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vineri, 21 septembrie 2012

Kind of amazing.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Kind of amazing.

You have to see this video.

Every White House has the privilege of hosting some world class athletes. Every President gets an opportunity to welcome Super Bowl champions, winners of the NBA Finals, and other professional and collegiate athletes at the top of their games.

But every once in a while, the White House hosts a group of champions who represent us all -- Team USA.

Last week, more than 400 Olympians and Paralympians gathered at the White House for an event to celebrate their success in this year's London Games.

We put together a video that takes you behind the scenes and lets you hear from the athletes as they describe their visit. Check it out here:

We also sat down with one extraordinary athlete -- Lieutenant Brad Snyder -- as he met with First Lady Michelle Obama.

Lieutenant Snyder is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. Exactly one year after he was blinded by an improvised explosive device while on duty in Afghanistan, he won gold in the 400-meter freestyle in the London Paralympics, finishing nearly six seconds ahead of the next closest competitor.

That video is pretty special, too.

Check them both out here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/team-usa

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Predicting Keyword Volume Before Data is in Adwords

Posted: 20 Sep 2012 07:59 PM PDT

Posted by randfish

Howdy Mozzers!

Being able to get in front of trending keywords can be a valuable but difficult task. Not only does the world of keywords move quickly, the Search Engines are doing their part to change things up so we don't get too comfortable.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we'll be talking about predicting keyword volume - before the data is even in AdWords! We'll show you how to use the resources at your disposal to perform predictive keyword research. This is an advanced technique, so you'll want to make sure you have the basics down.

As always, leave any thoughts, questions, declarations of love, or candy in the comments below!

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk a little bit about keyword research, but predictive keyword research, keyword research that you can do before data even appears inside AdWords or Bing, wherever you are pulling your keyword data from.

It's a big challenging project. It's hard to do. It's hard to execute on. It's certainly what I'd call more of an advanced SEO technique. So, if you haven't got the basics set yet, I'd do those before tackling this. But it can be extremely powerful for two big reasons. Number one, trending keyword volume, keyword volume that happens in big spikes around events or around news items or around topic matter, is very exciting and interesting because it can produce a lot of volume, and it can turn what has been a content marketing strategy into a thought leadership strategy. And second, your competitors don't know about it. They don't know that these things are coming out. Now if you are, you know, political news or in headline type of news areas, yeah, everybody is writing about the same stories. Those things make headlines and they're sort of follow-up. So there's always going to be lots of competition. But in lots of business areas, especially local areas or industry niche areas, there's a lot of news that only gets covered briefly, doesn't get covered particularly well from a keyword targeting standpoint, and therefore you can do it very powerfully and very well.

Let me show you the process here. I'll start with an example actually. SEOmoz, years ago, I think it was 2006, 2005 maybe even, probably '06six, and Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land started writing about social media marketing. I saw this article from him. He was talking about it, about how, with the emergence of Twitter and with Facebook opening up to not just college students, and MySpace was still popular at the time, Digg was still popular at the time, Reddit was still growing in popularity, StumbleUpon was popular. Twitter I think had just started emerging or was just about to emerge. And so he wrote about this topic of social media marketing, and I thought, "Wow. Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I think social media marketing is going to be big." So we're going to do two things. We're going to write a guide to social media marketing, and before I even do that, I am going to write a blog post about social media marketing.

There's no search volume for it at the time. You know, if you went into Google AdWords at the time and you typed in "social media marketing,"
you're not going to see more than, say, 30 to 50 searches a month. It's just not a popular topic yet, but it's about to become one. What happened is I wrote this blog post, and that actually made it to number two in the search results for social media marketing for a long time in Google search results, which sent over the course of a few years - now it was both this article and the larger article that we eventually wrote - that was 20,000 plus visits to the SEOmoz site over about 2 or 3 years.

That's a lot of traffic. That's a lot of new people to capture. And, of course, since we are trying to make tools for SEOs and social media marketers, a little more social media marketers since last November when we released some of that in the Followerwonk acquisition and all that kind of stuff, now we can sort of say, "Wow. You know, this is a great channel for us. This has been a really valuable keyword. I'm really glad we got that thought leadership out there early, before it was even in the keyword tools."

Now, here's the process that you can use to do this repeatedly. So step 1, you've got to be on top of things. You have to be on top of what's happening in your industry, and I suggest three sources, these are unique sources. First off is news, so you could go to, for example, Google news or set up a news alert or those kinds of things. Or if you're in the technology industry, it might be Techmeme. If you're in a specific blogging field, maybe you're going to the Alltop section for that. You want to follow some social sources, who are the leading folks usually on Twitter and Facebook, Google+ can also be useful for this, and seeing what they're talking about and writing about, what's interesting to them.

