One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

When we're working on fixing an immediate problem, especially one that's affecting customers, it's difficult to stop and take a breather. But sometimes, a breather is exactly what is needed to solve the issue. 

One Step Back

Last month was a bit rough for our Big Data team. We spent most of the month heads-down fixing issues with Rankings and Keyword Difficulty, and our technical debt was creeping up on us. I wanted to give into my natural urge to hunker down, chew on the issues, and come up with a plan that would fix as much as I could. However, I had a weekly 1 on 1 meeting scheduled that seemed to be getting in the way of my plan to lay low and problem solve.

Here at Moz, each employee attends weekly or bi-weekly 1 on 1 meeting with managers or teammates to help keep our goals on track. 1 on 1 meetings are a chance for teammates to act as soundboards for project ideas and idea generators for solutions to issues. These meetings are an important part of our culture, but on this particular day my focus was elsewhere and I didn't feel I had time for my 1 on 1 with Matt Peters, our rock star data scientist. Realizing that we had missed our last meeting, I begrudgingly made time to fit the meeting in. After our usual good talk on algorithms, correlations, and next steps for growing his team, we started bouncing ideas off each other on how to save money on processing. We were spending $800,000 on processing and not really getting anything for it. The current plan was simply unsustainable. 

Matt, in his very scientific way, broke down the problem in exact numbers. I, however, will break them down for you in a very Anthony way:

• Long-term, we knew we needed to fix the issues we were having with Amazon, but we were reacting to missing our index release date instead.
• Short-term, it seemed sensible to spin up more servers and get the index done more quickly.
• In reality, spinning up more servers at Amazon was only increasing our costs, and our server failures. The current solution was not only not addressing the problem, but in some ways it was making the problem worse by taking time away from the team's efforts to fix the long-term issues.  

Taking a step back from the immediate problem made it clear that our current approach wasn't working.

*Server photo by Kim Scarborough used through creative commons license.

Coming Up with a Better Plan

After the insight I gained in my 1 on 1 with Matt, it was clear we needed to change our approach. Matt and I and outlined a high-level plan for lowering our costs with the added potential bonus of getting indices out on time. We figured it might be a hard sell after telling the team, 'Don't miss the date at all cost,' for the last two months. They'd spent hundreds of hours trying to keep all of those servers up, and we weren't sure how open to this change they would be.

However, Carin, our stellar Manager of Big Data, brought the team together and we all agreed on the plan. Carin outlined the issues and then proposed the new approach in this snippet from her email to Rand:

The New Plan:

1. Run two indexes at most in AWS:

• One cluster on 80 cc2.8xlarge machines - these are HUGE and more expensive, but should complete an index in less time, making them cheaper over the month.
• If necessary, run a backup index on 200 smaller c1.xlarge machines (current setup).

2. Continue to maintain an index size of 60 - 70 billion URLs to keep processing time reasonable.

This plan allows for engineering time to tackle the larger problems: develop a testing environment and improve the Mozscape code base. Most importantly, though, we can distribute PLDs across processing shards in a more efficient manner, which could lead to significant time savings in processing.

Two Steps Forward

Luckily, Rand approved the plan, and the time and energy spent to take a step back really paid off. Newer, better, bigger equipment did the job, with no server failures and no operational headaches. The October index release is the result of the change. It finished in record time and only cost $100,000, compared to the $800,000 spent last month.

*Server photo by Kim Scarborough used through creative commons license.

We learned quite a few things from this experience, but this was our most important takeaway: the times when you feel like you don't have time to step back and reassess are exactly the times when you should. It may not always save you $700,000, but there is a chance that it might. The time spent gaining a new perspective can bring solutions to light that you'd have never seen if you'd kept that nose to the grindstone! 

We are hopeful that future indexes run as smoothly as October, and if they don't, we'll remember our own advice and take a step back before moving forward.

Bloggers & Acquisitions: How to Finance and Partner with an Existing Blog

A few months ago, Rand Fishkin wrote a post about the benefits of buying a blog. It's a tactic I have become a big fan of - it's effective, efficient, and scalable. By purchasing/financing a blog you can work hand-in-hand with an established site that already has an engaged readership and a social following.

One thing to keep in mind, the end goal here isn't links. Do you get links? Sure! You get a ton! But this isn't a tactic to pump a contextually relevant blog full of anchor text links. This is a blueprint to align your site with an established publication, partner on content, and build your brand. This is a strategy to grow a business, not just a back link profile.

Prospecting

_{(Credit: Flickr user ToOliver2)}

Target a niche blog that pertains to your vertical - It's best to target a site that is about one very specific subject that pertains to your money site. If I was working on a site that sold beer brewing kits, I wouldn't go for a general beer blog. I would prospect for blogs that cover a specific aspect of beer, like home brew recipes or rare beers. 

(Credit: Flickr user Tim Patterson)

Every site ranking for "beer blog" or other generic head terms that pertain to your industry is going to get hammered by link requests on a regular basis. When you target something niche, you are going to cut down on the amount of link requests they receive, and they may be more open to talking with you. I like to target sites that cover my secondary and long tail keywords. 

