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luni, 29 aprilie 2013

Competitor Research In An Inbound Marketing World

Posted: 28 Apr 2013 07:34 PM PDT

We all know that online marketing is changing. When I started in online marketing a few years ago, all the talk was still about links and directories and ways to get more exact match anchor text. Some SEOs were doing some pretty nefarious things and profiting from it, but most of that came crashing down starting in February 2011 (with the first Panda algorithm) and then over the past couple of years with Panda, Penguin, and the EMD update all rolling out and affecting websites the world over.

Rand talked last week about the changing SEO metrics, and today I want to talk about the changing landscape of competitor analysis as more and more people make the shift from just SEO to inbound marketing. Since inbound marketing includes a lot more than SEO, if we want to be effective inbound/online marketing consultants, we need to not only have proficiency or knowledge of the different roles of an inbound marketer, but when we get into actionable recommendations for our clients or our company we need to know how to analyze what our competitors are doing across the whole marketing space, both to identify deficiencies in their strategy that you can exploit as well as to see what they are doing that you should also adopt for your company.

So today I am going to talk about a few of the key areas of inbound marketing where you should investigate because they are likely to bring the largest returns (I'm talking about the Pareto Principle, which I was reintroduced to by Dan Shure in this post on his site about applying it to SEO).

By the way, if you're interested in more on this topic, I'm going to focus on it pretty heavily in my upcoming Searchlove presentation in Boston. I'd love to see you there! Ok, let's dive in.

Email marketing

If you've been in marketing for a while, you should know that email can have an incredible return on investment for the small amount of setup that it takes. In fact it's the 2nd best ROI for many businesses, according to eConsultancy:

What if I told you that 39.16% of our conversions on the Distilled website (micro and macro conversions, including DistilledU, conferences, and lead gen forms) were touched by an email during the conversion process? What if I told you that this is more than either organic or social? Here's the proof:

If you're not doing email marketing, you probably should be. But what works best in your industry? Often we're paralyzed by the multiplicity of options presented to us by any choice, and research has recently shown that limiting the number of choices can lead to better and less risky decisions than when we're faced with a seemingly infinite number. By being smart about our analysis, we can reduce the number of choices that we have to make around email, like:

What time do I send my emails?
How often should I send them?
Should I invest in good design?
What kind of call to action should I include to start with?

Stalk your competitor's emails

If you're interested in investing in email marketing, I'd first suggest that you subscribe to your competitors' email lists so that you receive emails whenever they send them to their entire list. You won't be able to learn how they're segmenting their lists, but you'll find their frequency, their subject lines that get you to click, and how they are calling you to action. Stephen Pavlovich talked about this at Searchlove New York in 2011, where he suggested that you save your competitor's emails to your Evernote, with a specific tag, so that you can go back and get ideas for your own emails. While this is an amazing tip that we should all do, it's step 1 and we should all go further. I like to take the emails sent by my competitors and analyze them in an Excel spreadsheet, taking into account:

Name
Email date
Time arrived
Custom design?
Call to action
Subject line
Did I click?
Was the email triggered (i.e. was it influenced by something I did recently on their site)?

My analysis looks like this. Feel free to use something similar:

I recently found a chart on MarketingCharts.com (one of my favorite sites) that talked about fallacies surrounding email marketing according to Experian. Their way of setting up their analysis may help you as well:

Throw Into Wordle

Now we need to find what common themes our competitors are using when they send out their emails. The best way to visualize this (I'm a visual person) is by using one of my favorite tools, Wordle. When I put in the words that my competitors have been using for their subject lines, I get this:

Protip 1: To get the best results, use the biggest dataset you can find.

Protip 2: Use this knowledge to inform the content you should be doing outside of blogging :-)

Content production

Content is a huge part of inbound marketing. You know this, I know this, everyone who reads Moz knows this. So why do I say it? Because once you go beyond "content is king" knowledge, you can actually take this belief that use it to create content that your readers want. When it comes to competitor analysis, you can either choose to do this manually or in a more automated (but possibly less accurate) fashion.

