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marți, 6 mai 2014
Climate Change Is Affecting Us Now
The most comprehensive look yet at climate change
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Is Your Content Strategy Guided by Audience Intent (or Just Keywords)?
Is Your Content Strategy Guided by Audience Intent (or Just Keywords)? |
Is Your Content Strategy Guided by Audience Intent (or Just Keywords)? Posted: 05 May 2014 05:15 PM PDT Posted by Laura.Lippay
All too often I see content strategies that:
This is a typical old-school SEO strategy, but what about audience (visitor) intent? There's a lot of focus in SEO around optimized landing pages (as there should be). An optimized landing page has a targeted topic and keywords, a targeted page title, a clean URL, a compelling meta description, intuitive layout and navigation, loads quickly, looks amazing, and has calls to action most likely above the fold. Content, on the other hand, is more than just optimized landing pages. Content serves a purpose. Content can give a company an advantage over it's competitors. Content is a means of communicating and building a relationship with an audience. What is audience intent?That core audience you're trying to attract needs something. Maybe they're researching the best hiking vacations around the globe. Maybe they want to know where they could go hiking specifically in Utah. Maybe they know they want to go hiking in Utah and are looking for Utah vacation packages that include hiking. Or maybe they just need to book a trip from Boston to Park City. Their intent can be very vague or very specific, and when coming up with content for a landing page you need to put yourself in the mind of your audience and consider what it is that they really want to see. The audience intent would consider:
The basic requirements of content strategy A great piece of content requires all of the things a great landing page does (when the content is indeed a landing page, as opposed to other types of content like white papers, videos, guides, maps, etc.). A great content strategy, though, considers a bit more beforehand, primarily:
And after thoughtful research around the audience needs and competitive landscape, it addresses this question: How do we build something that meets (and exceeds) user intent, while satisfying our business goals, and is better than anything else out there? Let's look at these considerations in real-life examples of content strategies. These examples clearly differentiate between simply building landing pages and writing copy vs. coming up with creative ways to meet audience intentions and business goals. Content strategy example 1: |
CONTENT | LIFESTYLE |
Landing pages | Self-expression |
Articles | Community |
Blog Posts | Culture |
Videos | Identity |
Slideshows | Associations |
Guides | Experience |
Maps | Emotion |
Consider these brands embracing lifestyles through content. They're all there to sell product, but their content attracts and engages audiences, draws them in like moths to flames. Their content isn't based on keywords and optimized landing pages, it's based on giving their audiences what they need and getting them excited about it in the process.
GoPro: Be inventive, buy cameras. | Nike: Do sports, buy shoes. |
Airbnb: Travel hip, rent places. | Martha Stewart: Be crafty, buy products. |
The approach proposed for this particular client in this example:
- Client: Live fabulously on a budget, buy products.
- Client: Optimized landing pages derived from high-volume keywords, buy products.
Content strategy example 2:
Articles vs. awesome content
- Audience: Primarily women, primary age group: 35-55.
- The audience need/intent: Get fashion and beauty inspiration, tips, ideas.
- Content goals: Reach and engage more women.
- Business goals: Page views (ad impressions).
- Market research on online beauty and fashion trends.
- Extensive competitive research.
- Extensive research into trends on what's popular in beauty and fashion online and in social networks.
- Videos or slideshows comparing different makeup brands (example: different thick lash mascaras or long-lasting lipsticks).
- Makeover tools.
- Various types of "lookbooks" for things like pixie hairstyles, colorful eyeliner ideas, nail trends, etc.
- Working with brand partners to deliver samples boxes to subscribers.
- A series on recreating celebrity looks for less (and where to buy).
- Local fashionista bloggers in major cities who blog on where the latest coolest fashion finds, fashion events and fashionable places to be are in that city.
- Weekly collections/series around various topics like This Weeks Cutest Shoes (in your inbox), Must-Have Dresses, Craziest Fashion Trends, etc.
Content strategy example 3:
Selling vacation packages
- Audience: Adult international travelers coming from the United States.
- The audience need/intent: Find things to do in the area, find tours in the area, find vacation packages, plan a vacation in the area.
- Content goals: Attract, engage and convert more people.
- Business goals: Primary: sell flights. Secondary: sell packages.
- What do searches tell us about the various types of intent the searchers have? People may be searching a specific attraction or they may be looking for hiking tours. We found at least 4 high-level ways to slice and dice intent (in addition to looking for packages): By specific attraction name, by town, by type of attraction (ex: waterfalls), or by activity (ex: bird-watching).
