Central Perk

marți, 13 august 2013

Damn Cool Pics

Mountain Villa on Top of Apartment Block in Beijing, China
Don't Drink Too Much
Motorbikes in Movies [Infographic]
Greatest Vines 2013 — The Best 11 Minutes and 38 Seconds of Your Day [Video]

Mountain Villa on Top of Apartment Block in Beijing, China

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 11:11 AM PDT

Professor Zhang Lin has built a dream mountain villa on top of a Beijing apartment block. He has spent six years shifting rocks and rubble to the roof to create this mountaintop penthouse. The people underneath aren't too happy because cracks and leaks appeared throughout the apartment block. The construction will be demolished if deemed unsafe.

Via dailymail

Don't Drink Too Much

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 10:45 AM PDT

Cute girl. But wait until you see her at the Glassberry festival.

Glassberry, 2013

Motorbikes in Movies [Infographic]

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 07:21 AM PDT

Movies and motorcycles go together like PB&J – but not every use of the wonderful two-wheeled drive has been beneficial. In fact, some movies seem hell bent on besmirching the cool factor of the motorcycle and we're just not going to stand for it. The jury has passed their verdict on the very best and worst motorcycle movies the world has to offer. Question is, do you agree with our sentencing?

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via bikesure

Greatest Vines 2013 — The Best 11 Minutes and 38 Seconds of Your Day [Video]

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 07:37 PM PDT

It might be a little early to start with the annual compilation videos, but Vine's offered up so many goodies, there isn't time to wait. Check it out to start your week off with a laugh, but keep the volume down for some NSFW.

How Google Continues to Kill Organic Results Graywolf's SEO Blog

How Google Continues to Kill Organic Results

Posted: 13 Aug 2013 10:04 AM PDT

As someone who has been involved in the search industry for over a decade, one of the things that really bothers me is how Google is slowly but inevitably taking all of the “above the fold” organic search result space and giving it to paid results, Google web properties, and to the Google Knowledge graph. […]

The post How Google Continues to Kill Organic Results appeared first on Graywolf's SEO Blog.

Photo of the Day: Meeting with Susan Rice

Featured

Photo of the Day: Meeting with Susan Rice

National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice briefs President Barack Obama during his Presidential Daily Briefing in Chilmark, Mass., Aug. 12, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

How to Carve Out Marketing Strategies by Mining Your Competitors' Backlinks

Posted: 12 Aug 2013 07:16 PM PDT

Posted by Annie Cushing

Image from the National Archives

If you want to see how your competitors are gaining a strategic advantage, one of the best tactics to overtake them is to take a deep dive into their backlinks. They leave breadcrumbs behind that reveal their best tactics. Then pivot (no pun intended), glean ideas from their brilliance, and do it even better!

Required skill: pivot tables

If you don't know how to use pivot tables, you need to check out this video walkthrough. I teach you everything you need to know and then some.

Download example pivot table

I redacted my client's data from the pivot table in the Excel sheet, but you can get an idea of how I pulled together the data in the "Raw Data" tab and then see how I organized my pivot table in that tab. You can, of course, organize yours however you feel is best. But hopefully this will provide a good jumping-off point. I also sorted my pivot table by domain authority in descending order and then filtered out links from [free-subdomain].wordpress.com.

You can download the Excel workbook from Dropbox.

Steps to pull data together

Step 1: Pull your site's (or client's) backlinks â€" using Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, ahrefs, or whatevs â€" as well as a few of your main competitors. Then pull them together into a formatted table.

Step 2: Add another column and label it "Site." What I typically do is add the domain (without the http:// or www to minimize noise) and double-click the bottom-right corner of the cell to fill down to the bottom of the data set. Rinse and repeat each time you add a new batch of backlinks. When you finish, you'll have a single table that contains a mashup of backlinks.

Step 3: Extract the domains from the backlink URLs using the LEFT and SEARCH functions. If you haven't done this before, I demonstrate how in this video tutorial. (Or you can download the demo workbook from the post and just copy the formulas.)

Step 4: Create your pivot table using these settings:

Step 5: As a general rule, I don't like how Excel merely indents rows in the default, "Compact" pivot table format. In our data set here, where we have three different values pulled down in rows (Domain, Site, and URL). This can cause your rows to get really congested, and it can be hard to differentiate them. For this reason, if I pull multiple values into the Rows field list, I prefer the Outline layout. You can check it out in the Excel file download.

To set your pivot table to "Outline," click on any cell in the pivot table and go to Pivot Table Tools > Design tab > Layout > Report Layout > Show in Outline Form (Mac: PivotTable tab > Design > Layout > Outline Layout).

Step 6: I pulled individual observations into text boxes to the left of the pivot table. I used text boxes for a couple reasons:

I didn't want to mess up the heights of rows inside my pivot table.
I could attach links to the text boxes that linked to the individual cells in the pivot table.

Step 7: Dive into the data and start reverse-engineering strategies (using the observations I pulled out as a template, if you'd like). I can assure you there are many more to excavate from that data set!

Video tutorial

For you visual learners out there, I pulled together a 10-minute video walkthrough of some of the key steps I took to organize the data for analysis.

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Seth's Blog : Message amplification isn't linear

Message amplification isn't linear

Put two loudspeakers next to each other, and the perceived sound isn't twice as loud--and ten times as many speakers certainly doesn't seem ten times as loud.

But when you hear an idea from two people, it counts for twice as much as if you randomly hear it once. And if you hear an idea from ten people, the impact is completely off the charts compared to just one person whispering in your ear.

Coordinating and amplifying the evangelists of your idea is a big part of the secret of marketing with impact.