_{(Credit: Flickr user Tax Credits)}

Look for a blog that is not monetized - There is no point in trying to purchase a blog from someone who is guest posting, doing product reviews, and hosting giveaways several times a day. When prospecting, find a site that publishes a lot of original content for the sole purpose of benefiting their readership and sharing a unique perspective. 

Target a site with one writer - During the acquisition process, it will be easier to sell a single person on the idea of financing their blog. Also, managing workflow, deadlines, and payment is much easier with one person as opposed to a group of writers.

Research the prospect with a microscope - If it's a serious prospect, I will read through the last four weeks of their blog and then do the following searches

• site:blogimresearching.com AND [client name]
• site:blogimresearching.com AND [head keyword] OR [secondary keywords]
• site:blogimresearching,com AND [CEOs name] OR [spokesperson name]

I look for any inclination that the blogger has been exposed to the brand before. How do they feel about the industry and your client's executive officers? I read the posts for tone, which I admit takes a lot of time. This is going to be someone promoting your brand, so you need to pay attention. If the mentions aren't extremely favorable, move on to the next prospect. 

_{(Credit: Flickr user Victor Bezrukov)}

Go for something established, but not a powerhouse - You are not going to be able to sponsor or buy a top blog that pertains to your industry. In my experience, it's best to target up-and-comers. Don't be too picky. If they are a solid writer, I would take a Domain Authority of 35 or higher with 40 or more linking root domains.

Outreach Phase

The term "buying a blog" is scary, remove it from your vocabulary when communicating with target sites. I like to refer to it as a "promotional partnership." Craft a quick personalized letter that comes off as professional and friendly, here's one of mine:

Always ask for a phone call in the introductory email. It's imperative to become a real voice in their ear and not just another thread in their inbox. This shows the blogger that you are willing to invest your time and attention towards them. If they have posts that have been picked up by major publications, it wouldn't hurt to reference those achievements either. 

The Response

Acquisition Phase

Off the bat, I like to let them know that this proposed partnership isn't about links and anchor text, it's about driving traffic. 

Before you go any further, it's important to get a screenshot of their analytics, if they have no traffic there is no point in going through with the partnership.

That's way better than I hoped for.

To seal the deal, I offer to pay for their hosting and the time it will be taking them to work with us to grow their audience. It's critical to go over all of your expectations with them. Let them know that they are free to have other advertisers on their site, but that they shouldn't engage in advertising with any of your competitors.

IMPORTANT: GET EVERYTHING IN WRITING!

(Credit: Flickr user NobMouse)

I recommend having the blogger agree to the following in writing

1. Since our experts' opinions are useful and informative for your readership, we would like X amount of posts every month to feature them for an expert opinion or interview. These posts will link to relevant portions of the client's site in an effort to reinforce the overall message of your posts.
2. One badge, with the client's branding that links over to the client's site with the alt image text of the client's choice shall be placed on the homepage for the duration of the partnership
3. Site will be paid X on the 1st of the month as long as all publishing deadlines are met.
4. Site will not engage in any advertising with the following sites: (list of competitors)

Once that's signed, the real work begins.

Mentoring Phase (Ongoing)

Now you have to follow through on the promise to grow their audience. These recommendations can be time consuming for both of you. I like to make one recommendation per month to improve their blog. Here's a starter list of things you can do to help out your blogger.

1. Clean Up Their Site - Run their site through Xenu and send them the broken link report. Have them download Check My Links for Chrome so they can easily find and clean up their 404s from the Xenu report. 
2. Help Them With Indexation  - Look over their site and provide them with a new robots.txt file that blocks out unnecessary directories with duplicate content. (like /tag/ and /category/)
3. Make Them an XML Sitemap - I like to use Screaming Frog for this, just make sure to take out any unnecessary pages. 
4. Send Them Guest Post Opportunities - Those HARO opportunities that might not be right for your client are probably perfect for your partner blog.
5. Identify Influential Peers - Use Followerwonk to find influencers in their space. Encourage your blogger to interact and engage with the influencers you've identified through social media and insightful blog comments.
6. Optimize Their Evergreen Content - Get a user account for their Google Analytics and see which old posts are still getting search traffic. Rewrite the title tags and meta descriptions of these evergreen posts for increased click through rates. 
7. Give them social media advice - My favorite social media guide for small business is The Social Media Workout Plan (TM) by @manamica. It's extremely actionable and very easy for anyone to follow, including bloggers. 
8. Teach Them About Google Alerts - Show them how to set up topical Google Alerts so they will have a constant stream of relevant news stories that could inspire their blog posts.
9. Give Them an SEO Education - Blogs need SEO help too; the Beginner's Guide to SEO is the best entry level resource out there. 
10. Grow Their Commenting Community - Have the blogger implement Livefyre or DISQUS for increased commenting on their site. 

Content Creation Phase (Ongoing)

Every month, your blogger should come to you with a new topic that they want to write about that pertains to your client's industry. It's your job to get a representative from your client's company to get you a quote in a timely manner. As long as you don't slow down the blogger's creative process, they should like working with you. After all, you are providing them with authoritative industry opinions for their content.

If the blogger ever has writer's block, I like to use UberSuggest to create an evergreen post concept. If you need some tips on using the tool, Amanda Orson wrote a great post on how to use Followerwonk to create content.  