- Does the site architecture currently meet those intents? In fact, no. The architecture was somewhat random. It is difficult to find some of the things on the site based on those 4 types of intent. Some of the content that could be easily cross-sold was also buried as landing pages in the packages section.
- How do visitors with these intents navigate the site now? We did user testing asking visitors to find and book a specific attraction and to find and book a specific activity. Many were unable to complete the tasks, and all of them went about it in completely different ways. We learned a lot about what people expect to find and how they expect to find it that could help guide our content strategy (including additional types of intent like time of year the package is available for instance).
- What content assets do we have to work with? A content inventory was done with a sample size of content currently in season and live on the site, and content out of season that they currently remove from the site. Each page was "tagged" with the specific attractions, towns, type of "thing to see," and activities that were included in the package along with package price, travel period, whether or not it includes a flight, departure airport, number of nights.
With all of this in mind, the end content strategy proposed things like:
- Architecture: An updated architecture with landing pages to meet the specific major intents.
- Navigation: A newly proposed navigation (which is slightly different from the architecture).
- URLs: Of course.
- Tools: A proposed filtering tool/system to filter anything from type of activity involved to price range to number of nights and everything in-between.
- On-Page: On-page content recommendations based on what we learned from user testing + adding in related content for higher engagement and search-friendly cross-linking of relevant content and pulling things like transportation options out from being a buried landing page under packages to being a module cross-linked from relevant package pages.
- Seasonal content treatments: Adding the ability to book packages that aren't in season right now + how to address long term landing pages for seasonally available or annually changing content.
Remember, we're creating content for people, not search engines
It all goes hand-in-hand. When you create something that your audiences like, that they link to more, share more, and engage with more, it's likely to affect search engine rankings and traffic, too. Of course this isn't your good ol' typical "SEO," but its also not 1999. The best SEO is—and for many years has been—a good product, so taking the time to consider your audience intentions when creating a content strategy can pay off in more ways than one.
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Tools For Writing PPC Ads
Tools For Writing PPC Ads |
Posted: 06 May 2014 01:00 AM PDT Ads are obviously important. They're the tip of the paid search iceberg: you need the campaign structure, keywords, bidding strategies and so on to keep everything afloat, but the ads (along with extensions) are the part that people actually see. But if you're writing text ads you have limited space, and a host of editorial restrictions. Even when you have a good idea for your messaging, ads can be challenging to write. Fortunately there are a few tools to help! Never use a long word when a diminutive one will sufficeWe’ve all written the perfect piece of prose that’s just one character too long. Sometimes you can correct that with just a word substitution. If you just want a shorter word Thsrs will give you shorter synonyms. Of course thesauruses aren’t precise – always substitute words with care! Also try WordHippo – it doesn’t care about the length of words, but as well as synonyms you can find different forms of the word, antonyms and rhymes. Even if you don’t find a precise substitution you may see something that lets you go down a slightly different track – like using a different tense, or a noun instead of a verb. Excel for CheckingA spreadsheet is a good way to write ads – it's easy to check character length. The basic way to check length is with the len() function. Then use conditional formatting to highlight in red anything that's over the limits. As I explained in one of my Excel tips posts, you can modify this to take into account dynamic keyword insertion. Using just len() will tell you "{KeyWord:Things and Stuff for Sale}" is 35 characters, but 10 of those characters are {KeyWord:} and don't count towards the limit. So you can use a different formula to remove those non-counting characters:
You can't automatically test for everything, but there are a few more checks you can make. AdWords won't let you use an exclamation mark in the headline, and won't let you have more than one exclamation mark in the description lines. You can count the number of exclamation marks by comparing the length of the headline with the length when !s are removed:
So you can check if the headline is wrong with
And you can check if the description lines are wrong with
(Note that Bing Ads allows you to have one exclamation mark in the headline and one exclamation or question mark per sentence in the main text. So if you're writing for Bing you can ignore this test.) Also, correct spelling is crucial – mistakes can look unprofessional, and could get your ad disapproved! On Windows, you can press F7 to do a spell check. Excel for Writing in BulkUsing Excel is also handy if you want to make a bunch of ads with the same structure but with a few words replaced. You can add columns for the varying info and use formulae to generate the ad text from them. See the sample spreadsheet! In this example you can quickly see the third ad is wrong – description line 1 is too long because 'thingamajiggers' is a long word. You can copy and paste as values to manually edit it down to size. You don't have to use this to just make cookie-cutter ads – you could use the generated ads as a starting point and then tweak them into more tailored ads. You could also use something like this to see what your DKI ad text looks like, by copying in your keyword list. Phenomenal Selling Powers, itty bitty writing spaceI've not really talked about what to put into your ads – that's because there's already a tonne of articles on that! If you're looking for tips on how to write ads, see this massive list from 3Q Digital. And if you have any other tools for writing ads, please share them in the comments!