And then, probably the best one that you can do here is verify that there's actually interest and questions around this by checking out Q&A sites. So, if I see that someone is talking about . . . I'll give a good example. There's a trend to start using the word "growth hacker" to describe marketers in Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley has historically not particularly liked marketers, and so now they're embracing marketing and the practice of getting actual customers on their startups by calling it growth hacking. That's what they have chosen to call it. That's fine. Now, news sources are writing about this only a tiny bit. Social sources are talking about this a little bit more, and you can see plenty of activity on Q&A sites in the technology field, like on Quora, like on Formspring.

So what does this indicate to you? Well, it says to me, "Hey. This means there's an opportunity there." If I can rank well for growth hacker, get into these things, especially if I could do this, say, six or nine months ago, when the term first started becoming popular, that could be a lead to a lot of great traffic, especially if I'm, for example, let's say like many of you probably, an SEO consultant or an SEO agency or an in-house SEO who's trying to get well known in thought leadership on the topic of growth hacker, maybe to get new customers, maybe to help your reputation internally, those kinds of things.

Step two, once you've identified these things, is you need to make a decision. Are you going longtail, or are you going fat head? Are you going to write about growth hacker plus X and Y and Z and all these other keywords that you think might be attached to them? What about growth hacker for e-commerce sites? What about growth hacker for social communities? What about growth hacking for news sites or for mobile apps? Those things will probably all be in there, or you could go after and write the fat head, which is just going to be growth hacking and growth hacker.

Then you need to obviously create the content, and we talk about that in a lot of other Whiteboard Fridays and a lot of other blog posts on SEOmoz. So I'll skim over that. But it has to do two things. It's got to be relevant, hyper relevant to both the topic and the audience, both of these, simultaneously. The reason being that getting rankings for the topic is of no use to you unless you are also attracting and creating a reason for the audience to care about you and your brand and want to come back, take action, subscribe to you, follow you, maybe even take a free trial of whatever you've got, call you up, etc. So, attractive to the topic, attractive to the audience.

And in step three, you're going to obviously publish and promote the content itself. Check that off, and then you're going to need to make this a repeatable process, that turns into something you do consistently for SEO to get traffic. You've got to analyze the successes and the failures, meaning what worked, what didn't work. What was over here in the news sources, and it's like, , oh, that didn't really turn into something. Was that because there wasn't a lot of Q&A volume afterwards? Or maybe we did see a lot of Q&A volume, but there weren't any people talking about it on the social network. Whatever the trends and the patterns are that work well for you, you've got to identify those so that you can repeat the things that work again and again.

If you use this as part of your content marketing process, as part of a blog or of articles you issue or of guides you do, white papers, research, videos, whatever kind of content you're producing, this can lead to the same type of thing that we saw, which is taking over search results before anybody knows that it's going to become a popularly searched term. This is a wonderful way to jumpstart your keyword targeting, jumpstart your content marketing.

All right everyone, hope you have enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next time. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Your Peek Inside the President's Week

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, Sept. 21, 2012

Your Peek Inside the President's Week

This week, the President, Vice President, and Secretary of State attended the Transfer of Remains Ceremony for the four Americans killed in Libya, while the White House welcomed Olympians and Paralympians, WNBA champions the Minnesota Lynx, new foreign Ambassadors, and the Children's Miracle Network.

Watch this week's behind-the-scenes look at the White House.

How to find blogging inspiration & 20 blogging ideas

Posted: 20 Sep 2012 05:34 AM PDT

Even if you have the best intentions in the world, coming up with a constant stream of new ideas for blog posts can be pretty intimidating. All too soon, the corporate blog lies empty because the company has run out of ideas. Don’t let that happen to you! From company brainstorms to new ways of planning copy, we are going to provide you with some great tips on how to generate ideas for blog content.

WARNING: This is a long post, but we think it's worth the read (and hopefully you'll agree). If you really don't have time then there's a list of our top tips at the end!

Use your colleagues

Brainstorms can be a brilliant way to come up with interesting blog ideas. Don't limit yourself to asking only the PR or SEO teams though, invite people from across your business to contribute to a brainstorming session. They might not have the skills needed to write good content, but they may have insights and opinions that will help you generate great ideas.

Speak to your partners, colleagues, and employees, and listen to them to decide what would best suit the needs of your company. Then, come up with something you can write about which takes this on board.

You might even want to talk to some of your regular and trusted customers, to find out what they’re interested in, as there’s a good chance other potential customers will share those same interests.

Remember why you’re blogging. In the case of a corporate blog it’s usually to generate business – so put your audience first and write for them, not for your own interests. You might be delighted to finally have a platform to rave about your travels, but your corporate clients won't care.

One key consideration is to make sure everything you write is both useful and interesting. That's the best way to maintain a high standard for your blog.