Although it's a lot of work at first, this beats the headaches that come with maintaining a flimsy microsite that could get penguinized at any moment. With this strategy you get a real site, with real readers, that are being exposed to your client's brand on a daily basis. It can drive conversions, educate consumers, and help build a loyal brand following. This isn't just and SEO strategy; it's a business strategy. 

_{(Credit: QuickMeme)}

This isn't the only marketing initaitive we have going for this client, so I can't say if this single strategy lead to undeniable success. There have been a lot of other efforts to push them into mainstream press. However, here is a screenshot from their analytics that shows the conversion rate of the traffic from the partner blog:

This relationship is driving revenue. 

Our client is experiencing growth because of a real relationship that we have created with a trusted and authoritative site. Overall, their rankings have gone up, they are seeing more conversions, and they love that we are creating content that gets read by their target demographic and not some "Top 10 Signs You Are..." to place on a low level blog in exchange for a single link.  

Savvy clients are starting to care less and less about PR3 links on pay-to-play mom blogs or infographics you have to throw down $150 to post on the equivalent of a content directory. As an industry, our clients are relying on us more to be real marketers. Inserting our client into a target demographics' preferred and trusted media source has helped grow their business, brand, traffic, and trust. This may not be traditional SEO, but it's working.

The Hope of a Link: Mashable Content Analysis

The holy grail: A link from Mashable. 

Don't kid yourself. We all want one. They are a content powerhouse with a mind-blowing community. Moz has that type of community, but Mashable touches on everything from kittens to major trends in the economy and technology. If it's interesting to the Internet community, they'll publish a about it. Their domain authority and homepage authority is a whopping 96. Of course we all want a link. 

The first thing any reputable SEO would tell you is that you need two things before you can even begin hoping for a link from Mashable:

1. Great content - it has to be beyond good by this point, it must be great
2. A relationship with Mashable

I'm not going to claim that those two things are absolutely necessary, but I would agrue that you need to know more about Mashable before you go pitching your content to them. Well, I've done some of that for you, and today I'll teach you how to do it for other sites as well. This is Advanced Content Analysis ... starting ... now.

The Brain Child

The idea to do Advanced Content Analysis on Mashable came from a conversation Carson Ward and I had one day about getting a link from them. He made the quip that all you really need to do is write a post along the lines of "7 Ways to Do X." I laughed because it's sort of true (list posts do well), but then asked myself:

"How many of Mashable's posts are lists?"

Once I dug into how to get the titles of as many posts as possible, I realized just how much more data was available and how much deeper the analysis could really go. 

Data Process

I thought I'd pull six months of Mashable posts; that is, until I started pulling the data and realized they put out almost two thousand posts a month. TWO THOUSAND. Holy content, Batman. Two thousand posts and one month was plenty for my analysis. If anyone wants to do more, I'd love to hear about six months of data.

I used three tools to pull the data necessary for analysis: ImportXML for Google Docs, SEOTools for Excel, and Microsoft Excel.

ImportXML

To gather the post titles, I used ImportXML for Google Docs. The linked guide will tell you more than I ever could about how to scrape content from a site using ImportXML. For those that are curious, I've included the formulas I used for Mashable. If you just want to see the forumlas in action, here is a document that is read-only for you to investigate. 

The first important part is the page to scrape. You want to get to the blog/site's archive pages. For Mashable, you can access them by hitting "next" on their homepage. This gives us the page to scrape. A1 below is where you input the page number you want to scrape. This forumla is cell A2 for me -- you'll need to know that in a minute.

=CONCATENATE("http://mashable.com/page/",A1,"/") 

Below that, you can complete the import. These three take up A3, B3, and C3. As previously mentioned, once I pulled the titles, I figured I'd just keep going. The URL is important for the things you can pull using SEOTools, so be sure to add that one. The date and comment number was important for in-depth analysis. The number of comments along with social metrics are the only real "success" metrics you can pull externally. I mean, unless Mashable wants to share the traffic numbers with me for each of the posts ... no? Dang. 

Titles: =importxml(A2,"//a[@class='headline']")
Post URL: =importxml(A2,"//a[@class='headline']/@href") (muy importante)
Date, Author, Comment Count: =importxml(A2,"//p[@class='byline clearfix reviewer vcard meta']")

Side Note: Dear tech guys and gals at Mashable, sorry, I crawled tons, and others might, too. Though that is probably like .001% of your server traffic. :)

From here, you simply copy and paste into an Excel sheet, and keep going (change the page number in A1) until you get the number of posts you want. 

SEOTools

This is my new favorite tools for a number of reasons, not least of which is the ability to use Regex in Excel. Are you excited, too? Well, it can also return social metrics using a URL, return the canonical URL, and so much more. If you haven't downloaded it, please do. And donate. This thing is worth it. 

Alright, so I promise not to bore you, but I used SEOtools to do a few things:

1. Download the Facebook shares (Twitter wasn't being nice when I tried, but it's possible)
2. Return True/False if the post title included markers like Infographic or Video. Mashable is nice and gives us a marker in the title if the post is about something big like that. 
3. Return True/False if the post title included a number. More on this later. 

