’s published. It’s nice when it happens, but too often that explosion just left behind the charred remains of servers and nothing but some traffic logs to show for it. If you believe your content is great, give it a chance. It could catch on because of a guest post, a well-placed link, an interview, or any of a hundred factors that happen in the days and weeks after the content goes live. Even if you finally decide it did fail, learn what you can from it. People want to bank everything on one-shot content, but even the best content marketers don’t succeed 100% of the time (I’d say they’re lucky to bat 0.200) – failed content still carries valuable information, and you can build the next piece of great content on top of it. Do you like this post? Yes No

Advanced Google Analytics - Tips and Tricks Posted: 02 Nov 2011 05:07 AM PDT Posted by Fabian Alvares This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Google Analytics affects everyone in search engine marketing (unless you use another analytics package!) but not everyone knows how to take full advantage of it. To take full advantage of it we have to share knowledge and that's what I'm here to do. I'll be sharing some great advanced segments, how to do multiple goal conversion tracking and the secret success behind cross domain tracking. 1. Advanced Segments Advanced segments provide you with the ability to take your reporting up a gear. So many people mention it, but how and what should I be doing? Asking that question in a mirror won't provide any answers but here's something that will.... Social media segment If you are paying for social media traffic then it's imperative that you check the value it yields to sales i.e. does it even generate any direct sales? Here's how to find out: Click on the My Site tab > Advanced Segments > Then click on +New Custom Segment > Choose a name for it > Then click on +Add a dimension or metric > then add "Source" as a dimension > have it as "include" and "matching regular expression" then using a bit of regex, type the following in the field. (facebook|twitter|linkedin|stumbleupon|youtube|vimeo|myspace|delicious|reddit|tumblr) Click on test segment (check that it works!). Obviously find out the most relevant ones to your site and build up an accurate social media segment. Apply this to your reports and you can now segment your social media channel. Try cross tabbing by goal conversions to find out which channel is bringing in the beans. Long tail keywords segment Another useful advanced segment is to understand the long tail demand. Follow the same methodology to get into the advanced segment dashboard but follow this: Click on +Add a dimension or metric > then add "Keyword" as a dimension > have it as "include" and "matching regular expression" then type the following in the field. ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){2}\s*$ Applying this segment to your reports will show you keywords with greater than two words. To filter more or less keywords simply change the number, for example if I wanted searches with greater than four keywords then I would modify it as follows: ^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){3}\s*$ When applied to your reports it will show you keywords with greater than three words. Non Branded keywords segment This is useful if you want to understand search without any branded terms. Follow the same methodology to get into the advanced segment dashboard but follow this: For this to make sense, imagine my company is called John Lewis. Click on +Add a dimension or metric > then add "Keyword" as a dimension > have it as "exclude" and "matching regular expression" then type the following regex in the field. (John|Lewis|Jon|Luis|Lews|…….) Exclude these terms and the misspellings of the brand terms. Applying this segment will allow you to differentiate between non branded keywords. I wonder how relevant this will be to SEOs with the introduction of SSL Search by Google? 2. Multiple Goal Conversion Tracking Goal tracking is simple, name your goal, add your goal URL i.e. /thank-you, setup a funnel etc. That's all great but let's say we have two paths to get people to register on our site as follows: Path 1 - www.fabian.com/my_work = they registered from my home page and landed on my dashboard page. Path 2 - www.fabian.com/download = they registered in order to access my free carpet samples. Both destinations lead to a registration, so how do you create a goal with multiple URLs? Here's what to do: Get to the goal dashboard > name your goal > select goal type as "URL Destination"> then enter some regex into the Goal URL as shown below > on the "Match Type" field, select Regular Expression Match and save it. /(my_work|download)$   You can remove the dollar ($) symbol at the end of it, if you want to capture dynamic elements. To see a breakdown of the goal and to check that it is recording the correct pages, use the Goal Verification Report or Goal URLs (new analytics). I've tested this and it works 100%. 3. Cross Domain Tracking The GA tracking cookies are first party cookies, which mean they can be used only by the website that sets them. If a visitor decided to leave the site to a different domain, the tracking cookies won't work. For example if your site accepts third party payments on another site then you will need use cross domain tracking to preserve the referral. For cross domain tracking to work you need to have the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) on both domains and the third party site must not prohibit query string parameters. Step 1 – Modify the GATC Go to Analytics Settings > Tracking Code > Select "Multiple top-level domains" radio button > Google Analytics will provide you with two new lines of code as shown below. _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']); _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]); It's possible to get a cookie with a domain of www.seogadget.co.uk and .seogadget.co.uk which would mean getting more than one set of cookies per visitor. According to Justin Cutroni, it's usually best practice to use the primary domain of your website instead of the 'none'. For example I would use '.seogadget.co.uk' to avoid multiple instances of the Google Analytics tracking cookies. Step 2 – Transferring the cookies Analytics has two methods to transfer the tracking cookies between the two domains which are _link() and _linkByPost() Both extract the cookie values from the cookies and place the data in the destination page URL as query string parameters. Imagine our primary domain is www.seogadget.co.uk and our 3rd party payment site is www.moneyforfabian.com then apply the following: Example 1 = If your website transfers the visitor between domains using standard anchor tags, use _link() <a href="http://www.moneyforfabian.com" onclick= "_gaq.push(['_link', 'http://www.seogadget.com']);return false; ">Buy Now</a>']);   Example 2 = If your website uses a form to transfer visitors between domains then you need to use _linkbypost() <form name="post_form" action="http://www.moneyforfabian.com" method="post" onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_linkbypost', this]);"> Once you've applied either _link() or _linkByPost(), your site visitors will be tracked across the two domains.   Final thoughts Everything discussed has been tested and works like a charm. If you come across any problems implementing these techniques drop me a line on twitter @panduuf or drop a comment below. As always I'd love to hear your thoughts, thanks for reading it and I hope it's useful. Do you like this post? Yes No

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