Central Perk

marți, 1 iulie 2014

3 tools to ‘suggest’ your way to better content ideas

Posted: 01 Jul 2014 01:30 AM PDT

Have you ever found yourself scrabbling for fresh content ideas relevant to your main topic of interest?

Perhaps you want to provide some insight into common issues facing your audience to build helpful resource articles?

Or maybe you've started working with a new client and need to generate a list of potential ideas for marketable content that will drive brand awareness? Right now?

Whatever content you're looking to create, it's common to find ourselves seeking fresh inspiration. Well, why not let Google do some of the heavy lifting for you? With a starting list of topic terms and a nice dash of automation thanks to some clever tools, I like to let Google's Suggest feature help me dig up a list of highly relevant, targeted long-tail variations, including terms that are either regularly searched for or that are being used right now.

Officially known as Autocomplete, Google Suggest helps by displaying "search predictions that might be similar to the search terms you're typing". For example, if I start typing in content marketing, Google thinks 'here's what other people have been searching for when they type this in'

Autocomplete offers a range of popular options for when users start their search with ‘content marketing’

The results you get from Autocomplete are not purely based on volume of searches, but are "a reflection of the search activity of users and the content of web pages". In other words, they are partly based on volume, but also on searches that Google thinks it has strong answers for.

Despite this, Autocomplete is a powerful research resource, as how often past searchers have used a term is an important consideration, as well as factors such as your personal search history, location, topicality and more. Of course, finding search topics based on what's popular right now is no bad thing either. Whether you need blog post ideas, new supporting content for your main offering or are generating ideas for marketable content to bring your site to new eyeballs, Google Suggest can help to reveal a host of potential opportunities through long-tail, semantically related, key phrases.

Now, to manually check Google Suggest for your main topic and all the possible variations is possible, but it would take time, and no doubt you're in a hurry. Fortunately, the online marketing community is highly inventive. So, here are three easy-to-use tools to quickly mine for great content ideas, all based on real insights into the needs of your potential readers.

I love these tools. They've given me many an idea, and helped kick-start a variety of content projects. Hopefully they can do the same for you!

Übersuggest

One of the first Google Suggest tools around, Ubersuggest is one of the best long-tail keyword finding tools available. It calls itself Suggest on steroids, and that's pretty apt. By entering your main topic and selecting your country location, you can mine Google Suggest for tens of great variations that can lead to content ideas. What's more, it's really quick to do. Let's run through how to use the tool, keeping our content marketing topic.

So, I load up ubersuggest.org and enter my key phrase, content marketing, choose my country and which vertical I'm interested in (web, images, news etc.) and fill out the reCAPTCHA field.

Übersuggest lets you choose from a large range of Google domains, and along 6 different verticals

A quick note, using different verticals might not seem obvious, but can be useful for certain topics to find truly helpful keyphrases. For example, using the News vertical can help you find what news angles are of interest to your potential audience right now – perfect for blog posts when you want to be seen as commenting on the latest events.

Ubersuggest works by scraping the Autocomplete results for your term, and the Autocomplete that occurs when you add another character. It does this for the entire alphabet, each numeric character and even for just adding a space. So, having completed my search, Ubersuggest has found 324 suggestions for me to browse. Now, if you click on one of the keywords it adds more suggestions based on that keyphrase (1) – yep, more choices! Click on the green plus symbol to add that keyword to your bucket (2).

Übersuggest offering a range of suggestions

Übersuggest can deliver hundreds of potential new keywords, and lets you drill down further to uncover more

Once done, scroll back to the top and you'll find your bucket on the right-hand side. Click Get and you're presented with a plain-text version for you to copy and add to your seed list.

Grabbing the keyword data from Übersuggest

As you can see, if you add a broad topic you can quickly generate hundreds of variations on your topic. Sadly, Ubersuggest can sometimes be a little unreliable; occasionally it is unavailable, and it can be a little slow to load. However, generally it works very well, and the keywords it brings you, and the functionality to select individual terms and find further suggestions, means it can help you create a big bucket of potential ideas.

SEOChat's Suggestion Keyword Finder

One of the limitations of Ubersuggest is that you have to manually select each important keyword variation to find the suggestions for that term. The Suggestion Keyword Finder from SEOChat neatly solves this problem by approaching finding Google Suggest results in a different way.

You can start by entering your topic keyword and hitting the submit button to get the top suggestions based on your term, much like the first level Ubersuggest gives you. However, the real fun comes when you select Level 2 as an option before submitting.