Microsoft Excel

This section is all in Excel. I did one more thing and checked to see what day of the week the post was made live. That's made simple with a formula like this: 

=TEXT(WEEKDAY([@Date]), "ddd")

The [@Date] references the cell in the table with the date. 

Content Analysis

Now I have the data, it's time to learn some stuff about Mashable and their content. After de-duplication (they post weekly recaps of videos, etc.), I analyzed 1,159 posts. Below is a look at the content types from what I could tell. Other includes smaller types like Audio and just plain text posts. 

 

It looks like in the last month Mashable has preferred Vvdeos over infographics, which is something to keep in mind when deciding what content to develop and pitch. But this is just in terms of the number of posts. We have answered our original first question: how many of Mashable's posts are lists? 13% in the last month (in the chart above I am referring to "# Posts"). Nothing to cough at, but not as many as Carson and I figured. But what about performance of these posts? What days are they posted? And for that matter what about video and infographic posts? On to dataland we go.

Lists, Infographics, and Video Posts -- Oh My!

How well do they perform? I'm picking on these because they are the content types that we all harp on so much. The results for comments on the post types and Facebook metrics. The most suprising find here is that while video posts have more shares and comments, there is a higher number of list posts. I think this has more to do with traffic and brand building than actual engagement. I theorize that if we could see average unique visitors to these posts, that lists would have a much higher view rate. Reason: people are lazy and just want to skim for data. Lists work well because they are easy to skim and give people information in just a few seconds. One day I'd love to see a study in which Mashable looked at the new visitors from a list post and watched how often they came back to Mashable, and compare that to other post types. THAT would be fascinating. 

Now to the more fun stuff - days of the week. This has little consequence in my book, but it's fun to look at. 

Above is the average for the site overall in the last 30 days. Fun factoids: 

• Mashable posts less on the weekends, but the audience is more active in comments and sharing. Weekend numbers are similar to Tuesdays. Tuesday is apparently the day that Mashable audience members are bored at work. <Runs and Hides> But more likely, there are just fewer posts those days. Averages run higher when you have a smaller base. 
• Monday is the big post day. No surprise to me there. 
• Wednesday and Thursday are when intereaction drops off. 

What about by post type? How many are posted on each day? It turns out that the videos and lists are posted more on Mondays, and infographics on Wednesdays. Why do you think this happens? I have my theory, but I'd love to hear yours on this one. 

How did these content types perform per day? Let's just look at the "lists" category for this part as we are getting pretty deep, and this post was originally about lists. 

Remember my theory on boredom on Tuesdays? *points like Vanna White at the chart above* See?!?!?!? The count of total shares and comments back my theory up. Even though there are fewer posts on Tuesdays, they got more interactions on average. Huh. Maybe this is why we post on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Distilled. Will and Duncan are smart cookies. (No, really, I doubt that had a ton to do with it, but Will or Duncan can correct me later.)

Final Thoughts

• Content Analysis is much easier with tools like ImportXML and SEOTools for Excel.
• You should consider doing this with the content on your blog or a competitor. What's really working for them? Back up your analysis with hard core numbers of interaction with the audience, not just what you see them doing. Don't get inspiration (see I didn't say copying?) from something that isn't working. 
• Post awesome stuff on Tuesday.
• Develop great videos for Mashable, as infographics are on the way out. 
• List posts get attention, but not as much interaction. 

What else did I miss? This isn't fully scientific, but it is fun and gives us much more data to help make decisions than we might have had before. Take everything above with a grain of salt, pull your own numbers, and see for yourself. 

The REAL Benefits of Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is riding high right now and the whole Internet Marketing sphere is buzzing with talk about it. Some people consider guest blogging to be one of the more powerful of available tactics, while others disparage this viewpoint, saying that guest blogging is highly misunderstood and that people are misusing it.

In my honest opinion, both mindsets are correct. I recently did a cartoon post on my blog discussing (in a humorous style)  how guest blogging is powerful and how it is misused by many who have failed to understand the scope of awesomeness in this practice we call guest blogging.

Guest blogging is, indeed, one of the powerful ways of building strong, high-quality relationships that may help you in multiple ways, including developing business opportunities and professional connections, setting brand value and, of course, acquisition of link juice.

But, there are many people in the industry who aren't grasping the real worth of guest blogging. They tend to view guest blogging as just another link building tactic. Because of this, they continue to build low quality content for submission to blogs that accept guest posting. Sadly, I estimate that one out of ten blogs actually publishes this junk, polluting the web with garbage.

Discussion about guest blogging as a relationship development tool vs. guest blogging as yet another vehicle for mere linkbuilding is all over the web.  What makes this post different from others is that I will provide case studies and success stories to back my opinion of the real potentials of this practice.

Let's cut the theory part and talk about the real figures! Properly executed, guest blogging can help you:

Build Relationships

So many blogs state this, but I remember when I wrote my first ever guest post. Very few people tweeted it and I wasn't able to make any good connections out of it. I was a newbie, and didn't play my part well.

There is another common industry phrase that states, 'Building relationships takes time'. If I merge these two phrases, it reads something like this.

Guest blogging helps you build relationships, and as it takes time,  you should be consistent in your activities.