Manually

Using the information gleaned from the Wordle above, I can then go run advanced queries in Google to find how much my competitors are talking about the different content types listed. For example, if I run a [site:seogadget.com "webinar"] search, I get 14 results:

That's not very many (and no, I'm not calling out SEOgadget here. They do absolutely phenomenal work!), so if I'm starting a marketing agency, or have one that I want to build, this may be an area that I should investigate. At Distilled we run conferences because a) we had someone internally that wanted to do them, b) we thought we could run a darn good conference, and c) because we saw a need for the type of conference we could put on.

More automated

If you want to automate this a bit, you can at least find the number of times that a competitor has mentioned the type of content on their site in the URL. I chose to use the URL instead of just on the site because people will usually put the important words in the URL. We're not looking for all mentions of a content type like "webinar" - instead we want webinars that only they have put on and published on their site.

So what I have done is built out a spreadsheet for you, a rough tool, using IMPORTXML to scrape the number of results that a site has for the content type. If you're at all good with scraping in Gdocs, you can make this sheet customized to fit your needs and content types I'm sure!

Go here to open and make a copy of the spreadsheet.

Social amplification

You do follow your competitors on Twitter, or at least have them in a list, right? Oh you don't. Go do that. I'll wait.

*Whistles tune*

Following your competitors on social media will allow you to see their strategies for social promotion (if any). While this is nothing groundbreaking, it's also not something that many people are doing already. You can see how often they are tweeting their own content, if they are tweeting the content of others, and it can also inform you about the kind of content that they are creating.

Since you now know what kind of content they are creating, you can figure out their social promotion strategy outside of their own accounts. Who are their tweeterati (aka, who shares their posts)? Better than that, who are the influential people that share their content? Once you find this, you can then decide whether you will be able to get those same people to promote your content, and how to do that, or if you need to find new people to connect with solely (using a tool like FollowerWonk).

Lucky for you, Topsy allows you to find who the influential people are that share a specific URL. After you enter a URL with "Tweets" selected on Topsy, you can then select "Show Influential Only", like below:

This is all well and good, but want to do it faster? I built a spreadsheet for you where you can take a URL and it builds the Topsy URL for you, then scrapes the Influential people. Once again, throw this into a Wordle (or Tagxedo, which is more stable) and see who the influencers are!

Go here to make a copy of the spreadsheet.

I hope this post gives you ideas for what is possible for the new competitor analysis within inbound marketing. I'd love to hear in the comments what other ways you are using to do competitor analysis these days.

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President Obama at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, April 29, 2013

President Obama at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

President Obama joined Conan O'Brien onstage at the Washington Hilton Saturday night for the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner -- and gave his fifth address to the organization of journalists who cover the White House. In his remarks, the President poked fun at himself, as well as some of the news organizations and politicians in the room.

But while everyone had a good laugh during the speech, President Obama closed his speech on a more serious note, reminding the audience of the important role the media plays in American society -- especially during times of crisis like the Boston Marathon bombings and the explosion that killed so many first responders in West, Texas.

Watch the President's full remarks from the Correspondents' Dinner.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks during the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., April 27, 2013. First Lady Michelle Obama attended the dinner with the President. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

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Seth's Blog : Getting picked (need to vs. want to)

Getting picked (need to vs. want to)

Sure, it's fun to be picked, anointed, given social approval for what you do—the newspaper writes you up, you get invited to speak at graduation, your product gets featured on the front page of a website or blog...

The thing is, it's really difficult to get picked, and those doing the picking don't have nearly the power they used to. (Pause for a second to consider that double math problem: there are way more offerings, creators and choices, and, at the same time, an order of magnitude more media outlets, each with far less power than Oprah or Johnny ever had).

More than twenty years ago, at what he then believed was the high point of his career, Marc Maron auditioned for Saturday Night Live. Lorne wasn't impressed, nor was he kind, and Marc didn't get picked to become a cast member.

Today, of course, Marc's podcast is popular, lucrative and fun. Marc didn't get there because someone picked him, he picked himself (in fact, now he's the one getting pitched).

In the SNL instance, Marc had a career path where he needed to get picked. Unless a casting agent or booker picked him, he had nothing.