Image credit: 'Pen is mightier than the sword…' by V.v The post Tools For Writing PPC Ads appeared first on White.net. |
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Seth's Blog : Thoughts on HugDug
Thoughts on HugDug
We've spent the last few months working on a new project, and I wanted to share an executive summary with you...
It's called hugdug.
The backstory: So far, hundreds of thousands of people have posted millions of reviews on Amazon.
If you're aggrieved, the negative review makes sense to me. Someone is on Amazon, about to buy something that you don't like, and here's your chance to make a stand, to say your piece...
On the other hand, the positive review, particularly the long, well-written, impassioned review, feels a bit out of place to me. After all, the shopper is already here, finger poised on the Buy It Now button, and has already found the item in question. A simple, "I love it," ought to be sufficient.
But what if there were a third-party site, a place just for rave recommendations, a place where you could help people discover stuff they didn't even know they were looking for? Not just books, but anything sold on Amazon?
What if we can elevate the art of the review, what if we can make what you a review a way to tell the world what you care about?
Since we started Squidoo, we've paid our users and their designated charities more than $18,000,000. That's far more than sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which of course pay those that create content nothing at all.
Hugdug is our new project aimed at spreading positive reviews about great products. And we're earmarking half our profits to good causes.
The design goals for HugDug were to make it mobile, generous and beautiful. We wanted to create a platform that makes it easy to speak up and speak out about products you love, and we wanted to make it easy to connect with people who respect your opinion.
Why charities? Because it's the right thing to do and because it feels good. The Amazon products reviewed don't cost anything more on our site (we get paid an affiliate fee by them) and the idea of giving away half our profit is really powerful. What if every site that used user-generated content did this? By all means, I hope you'll donate as much as you can afford to the causes that you care about. Along the way, though, a commerce and recommendation engine that also generates good feelings and worthy donations is a step in the right direction, no?
The best way to understand HugDug is to give it a try. Perhaps you're interested in:
Wrinkle-free packing,
an executive shaving secret,
a future of work, or even,
the best dog toy ever.
(Here are all of my reviews).
And, if you want to try writing a review about something, here is a list of movies to choose from, or even some of my favorite books...
Thanks for giving it a try and for sharing it. I'll be posting some great reviews by my readers next week, would love to see what you care about.
PS by request, there's a bonus link about presentations added to yesterday's post.
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luni, 5 mai 2014
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
Did Birth/Death Revisions Distort Friday's +288,000 Jobs Number? Reflections on BLS Competence Posted: 05 May 2014 04:39 PM PDT A couple of people emailed me last week wondering how the BLS birth/death model impacted last Friday's payroll report. Recall that the payroll report came in a blistering +288,000 but the household survey showed the economy lost 73,000. For detailed analysis please see Nonfarm Payrolls +288,000, Unemployment Rate Drops to 6.3%; Household Survey Employment -73,000, Labor Force -806,000. 2014 Birth/Death Adjustment There it is, highlighted in red. The BLS Birth/Death Model added 234,000 jobs to the non-seasonally adjusted jobs number. But what does that mean, and is it significant? To address that question, we need to understand what the model does. Birth/Death Model Description The births and deaths in question are the births and deaths of businesses, not people. When businesses start, there is a lag before they are incorporated in any job surveys. When businesses go out of business, people who worked for them are unemployed. Given that not every business reports statistics every month, the BLS uses models to estimate the net number businesses (and people employed in them) that go in and out of business every month. Mathematical Mistakes People take the headline number and compare it to the birth-death adjustment. This month, the headline number was +288,000 and the birth-death number was +234,000. Some conclude the adjustment added 234,000 out of the 280,000 headline number. The problem is 234,000 is a seasonally unadjusted number and 288,000 is a seasonally adjusted number. It is mathematically invalid (and horribly so) to subtract one from the other. Moreover, in CES Birth/Death Model Frequently Asked Questions, the BLS notes "Months with generally strong seasonal increases such as April, May and June generally have a relatively large positive factor. Conversely, months with overall strong seasonal decreases, such as January, generally have a relatively large negative factor." The BLS takes all of the unadjusted data, combines it, then applies a seasonal adjustment to the total. There is no seasonally adjusted birth/death model. Birth Death History