Select Level 2 to start having some real fun

Now the tool gives you the initial list of suggestions, and then the top suggestions for each of the initial options presented. So, for content marketing the top suggestion was content marketing institute, so the first level 2 list is the suggestions for that keyphrase.

SEOChat 2

Suddenly, I'm able to see the top suggestions for each of the most popular or relevant variations of my main topic – very nice! What's better than this list? Even more data, that's what, and this tool delivers. If you select the option of Level 3 you get the next layer of granularity, the top suggestions for each variation of the most popular options (phew!). The Related Keywords Tool handily puts each suggestion and its breakdown together so you can see the whole topic niche.

SEOChat 3

What's fantastic about this arrangement is that the tool immediately drills down into each niche for you. This means that whether you find a topic to create content on at level 1 or level 2, you've got a breakdown of elements your content should touch on. Perhaps use them for sub-headings or even to create a series of related posts.

As this method of keyphrase mining is different to Ubersuggest's, you can use both in conjunction to build a list of potential content ideas in only a few minutes. Once you've found a set of helpful data, you can export it to a handy Excel format spreadsheet for further analysis and manipulation. One disadvantage of this tool is the lack of international support (US only results from what I can tell), so you have to bear this in mind when considering both the data gained, and entering topics with different spellings internationally and so on.

Note: SEOChat have another option, the Keyword Suggest Tool, which pulls the top suggestions from Google, Bing, Amazon and YouTube, which used to provide some interesting ideas as well, but sadly I haven’t been able to get it to generate results for a while now.

KeywordTool.io

A third option for you to try is the new kid on the block – KeywordTool.io. This little beauty is an excellent addition to any content marketer's/SEO's toolkit. It again scrapes Google's Autocomplete function to deliver impressive numbers of long-tail keyword variations, all in only a few moments.

This simple tool makes it easy to find hordes of keywords (up to 750 a time) based on Google Suggest's data. To get going, you enter your keyword, we'll be sticking with content marketing of course, and choose the Google domain and language you would like results for. This is not small detail – Keyword Tool has 194 domains and 83 languages to choose from.

Keyword Tool 1

Keyword Tool then appends your keyphrase with the entire alphabet and all numeric characters, much like Ubersuggest. However, it also prepends all characters as well, offering potential further insight, which is extremely helpful. Remember, not everyone uses your topic at the beginning of their search.

Keyword Tool 2

As you can see here, by prepending a to content marketing, Keyword Tool has given me a range of potential topics such as creating a content marketing plan, developing a content marketing strategy and example of a content marketing plan. Long-tail keywords like this will no doubt start your mind racing with possible content. When you're ready, simply click on the copy all button at the top of the page to grab all the keywords. These can then be pasted into a spreadsheet.

Keyword Tool 3

Keyword Tool is a very nice option, and one I'm sure many will love using. It doesn't give you the same deep dive into one variation as SEO Chat's Suggestion Keyword Finder, but can offer a more broad spectrum of possibilities, the strongest of which could then be re-put through of course. It is reliable, but does conflict sometimes Chrome, perhaps conflicting with another of my (many) extensions

No matter, I heartily recommend you give it a whirl next time you need some fresh content or keyword ideas.

After you have your words

Once you have your potential topic long-tail variations, you can pull data from some other popular tools to filter for the finest opportunities. Putting your options through the Google Keyword Planner will give you the search volumes each keyphrase currently projects and can be a great way to find the most popular.

Also beneficial is to run the phrases through SEMRush to uncover phrase-match and related keywords. It may be that the search volume for your first choice isn't fantastic, but there's another slight variation or a synonym that is much more popular. You can then rinse and repeat; take those further keyword variations and re-run through your suggest tool of choice, then the Keyword Planner to find volume and SEMRush to find further variations.

On a similar note, we've already touched upon the notion that much marketable content should be built with the intention of appearing as a resource for a whole variety of search-phrase variations on a topic. By finding all the related terms on the topic we've been suggested via Google, we can compile a much larger potential search volume and reach for our content, rather than focusing on just one keyword or phrase.

The final piece of the puzzle is to take a look at the competition. Within SEMRush's overview dashboard for each term is a handy interface that shows what's ranking for those phrases, making it easy to see which phrases either have results that can be improved upon with your expertise or are simply lacking relevant, helpful answers.