Let's hear what blogging and SEO expert, Kristi Hines, has to say about building relationships through guest blogging:

Words from Kristi Hines:

"I've built great blogging relationships through guest posting on other blogs as well as inviting others to guest post on my own. The strongest relationships you will build with other blogs are the ones on sites where you contribute regularly vs. submitting one-off posts."

Submitting a single guest post isn't enough. If you intend to forge a relationship, then your job doesn't end with submitting your post. Plan to interact with the audience (usually through the comments) and follow up with the blog owner or editor to see how your guest post did. This will prove that you aren't just another link builder; you actually care about the community.  Who knows? This might open their doors for you to a future of more guest posting opportunities and even partnerships in other areas.

Social Media Examiner is one example from my own guest blogging experience of building relationships through guest blogging. They treat all of their writers as a part of their team. They organize meet-ups at blogging conferences like New Media Expo (formerly BlogWorld), they include you in their roundup posts when your expertise matches the roundup topic, and they always offer to help you in any way they can. I've met a lot of great people through their community and even gained some clients for my freelance writing business, which is always a plus.

Become An Expert

Guest blogging can act as your doorway to gaining status as an expert in your field. The more in-depth, well-researched posts you publish on authoritative blogs, the more chances you will get to communicate and interact with people. Over time, you can become an authority in eyes of your target audience.

That's advice you'll read everywhere, but let's gain deeper insight from the words of guest blogging queen, Ann Smarty, about her journey towards the respect she has earned in the industry:

Words from Ann Smarty

"It somehow happened without me trying too much. I started blogging and was invited to guest post at Search Engine Journal. I didn't even know what a guest post was and was too humble to even include an "About author" page. Then guest posting invites kept coming. I saw traffic and more people recognizing me as an expert. I saw the benefit! So I started guest blogging actively. Then the idea of MyBlogGuest was born and my name became associated with "guest blogging" because of it. I started to guest post even more promoting MyBlogGuest. It was promoted 100% with my guest posts: no paid reviews, no ads, just "free" guest posts. And it started growing! I guess that's the best evidence of the benefits of guest blogging."

Discover Business Opportunities

This is the most delicious bite in the whole meal. Yes! With proper implementation, guest blogging surfaces new business opportunities. Don't laugh. I know it works. Rather than quoting an expert here, I'll share my own personal experience.

My last post on SEOmoz was about writing an email in a way that gets a better rate of response and it went very well. I danced twice; once when my post got promoted to the main blog and again when I received this message in my SEOmoz private message box:

While I can't reveal all the details of this message, I think it proves my point. In fact, I have received several emails like this after guest blogging elsewhere.

If you've tried guest posting without achieving this kind of success, keep the following tips in mind:

When attempting to attract business, nothing matters more than the quality of your offering. Your submission must accurately showcase your level of expertise in your field.  

If you want to see traffic flowing towards your website from your efforts, you must produce the best post ever (I really mean this) on your topic and submit it to a high quality blog. Be sure your website is ready to welcome the new traffic. Make sure it's as awesome as your guest post!

Capture A Wider Audience

It's generally accepted that the more targeted traffic your website captures, the greater the chance of a high conversion rate.

The formula for a blogger is pretty much the same, but the question becomes one of how to reach that target audience. Again, enter guest blogging!

Thanks to SEOmoz for coming up with this post analytics feature on their blog. I am again highlighting a previous guest posts on SEOmoz and showing you my stats.

Around 3,016 people actually visited my post's page and average time of their stay on the page is around 4 minutes and 20 seconds (enough time to read and comment on the post).

I am sure that if I had published my post on my own blog, I would not have gotten the same amount of traffic. My limited audience and smaller circle of influence cannot compare to that of SEOmoz (obviously).  Through guest blogging, I had the chance capture a wider audience and make an impression on new people.

Moreover, a good guest post can win more blog and Twitter followers. I've noticed how my followers have quickly increased whenever I've had a post published on one of the major SEO blogs.

Retaining these followers is a completely different story, but as far as the increase in followers is concerned, I consider this one of the best gifts guest blogging offers.

...And Get The Link!

Let's not forget linkbuilding. The highest quality links will come from submitting your best content to the best blogs publishing in your niche.

My blog is in its infancy - only two months old. I currently have a Google PR of 3 and DA of almost 35. Most of my incoming links are the result of guest blogging.

I should add that I've been guest blogging for more than a year now, long before I launched my personal blog, so I haven't been doing it for the purpose of linkbuilding, nor do I recommend this approach.

Within a few months, I achieved a reasonably good DA and Google PR score because I was getting links from valuable sites. Check out this screenshot of my link profile in OSE to see what I mean:

For me, guest blogging is fun and it provides a chance to enhance communication as well as my interpersonal skills. It also pushes me to read more and think outside-the-box to come up with something really amazing for guest post content.

If you want to enjoy all the benefits of guest blogging mentioned above, then just think creatively and put together the best (BEST ever) article for guest posting.

About the Author:

Moosa Hemani is a SEO Strategist and blogger at SETalks.com. SETalks recently launched a Guest Posting Services to help clients build high quality relationships within their targeted niches. Like this Article? Like SETalks on facebook.