January is uniformly negative, April uniformly positive. If one added back in the negative 307,000 results from the January data, jobs in January would have skyrocketed from the reported +113,000 to +420,000. People seem to do these additions and subtractions only when the resultant number supports their point of view. Realistic Way of Looking at Birth/Death Model A more realistic way of thinking about adjustments is questioning if the adjustment is out of line with history or out of line with what one knows is going on. The reported number this month is in line with what one would expect in an expanding economy. It is also in line with historical numbers. Unless this month was way out of line with what really happened, it did not impact the seasonally adjusted number in a major way, if at all. Economic Turns The BLS does admit that the birth/death model will be wrong at turns. And it was wrong in a big way in 2008, 2009, 2010. Heading into the housing bust and recession, I was one of the biggest BLS critics you could find. It was clear their model was wrong. Housing died. So did commercial real estate. Yet, the BLS model added construction and financial activity businesses each month. In October of 2009, the BLS finally admitted its birth/death model overstated jobs by about 800,000. That's quite an error, and I felt vindicated (See Reader Emails on Birth/Death Model and Unemployment Rate). The BLS has since changed its model, and it also does twice-annual adjustments as opposed to annual. I have no strong beliefs now that their model is incorrect. Actually, recent adjustments have been of a positive nature, not a negative one. This can change if the economy is at a turning point and that turning point causes businesses to go out of business (or expand at a significantly reduced rate vs. model expectations). Both conditions must be true for the BLS model to be way out of whack. Unless there is some reason to believe both of the above conditions are true, focus on the birth/death model as a source of error is likely to be wrong. Since I currently have no strong viewpoint on possible model errors, I stopped reporting on the BLS birth/death model in my monthly jobs report. Reflections on BLS Competence My opinion on the BLS has changed over the years. When I have called them on the phone, they are eager to help, and my perception is they are highly competent. Yes, their model was horribly wrong in the housing bust. Is it equally wrong now? I rather doubt it, even if this is an economic turn. The thing that most changed my mind has nothing to do with their model per se. In some recent conversations, I wanted to prove that a reason for the discrepancy between the employment survey strength relative to the household survey was due to Obamacare artifacts and part-time hiring. The person I talked to wanted to help. She couldn't help for the simple reason the BLS did not have the data. A brief conversation revealed the BLS does not have the data it wants or the data it needs to prove one way or another the question I asked (or many other equally important questions). In defense of the BLS, some of the seemingly convoluted ways they do things (and the birth/net model is a prime example) is for the simple reason the BLS does not have the detailed data that analysts presume they do. The person I talked to was desperate for more data, but for personal privacy reasons, and also because of burdens on businesses and various delays in reporting, they don't have it. Even if one presumes the data is somewhere in the system, one should not presume the BLS has access to that data. We can easily debate whether the BLS should have access to the data it wants. More importantly, we can step back and question whether those BLS jobs should exist at all! Most long-time readers probably know my point of view already. Such debates aside, my current belief is the BLS does a good job with the data it has. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. | |||||||||||||||||||||
Symantec Says "Antivirus Software Is Dead" Posted: 05 May 2014 10:07 AM PDT Antivirus "is dead" says Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security. Dye proposes businesses hire Symantec to minimize the damage once hackers break in. The Wall Street Journal reports Symantec Declares Antivirus Software Dead, turns to minimizing damage from breaches. Symantec Corp (SYMC) invented commercial antivirus software to protect computers from hackers a quarter-century ago. Now the company says such tactics are doomed to failure.Rather Curious Propositions Symantec has a rather curious proposition that essentially boils down to this: Hire us to learn how to minimize the damage once hackers break through our software. Juniper essentially says: Place fake data on your servers because hackers can break through our router security. Is doubling the data storage to "distract" hackers really a valid security solution? I think not. Shape Security assumes data will be stolen. Wonderful. What's the message here? Don't put anything of use online? Double or triple encrypt everything? The overall message from security providers is: don't expect the security systems we sell will work. Individual consumers obviously cannot afford to pay Symantec, IBM or anyone else to assess the damage when software fails. The saving grace for individuals is that ambitious hackers primarily attack banks and retailers like Target, where if they break in, they can steal information on tens-of-thousands of credit cards or accounts at a time. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
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