With his podcast, though, Marc might still want to get picked, but he's going to do just fine if he's not. By growing from the grassroots, Marc finds his own power. Not because he's still doing the same thing. No, because he's doing a different thing, in a different way, for a different audience, monetizing it differently.

The artist who struggles in obscurity, unfairly ignored because he hasn't been picked--that's a poignant sight. But at some point, the artist has the obligation to seek a different path, one that isn't dependent on a system that doesn't deserve him.

It's easier than ever to imagine a successful project or career or organization that isn't dependent on being picked by those with power.

If you're frustrated that you're not getting picked, one plan is to up your game, to hustle harder, to figure out how to hone a pitch and push, push, push. But in the era of picking yourself, it seems to me that you're better off finding a path that doesn't require you get picked in order to succeed.

• Email to a friend •

duminică, 28 aprilie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish Interview With "Bitcoin Jesus"

Posted: 28 Apr 2013 10:24 PM PDT

Of all the topics that readers have pleaded me to write about for months but I never did until now, "bitcoins" are at the top of the list.

In private emails, I stated on many occasions "bitcoins are a scam". I now take that back, "scam" is not the correct word. Others whose opinions I highly respect, state the same thing.

For example, Geoff Turk at GoldMoney stated in an email response:

"I have spent quite a bit of time researching Bitcoins and have not found anything scam-like about them. Price volatility is another matter, and that is a result of an increasing demand for a relatively scarce resource. There may be individuals attempting to manipulate the price in some way, which we know is possible in any small (or even not-so-small) market. However, in my opinion the Bitcoin protocol itself is quite sound, and it creates an interesting hybrid of a commodity without corporeal existence that is nonetheless limited in supply."

That was not an endorsement of bitcoin, rather it was a statement that my labeling of bitcoin as a scam was incorrect. I agree, with apologies offered to bitcoin.

OK But What Is Bitcoin

If bitcoin isn't a scam, then what is it? I have struggled with that question, which explains why I never have written about it.

Wikipedia offers a history and description of bitcoin that is rather fascinating.

Who Accepts Bitcoins?

For months I would search for companies accepting bitcoins as payment and found scant offerings. The same could be said for gold.

Yet, the total value of gold at a price of $1,600/oz would be something like $7.9 trillion. The total value of bitcoins is extremely volatile, fluctuating around $1 billion. Simply put, there is no comparison in terms of total price or volatility.

The record 9 percent drop in the price of gold was matched by a 70% plunge in the price of bitcoins in a similar timeframe.

Bitcoin Store

A few weeks ago I decided to do another search for businesses that accepted bitcoins. I was surprised to discover that a new entity, the Bitcoin Store, offers 500,000 electronic products for sale, accepting only bitcoins a payment. The products include high-end digital cameras.

I decided to call the store up and ask a few questions. My timing was fortuitous. The owner of the Bitcoin Store, Roger Ver, answered the phone.

This was unusual since Ver lives in Japan and he just happened to be back in California, and he is the one who answered the phone.

After some small talk and he told me that he was known as "Bitcoin Jesus". I told him who I was and that I had some questions about bitcoins. He recognized my name from Coast-to-Coast AM radio where he tunes in as a subscriber from Japan.

The interview that follows is via a subsequent chain of emails.

"Bitcoin Jesus" Interview

Mish: How did you get started in Bitcoin?
BJ: I heard about them on freetalklive in late 2010.

Mish: When did you start your business?
BJ: I founded MemoryDealers in 1999 and started building BitcoinStore in 2012. BitcoinStore launched March 1st 2013.

Mish: What is your volume in business, assuming a value on bitcoins of $100.
BJ: So far this month we have averaged 115 BTC per day. $11,500 per day, $350,000 per month.
We disabled international orders on the site because we were getting so many orders that we couldn't process them all each day.

Mish: How many products do you sell?
BJ: More than 500,000 line items currently. In the near future we will add additional distributors, bringing our line card to over 1,000,000 items.

Mish: How many employees did you have when you started? How many do you have now?
BJ: Bitcoin store started with one, now there are seven. I need to hire at least two more ASAP.