Now we can take a look at the difficulty of the keyword to see how hard it would be to rank. SEMRush comes with a keyword difficulty option, which is handy, and for a more detailed look Moz's Keyword Difficulty Tool and serpIQ both offer excellent analysis.

Between search volume, available keyphrase variations plus synonyms, and relative difficulty, we can quickly turn our Google Suggest options into a list of relevant content ideas that we know people are searching for. Not bad for a relatively quick and painless piece of work, and without having to struggle for new topics. Now there's just the simple matter of devising the content to blow the competition away!

The post 3 tools to 'suggest' your way to better content ideas appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : How will you choose your next project?

How will you choose your next project?

After you make a list, after you've exhaustively chronicled your options, will you choose: easy, cheap, proven, brave, certain, big payoff, fun, convenient, known, unknown, important, urgent, challenging...

There is no perfect answer, but knowing which way your compass points (and saying it out loud) is the best way to move forward.

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luni, 30 iunie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

French Bank BNP Paribas Pleads Guilty Criminal Conspiracy Charges, Fined Record $9 Billion; Anyone Headed to Prison?
Last Minute Concessions and Unreasonable Demands
Kurds Deputy PM Calls for Decentralized Iraq and Removal of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki

French Bank BNP Paribas Pleads Guilty Criminal Conspiracy Charges, Fined Record $9 Billion; Anyone Headed to Prison?

Posted: 30 Jun 2014 05:30 PM PDT

Today, French bank BNP Paribas plead guilty Monday to criminal money-laundering laws by helping clients dodge sanctions on Iran, Sudan and other countries.

As part of the settlement, BNP will pay a record penalty of close to $9 billion.

Former ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet said the fine was neither fair, just, nor proportionate and carries risks for the global financial system.

CCN Money has the synopsis in BNP Paribas to Pay Nearly $9 Billion Penalty.

On Monday in an agreement with the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance the bank pleaded guilty to falsifying business records and conspiracy in Manhattan Supreme Court. On Tuesday it is expected to plead guilty for violating money laundering laws in federal court with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

The bank also agreed to a sanction by the New York department of financial services. It will suspend certain U.S. dollar clearing transaction services through its New York branch for one year.

About 30 employees will leave BNP Paribas as a result of the investigation, including several who have gone already, according to the U.S. official.

The fine dwarfs HSBC (HSBC)'s $1.9 billion penalty in 2012 for similar offenses, and the $2.6 billion Credit Suisse (CS) paid in May to settle tax evasion claims.

The Wall Street Journal said BNP Paribas would have to slash its dividend and raise billions of euros by issuing bonds.

Standard and Poor's has warned it could cut the bank's long term credit rating once it reviewed the size of the fine and the nature of any additional penalties.

Curious Thing

Curiously, no one goes to prison for money laundering, falsifying business records, or conspiracy charges.

But New York Times Deal Book reports Prosecutors Ask at Least 8 Years for Martoma in Insider Trading Case.

Federal prosecutors are recommending that Mathew Martoma, a former trader who worked for the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen, be sentenced next month to at least eight years in prison for insider trading, if not significantly more.

That would be at the upper end of prison sentences for hedge fund traders convicted of insider trading in recent years, but by no means the stiffest punishment handed down during the long-running investigation.

In February, a federal jury in Manhattan convicted the former SAC portfolio manager of helping the hedge fund generate profits and avoid losses totaling $275 million in 2008.

To date, the 11 years given to Raj Rajaratnam, the co-founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund, is the longest sentence anyone in the investigation has received. Mr. Rajaratnam was convicted by a jury in May 2011 on 14 counts of insider trading — more than Mr. Martoma's three criminal charges. But the illicit trading by Mr. Rajartnam generated about $63 million, compared with the $275 million in illegal profits and avoided losses for Mr. Martoma.

Questions of the Day

Rajartnam was sentenced to prison for 11 years based on illicit profits of $63 million.

Here's the question of the day: Did BNP Paribas make more than $63 million in money laundering and other conspiracies?

Bonus question: Is insider trading worse than falsifying records?

Answer: Apparently, insider trading is worse than money laundering, falsifying business records, and various other conspiracies. Martha Stewart knows this as well, via obstruction of justice charges related to insider trading.

Addendum:

The CATO institute has the absurd details in Martha Stewart in Prison?

Meanwhile, insider trading by Congress is perfectly legal, even when Congressmen know who a big defense contract will be awarded to (and act on it in advance).