8 Ways to Delight the Pants Off Your Community - Whiteboard Friday

"Hey, SEOmoz fans. I'm Jen Lopez. I'm the Director of Community here at SEOmoz. So of course today I'm going to talk about eight different ways that you can delight the pants right off of your community members, and by pants I mean not pants, but anyway, we'll get into that a little bit more.

So, the first thing, something that we do here at SEOmoz is we give them points. Now, that could be brownie points. It could be actual money. It could be whatever you want to give them, stars, but something that lets them know that the activity that they're doing, the stuff that they're doing that they're doing a good job, and where people can actually tell them "You're doing great," whether it's like on Instagram, you can "heart" something. I actually always love that. I like it better than a Like because a heart has a little more power than a Like, and on Instagram, when I post something and I get a ton of people hearting my stuff, I get really excited. My pants don't come off, but I do get very excited.

Number two, you have to be sure to actually thank them. So, if somebody does something really nice, you should thank them. You're going to notice that all these really boil down to the last point, but I'm not quite there yet, so I'm not going to go there. But thanking them, taking that step, whether it is on the site in a comment, whether it's via Twitter, it's on Facebook, it's in an app, it's in a forum, whatever the case may be, if you thank someone, thank them for giving you feedback, thank them for their comment, whatever the case may be, the little, tiny step of saying thank you actually makes a huge difference to somebody. I know that, for me personally, I've been absolutely delighted in other communities when I've been participating and someone has said, "Thank you so much for your help with this, we really appreciate it." It absolutely makes a world of a difference.

The third one is be human. This is in your messaging across the site. If your site is down or you're having issues, rather than just saying, "Oh, hello, I am a bot and my site is down, and you must come back later," if you had a little bit of personality and actually show that you give a crap about your community and the people who are using your site, they're really going to appreciate that. If you say, "I'm really sorry, we're having issues right now, we'll be back as soon as possible, check us out on Twitter," whatever the case may be, we all know the fail whale. That's because Twitter, although we hate to see the fail whale, we all know about it and we actually kind of like it. Twitter has even spruced it up over the years, and it shows that they're human, that they care, that they found a design, and people really latched on to it. There are T-shirts out there with the fail whale on it and all of this.

So, actually be human. In everything that you do, make it known that there's a human behind it. If you're running your Twitter account, you're running your Facebook account, don't make it be like, "Well, we're a big organization and you're talking to a big bean." You're talking to a human and make sure that they know that.

The next one is show some personality. For us, it's sort of fun when we are engaging with the community on Twitter or Facebook, we get to be Roger. We get to be a robot. It's a lot more fun to be like, "beep, I love candy apples," or whatever the case may be that Roger seems to like that day. It's easy for us to put some personality into it. But that's another thing. It goes with "your site's down." We actually recently had somebody write a blog post about how much he enjoyed our "site down" message, and then he tweeted to us and we sent him back a response with a picture of Roger and he really enjoyed it. He wrote a blog post about it, which he then linked to us. So just by showing some personality and being human and doing all these things, we actually got a link out of it, not specifically on purpose, but because we're building this community and we actually care and we're working hard to do that.

The other thing is you have to make it easy. Nothing frustrates a user more than getting to a website and not being able to do what you want to do, whether it is to simply leave a comment, whether it is to sign up for a paid account, whatever it is, even if it's Twitter or if it's Facebook, make sure it's easy for the end user.

I like to really talk about Lady Gaga's community. This sounds really silly, but if you go to LittleMonsters.com and walk through the sign-up process, you will see what an excellent community is and how easy it is to sign up. They walk you through step by step, telling you everything that you're doing along the way. They pull in your information from Facebook or Twitter, wherever you want it to come from. You can change it. Then, as soon as you're in, they walk you through how to use the community. I'm actually quite a fan of Lady Gaga, and I don't participate in the forums or anything. But we have actually used their sign-in process and on boarding process quite a bit here at SEOmoz when we've been working to build our community even more.

So make it something that, whether it is sharing content, whatever it is, if you want somebody to write a YouMoz post, we don't make that super easy. That's one of the things that we actually need to work on. But make it really, really easy for your community to do things, and they will be happy as pie. Although hopefully, they'll still have their pants.

The next one is take it to e-mail. I've had this personally happen to me several times, and from that I have then starting using that within our own community. One time I was in New York City, and I had paid for the WiFi and it was about 11 o'clock at night and I tweeted from my phone because I couldn't get on WiFi. I tweeted about the WiFi problem at this hotel. Well, the next afternoon, I received an e-mail from somebody saying, "We saw your tweet. We've actually gone to your room. We fixed the problem. Your WiFi issue has now been solved and you don't have to pay for WiFi the rest of your three night stay."

My pants almost fell off, because I was so excited about that, and I've actually talked about it in almost every one of my presentations since, because I was absolutely floored that they went above and beyond. I sent a tweet. They read my tweet, and they found out who I was. Okay, it's maybe a little stalkerish, but I'm okay with it cause I signed up with my e-mail address. Anyway they were able to find me and help me out.

More recently Sprout Social, we've been testing them out. We're testing out various social management software. We're trying out Sprout Social, and I got a tweet from someone who works there that says, "Oh, we really love you guys. I'm glad you're trying it out." The next thing I know, we get a bunch of cupcakes in the mail. That has nothing to do with the e-mail. That was actually number seven, that rolls right into that one. I am so ahead of myself here.