Mish: Are your employees paid in bitcoins or US$?
BJ: US employees are paid in USD because the tax laws are not clear. Most of them would prefer to be paid in BTC. The international contractors are paid %100 in BTC. I don't know for sure what they do with them, but I suspect they keep them in BTC.

Mish: Who is your merchandise supplier?
BJ: Ingram Micro. They are the world's largest.

Mish: Do you pay them in bitcoins or $US?
BJ: I pay them in USD, but I hope to get them to accept at least partial payment in Bitcoin in the future.

Mish: Are all of your profits kept in bitcoins? What about expenses before profits? Describe your bitcoin currency risk.
BJ: All of BitcoinStore's sales are kept in Bitcoin. Expenses are paid via Bitcoin or USD depending on the vendor. I want to be exposed to as much Bitcoin currency risk as possible. I hold on to as many Bitcoins as I can.

Mish: What happens to you and your business if the value of bitcoins plunges to $10?
BJ: Personally I would lose a lot of money on the value of my Bitcoins, but it wouldn't affect the business model of BitcoinStore at any time. If needed, the bitcoin payment processor, Bitpay, can instantly convert the Bitcoins to USD at the time of each sale, so a guaranteed USD profit can be achieved on each sale.

Mish: Why did you move to Japan?
BJ: I moved to Japan following an unwarranted conviction for selling firecrackers. I wrote up some of the details in a Daily Anarchist article Bitcoin Venture Capitalist Roger Ver's Journey to Anarchism.

Mish note: Please read the article. It's fascinating. Ver is a libertarian student of Ludwig von Mises, Adam Smith, Fredric Bastiat, Leonard Reed, Henry Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, and especially Murray Rothbard.

Mish: Please explain how you got the name "Bitcoin Jesus".
BJ: Not only am I a true believer in the model, I have converted numerous skeptics who are now true believers as well. Everywhere I go, I tell everyone about bitcoin, from taxi drivers, to restaurant workers, to girls at night clubs. It doesn't matter when or where, I'm so excited about Bitcoin that I feel the need to tell everyone about it. Someone along the way said you are like a "Bitcoin Jesus" and the nickname kind of stuck.

I also give out $1 worth of Bitcoins to everyone I meet who doesn't already have any.
I just did an interview on Fox News on April 12 and I gave the sound guy at the studio his first $1 worth of Bitcoin after he installed the Blockchain App on his iPhone.

Mish: Anything else you wish to add?
BJ: Yes thanks. It is important to realize that Bitcoin has two independent functions:

1. As a currency
2. As a payment system

To use Bitcoin as a payment system, it doesn't matter if they are worth $1 or $100,000 each. You simply buy the correct USD amount, and send it to the recipient who immediately exchanges them back into whatever other currency they want.

I don't think Bitcoin's usefulness as an unblockable, uncontrollable, potentially anonymous payment system can be disputed. Time will tell how useful the bitcoins within the Bitcoin payment system become as an actual currency.

I'm sure all your readers will enjoy the article. Thank you for letting me contribute.

Mish: Thanks Roger. Good luck to you and Bitcoin Store.

Not A Convert

I am neither a convert nor a true believer. I will stick to gold thank-you. I see things similarly to Ron Paul who said in a Bloomberg Interview "If I can't put it in my pocket, I have some reservations about that."

Link if video does not play: Ron Paul on Gold: No One Knows Value; I'm Buying.

Bitcoin is a Game

My friend Hugo Salinas Price had some pertinent thoughts regarding bitcoins on April 10 in his piece Of bubbles and Bitcoins

The newest invention in monetary affairs are the so-called Bitcoins. Their creators and promoters explain them as follows: 'Bitcoins are digital money. They are transferred person to person through Internet without going a bank or a clearing house, so they are independent of the current monetary system. Several currency exchanges exists where you can trade your Bitcoins for dollars or euros, and some small business and freelancers are starting to accept them in payment'.

The Bitcoin is a game. We live in a highly confused and perplexed world regarding what real money has to be. Let's get this straight: real money has to be the commodity that is generally accepted by society as payment in full for goods or services received.