Become a Serial Killer

Serialising your blog posts can be a great way of producing killer copy over the medium term, rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket. By producing a series of posts on the same topic, you increase the apparent relevance of your site for that subject – and give your readers some other pages to click onto.

Serial articles can help keep people interested in your blog and encourage them to return for more useful content on a relevant subject. You could consider writing a series of how-to articles, or reviews of products, industry publications, or even Twitter accounts from within your sector.

At its best, this approach can encourage readers to come back for the next instalment, creating a steady flow of visits. So, if you’re relying on serial posts to get people back to your site, you might want to stick to a regular schedule for maximum effect.

One caveat – don't flog a subject to death. There is nothing worse than reading a series of posts which do nothing but re-iterate the same ideas over and over again. If you have nothing new to say on a topic then it's time to find something new to write about.

Read

Simple enough to be summed up in a single word, ‘read’ is one of the best pieces of advice that can be given to any writer. The more you read other people’s blogs – even if they’re not relevant to your industry – the more you’ll understand what makes for engaging content.

You also need to read people's blog comments and take on board what they're saying, both on your blog and other people's. This will help you to understand which sort of posts are good and which aren't.

Once you’ve gained this understanding, as well as gathering some new ideas, the trick is to turn them into something that is not only engaging and entertaining, but which also meets your marketing or lead-generation needs.

Remember, it’s not just new ideas that you can pick up by reading other blogs – you might also improve your grammar and style along the way.

Invite guest bloggers

Consider asking an industry influencer if they'd like to contribute to your corporate blog. They are likely to be flattered, so it could be good for networking, and they will publicise it to all their Twitter followers and online circle, which can lead to some new traffic for your blog.

Just one word of warning: agree how you'll edit their copy in advance. People can be very protective of their work and may not be happy if you've gone through it with a red pen. Edit their work lightly and send it back to them for approval before publishing.

Break the Rules

Finally, a fallback option is to go out and break all the known rules about corporate blogging. But, if you take this option, on your own head be it! Every so often you will find a corporate blog that has almost nothing to do with the company that publishes it, but focuses on something like environmental sustainability or charity work instead.

You might also see ‘corporate’ blogs that are purely for entertainment purposes, filled with jokes, or comic strips, or pictures of cats. When you’re this far outside of the box, there are very few hard and fast rules left to break, but get it right and you could give your brand a huge boost in positive perception as a result.

The only caveat to this is that it’s always wise to have plenty of plain text along with any images, infographics, videos, and so on. If you can get some relevant language into it then so much the better, even if it's just 'After a hard day working on our new landlords' insurance document, we've been relaxing with some lolcats. Enjoy!'

That way, even if you’re giving your visitors something fun to look at, you’re still delivering the search-visible text content that will help to get you into the search engine results.

However, I wouldn't recommend this as a good way to write a corporate blog. Nine times out of 10 it's not a clever quirky marketing strategy, it's down to ego, and it brings little benefit to the business.

Five golden rules

Ultimately, there are just five things you need to consider when writing corporate blogs.

Your posts need to be:

Relevant
Timely
Frequent
Personable
Useful

These are the golden rules for great blog content so never publish anything without considering those first.

Top 20 Tips

If you're still struggling for blog ideas, try some of these top tips:

Look at current trends, extrapolate them, and make a prediction for the future of your industry.
Do an introduction to 10 of the best up-and-coming bloggers in your field.
Find a current topic of debate and express your own, new, different view on the issue.
Make a list of common myths and misconceptions about your industry and then debunk them.
Satirise a well-known personality – it can be someone inside or outside your industry.
Look at a big brand, and analyse both their good and bad points – show where they're using best practise techniques and where they're making mistakes.
Find a recent piece from a high-level personality in your industry, disagree with it, and prove them and their opinions wrong.
Do a case study of something that went wrong in your business. Analyse the mistakes and explain how you fixed them.
Break some news about your company, e.g. revealing a new product.
Write a list of the vital web tools and software people in your industry can't do without.
Compare the old and new ways of conducting your business.
Write an allegory about your idol doing your business e.g. "How Steve Jobs Would've Done SEO" or "The Bruce Lee Approach to Marketing".
Go to a trade fair or industry event and report on it.
Do a comparison of your national market to markets abroad.
Review a book which deals with your industry – particularly if it contains some interesting outside the box thinking.
Find out about something new for your industry – a tool, a website, a method etc. – and write about it.
Identify industry leaders in your area and ask them to do a guest post.
Write a code of business ethics for your industry.
Conduct an interview with a prominent or rising industry figure and write it up.
Check Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Quora to find out what's most popular right now, and what questions people are seeking answers to. Then provide the information they want on your blog.