Number seven is take it offline, and some of that goes with the e-mail, if you can reach out to the person. Sometimes we'll have someone in the comments who's having issues or wants to ask more questions or whatever. We reach out to them and say, "Hey, I'm here. I'm a human. I'm here to answer your questions and figure out how we can help." So, whether you're doing that in e-mail, on the site or on Twitter, whatever the case may be.

Then the next step is to really take it offline, like I said. Send them something nice. So we received cupcakes, which if you follow me on Twitter or you've ever seen me speak like at MozCon or something, you probably know that I really like cupcakes. I actually think it might be in my Twitter bio. So all they had to do was look at my Twitter bio that said, "I love cupcakes," and they sent me cupcakes.

Now, are we going to use Sprout Social? I'm not 100% sure, but I guarantee that every time we talk about it, I'm like, well let's not forget about Sprout Social because they remembered I liked cupcakes. So take that when you're trying to woo a community member.

The last thing, and it's something I've actually talked about through the whole thing, is just to make it personal. They're a human on their end. If you make it personal for you, that you care about what they're saying, you care about what they're asking about, again we're talking whether it's on social, whether it's within your app, it's on a forum, it's on your blog, whatever the case may be, just remember that they are human and you are human and they're having a bad day. I can do a whole Whiteboard Friday someday on how to deal with trolls, and one of the biggest things will always be to remember that they are human also. They may not act like it, but when it comes down to it, if you treat them like a human being, they're going to respect that a whole lot more.

So that is today's Whiteboard Friday, and I believe I went through everything, and hopefully you still have your pants on. I'm hoping. Everybody got your pants? Checking? Okay.

Everybody have a really great week, and we'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Thank you."

What Does "X% of Queries" Mean?

Over the past few months, we've seen a number of public statements from Google regarding algorithm updates that sound something like this:

Notice the carefully chosen phrase 'X% of queries noticeably affected'. Those statements sound very specific, but once you stop to think about them, you're inevitably left with a couple of questions: (1) percent of which queries?, and (2) exactly how much is 'noticeably'?

Percent of Which Queries?

When most of us hear 'X% of queries', I think we naturally assume unique queries (different keyphrases), but there are really two interpretations: (1) unique queries, and (2) total query volume.  Here's an example, from a conversation I posted on Google+ - let's say that we live in a world where there are only four searches anyone ever uses:

1. 'iphone 5'
2. 'justin bieber'
3. 'platypus pants'
4. 'charlie sheen'

If we ran 100 searches on our parallel universe version of Google, the volume would be distributed to our four keyphrases as follows:

1. 50
2. 40
3. 9
4. 1

That's right - suck it, Charlie Sheen. Now, let's say that query (c) is impacted by an algorithm update. By definition #1, this would affect 25% of queries. By definition #2, that same algo update would only affect 9% of queries.

I've put this question to Google a couple of times, and while they didn't reply directly, a few people were kind enough to repeat it. Jacob Klein's tweet to Matt Cutts got the following reply:

It's not quite an official statement, but I'll take it. In most cases, Google is talking about overall query volume. I wouldn't read too much into the 'typically' ' Matt naturally doesn't want to commit to '% of queries affected' only ever having one meaning when uttered by any Google employee. I'm comfortable, though, that Google's recent statements refer to query volume. This also makes sense from the way Google views the data ' overall volume is probably much easier to measure than unique queries.

I don't think Google is being deliberately cryptic in this particular case ' the statement is simply ambiguous. As SEOs, we naturally think of "queries" in terms of unique keywords, because that's what we track. Google thinks in terms of overall search volume and each query is a discrete unit..

How Much is 'Noticeably'?

So, now that we know we're talking about query volume, what's this 'noticeably affected' bit all about? Does any change count, or does it have to be significant? Hat tip to Matt McGee for reporting on a follow-up conversation that sheds some light on this one:

It's not quite cut-and-dry, and the definition of 'noticeable' may be a little complex, but basically they're talking about Page 1 changes and probably even flux in the first few rankings. A query where the #32 ranked keyword drops to #34 isn't going to be counted as 'noticeably affected' by an algorithm update.

Knowing Is X% of the Battle

So, when Google refers to 'X% of queries noticeably affected' they mean the total volume of queries and a significant change in the Top 10. Since we don't see the entire universe of queries that they do or really know the relative volume, this still leaves a lot to interpretation, but I think any little bit of transparency helps at this point. It's a useful gauge of relative impact as Google uses the same metric across multiple updates.

Keep in mind, though, that any given query either impacts you or doesn't impact you. Don't rely on the aggregate statistics ' pay attention to what matters to you. Look at it this way ' unemployment was just under 8% in the US in September, but you and I either have a job or we don't. That 8% may be a useful gauge of economic prosperity or the effectiveness of our leaders, but ultimately we have to be aware of our own situation. If an update only impacts 0.3% of queries, but your money term was one of them, knowing that 99.7% of queries were untouched won't be of much comfort to you.