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

Last Minute Concessions and Unreasonable Demands

Posted: 30 Jun 2014 01:28 PM PDT

The EU threatens more sanctions on Russia unless Russia meets three verifiable demands. One of the demands is reasonable, the other two aren't.

For starters, the EU wants Russia to halt the flow of weapons into Eastern Ukraine, and it wants that process verified. That appears to be a reasonable demand.

Secondly, the EU demands pro-Russia militants return control of Izvarino, Dolzhanskiy and Krasnopartizansk (three border checkpoints) to Ukraine. The militants refuse to surrender, arguing that theirs is now a sovereign state.

Returning control of three Ukrainian checkpoints is an unreasonable, if not idiotic demand on Russia. Short of invading Ukraine and taking over the checkpoints, there is absolutely no way for Russia to comply with the resolution.

Finally, the EU demands "launch of substantial negotiations on the implementation of President Poroshenko's peace plan". Once again, Russia is not in control of militants who may or may not wish to negotiate anything.

Of the three demands, the Financial Times reports the first has been met as Moscow Makes Last-Minute Concession to Ukraine on Border Controls.

"President Vladimir Putin has proposed that Ukrainian border guards be granted access to those crossing points from the Russian side as observers for joint control of the border, and that observers from the [Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe] also be admitted to those crossing points from the Russian side," said Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

"We hope that this initiative of the Russian president will allow all responsible parties to take a decision to extend the ceasefire, to extend the truce," Mr Lavrov said.

Russia agreed to the first demand after "Vladimir Putin discussed the crisis by telephone with Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande of France and Petro Poroshenko, their Ukrainian counterpart."

At this point, there is little else Russia can do, and it would be very unreasonable to impose more sanctions on Russia for a situation in Ukraine that Russia has no fundamental control over.

Anyone but a bureaucrat under heavy influence of US meddling would rapidly come to that conclusion, but don't count on it.

In politics, stupidity frequently trumps common sense.

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

Kurds Deputy PM Calls for Decentralized Iraq and Removal of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki

Posted: 30 Jun 2014 12:22 PM PDT

The Kurds played their cards in the Iraqi mess exceptionally well. They never threatened independence until Baghdad was too unstable to do anything about it.

Even now, the Kurds offer one last olive branch of sorts, an offer for a "decentralized" Iraq as opposed to independent nations, but only on condition that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki steps down, and Sunnis get more control.

Please consider Kurds' Deputy PM Talabani Calls for Decentralized Iraq

Iraq and its foreign backers must abandon a centralised system of governance if the country is to survive, Iraqi Kurdistan's deputy prime minister has said, warning that his semi-autonomous region would gain de facto independence if the slide into chaos continues.

"We have to get our minds off of this notion that a strong central government can govern this country, because it can't," he [Qubad Talabani] told the Financial Times in an interview. "We're past that. We tried that. We had some competent Sunni ministers in the government . . . it didn't provide adequate representation to the people in those [Sunni] territories."

KRG president and head of the region's dominant Kurdistan Democratic party, Masoud Barzani, openly stated last week that Kirkuk would remain under Kurdish control and that independence could be near, hinting it may be time for a referendum on the issue.

Mr Talabani, who is from the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, was more circumspect, saying the Kurds still hoped to make a deal in Baghdad.

The two main parties in Kurdistan have a power-sharing agreement where they alternate between the premiership and deputy posts.

Kurds and Sunni are adamant that their participation depends on an end to Mr Maliki's eight-year rule, and the appointment of a new premier who will negotiate. It is not yet clear if majority Shia politicians will agree on an alternative candidate.

Even if Maliki goes along, Masoud Barzani, the Kurds president favors independence. Expect a referendum on independence soon if Maliki does not step down, and perhaps even if he does.

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

Damn Cool Pics

These Tip Jars Will Definitely Get Money
The 17 Coolest Signatures Of Famous People [Infographic]
One Man's Dream Car Is Another Man's Junk

These Tip Jars Will Definitely Get Money

Posted: 30 Jun 2014 12:10 PM PDT

Who wouldn't want to put money in these awesome tip jars?

The 17 Coolest Signatures Of Famous People [Infographic]

Posted: 30 Jun 2014 10:39 AM PDT

We've chosen the 17 famous people with the coolest signatures in all of history. Keep scrolling to see the signatures, from legendary Argentinian soccer player Diego Maradona to German artist Albrecht Dürer.

Click on Image to Enlarge.