Throughout history, the commodity most generally accepted in payment has been gold. Silver has taken the second place after gold. Gold and silver were chosen by humanity thousands of years ago, as the commodities with which to make payments.

The Bitcoin is an example of the tremendous hold that the idea of the omnipotence of technology to solve human problems has upon humanity. However, technology cannot create matter; it cannot create commodity-money, as it cannot create petroleum. Technology may give various forms to matter, but it cannot create matter or substance, and money must be the substance that is most accepted in commerce. All the Ph.D.s and Nobels in Economics are playing games to keep the world entertained. The less their pronouncements make sense, the wiser they think we will consider them.

You tell me: What is the future that awaits a humanity so confused that it can no longer distinguish between an abstract concept and what is real and material? Very confused people are participating in speculations in imitation currencies – dollars, pounds, euros, yen, yuans, Bitcoins - in the hopes of obtaining some profit or benefit, because unable to think for themselves, they can do nothing but speculate – and ruin themselves.

Understanding the Game

Even though I am not a bitcoin convert, it's easy to understand why people gravitate towards them.

Yes, people like games and speculation, but they are also fed up with unlimited monetary expansion of Central Banks, especially the Fed and the Bank of Japan.

Bitcoins may also play a role in capital flight. How so? Consider Cyprus or China (See Wall Street Journal February 28, 2013 China Forex Regulator: More Easing of Capital Controls Needed).

Purchase bitcoins, leave the country, convert the bitcoins to a currency of your liking, and voilà!

Yet, should that happen or even be suspected, how long will it take before there is a government crackdown on bitcoin? Should such a thing happen, the value of bitcoin can plunge to next to nothing if confidence is lost.

Bitcoin Hyperinflation?

In its initial days bitcoin hovered near six cents (click on link to see).

It's quite amazing to me that it soared to over $260 at one point. Is it so inconceivable that the value of bitcoin would plunge back to 6 cents?

Perhaps, but what about $1 or $5. A drop from $260 to $5 would wipe out 98% of the value. Should that happen, in a short time frame, what else would you call it but hyperinflation? Curiously such a plunge would not be associated with printing.

Bitcoin Jesus would say that is unlikely, but is it?

I do not know, but I do know history. And when given a choice, the free market has always decided on gold and silver as money, when available.

In my Presentation at the Wine Country Conference, I stated "I cast my vote with history". I still do. Yet, I offer encouragement to those like Roger Ver willing to "fight the Fed" in a literal sense.

To see my video presentation, scroll down and look for Mike "Mish" Shedlock: A Brief Lesson in History

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Who Won? the 93% or the 7%? Why?

Posted: 28 Apr 2013 12:59 AM PDT

Economic trends since 2009 show A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%.

During the first two years of the nation's economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released Census Bureau data.

From 2009 to 2011, the mean wealth of the 8 million households in the more affluent group rose to an estimated $3,173,895 from an estimated $2,476,244, while the mean wealth of the 111 million households in the less affluent group fell to an estimated $133,817 from an estimated $139,896.

Uneven Household Recovery

What Happened?

Some seriously misguided souls blame free market capitalism for this event.

For details, please see Is Capitalism Killing Our Morals and Economy?

I blame the Fed, fractional reserve lending, political corruption, unions, and the Military Industrial Complex that president Eisenhower warned us about in a Speech in 1961.

In short, the problems we face are not the result of free market capitalism, but rather the results of Fed sponsored corporate and military fascism.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : The hard parts

The hard parts

In an industrial setting, the obvious plan is to seek out the easy work. You're more likely to get it done with less effort and then move on. The easy customer, the easy gig, the easy assembly line.

Today, though, it's the difficult work that's worth doing. It's worth doing because difficult work allows you to stand out, create value and become the one worth choosing.

Seek out the difficult, because you can. Because it's worth it.

[An aside for entrepreneurs and anyone starting a new project: if you can't describe the hard parts, how will you focus on them? And if there are no difficulties ahead, what makes you think your project is valuable? When I meet an entrepreneur, I always ask this question first--which part of your project is hard?]

• Email to a friend •

luni, 29 aprilie 2013

Competitor Research In An Inbound Marketing World

Competitor Research In An Inbound Marketing World