For reference, I've recently added Google's impact percentages to the MozCast Events page. This page lists recent algorithm updates, along with the severity as measured both by MozCast temperature and Google's publicly stated percentage, to allow for easy comparisons.

The SEO Path to Becoming a Great Funnel Owner

There has recently been a lot of great discussion around the role of an SEO and how SEO strategies are evolving to include more tactics (PR, Social, Content, CRO, etc.). In my opinion, the role of an SEO hasn't changed much as the focus is still on driving more organic traffic to their client's sites.  If SEO consultants want to own more of the funnel, their title will need to change to support a more expansive role that includes multiple channels, rather than changing what the term "SEO" itself means.

A background in SEO definitely provides a solid foundation to take ownership of integrated marketing campaigns that encompass a lot more of this:

For this post, I am going to focus on two key areas of SEO from a presentation I recently gave. They are:

• Beyond keywords
• Content that works

My main goal for this post is to show how strong SEO's have the skills to become great funnel owners, without having to change the term SEO. Let's get started!

1. Beyond keywords

What good SEOs already do:

Model search behavior across the funnel

Good SEO's are already skilled in the art of modeling user search behavior across a search buying cycle. They look to identify what language prospects are using relevant to their business. How they refine their search at each stage of the cycle and what the potential competition is for each of their target phrases. This helps identify what keywords a business can complete for (taking budget and resources into account), what content should be developed for each phrase, and what are the target keywords for their link building strategy.

Good SEO's will:

1. Use PPC data

SEO's will create exact match Adwords campaigns for the keywords they've identified for a business. This gives them an estimation of potential traffic and conversions (whatever that may be for a given site). This would only be an estimate as there are big differences between PPC and Organic click through rates.

2. Measure head vs long tail

They use advanced segments in Google Analytics to split this traffic out by keyword length (get advanced segments for keyword lengths here). This allows SEO's to bucket keywords into head, body, and tail, adding competition stats and potential ROI.

3. Track top of funnel keywords

They pay close attention to data from sources like Google Trends and Google Instant (UberSugget.org) to look for top of funnel keywords that are not mapped against commercial intent, but instead whose sole purpose is to attract people in the awareness stage and begin to grow the brand online.

4. Create keyword funnels

Good SEOs will map keywords across the buying cycle of a business, including lots of extra information about those keywords. In this example, we have simply added the potential revenue from that keyword and keyword difficulty from the SEOmoz tool of the same name. The keyword marked green is one whose search volume is rising fast (data from Google Trends).

5. Create content maps

The great SEO will take all this data and either map it against existing content, or create new content suitable for the target key phrase.

The smartest SEO may even start thinking about why certain pages will attract links and build this into the design.

If you need more information on keyword research, you can check out:

• ViperChills Keyword Research Guide
• KissMetrics Guide to Keyword Research
• SEOmoz Guide to Keyword Research

I want more of that funnel

What great funnel owners do:

Model the whole customer

Likely due to my background in software development, I am obsessed with persona modeling; I've talked about this previously on SEOmoz here and here.

Persona modeling is nothing new, and smart marketers have been using them to help with brand marketing, website design, and UI for years. In fact, SEOmoz did a great whiteboard Friday on the topic back in 2008 with Ian Lurie and Rand Fishkin sporting some very groovy hair!

Persona modeling is a critical task conducted by great funnel owners, and SEO's can definitely apply their skills to provide this function.

In today's data driven world, there are so many places to acquire data about your potential customers:

 

I've labeled these strategies either easy or hard to implement based on my experiences. What type of data you get back is heavily dependent on the market you are in. (Note that I put a question mark against psychographic data in Facebook as this is something I've only recently begun to look at, thanks to all the great information from @aimclear in sources like this post, this post, and his MozCon session.)

As Ian mentioned in the video above, a lot of persona modeling will still rely on gut instinct. With all this data, you can start to validate your guesswork and pivot much quicker. For example, if we use the seven steps Ian gave in the Whiteboard Friday video (see below), we can see where our data can be applied to help validate our guess work (think how much more data we have for our prospects since that video was made):

 

Bonus Tip: When at step one (brainstorming), I highly recommend Simon Sineks Ted Talk, Start With Why. This talk helps focus your mind on the type of people you are trying to attract. You define why your company exists and what your vision is, and outline how to find people who share that vision. For example, SEOmoz is famous for TAGFEE. They believe in being totally transparent, over delivering on everything they do, and building a world-class community of smart SEOs. You can see how that influences the type of marketing they execute. If SEOmoz started with the 'What?' e.g. "We build great inbound marketing tools, come and get them," they may not have been as successful as they are now or attract the type of customers they currently do. Starting with "why" will help you tremendously. 

How do well thought-out personas help great funnel owners?

Glad you asked. Well constructed personas help develop many different tactics, including:

• Content that resonates
• Community that engages
• Display/retargeting ads that get clicked
• Emails that get opened

2. Content that works

What good SEOs already do:

Audit sites to make the engines (and user's) happier

Good SEOs are a technical bunch and know how to ensure your site is ready to take on the search engines and win. Better yet, since good on-site optimizations follow good UI principles, the people visiting your site will be just as happy. Hopefully this will lead to them becoming customers and spending money buying products from your site or signing up for the offers you have.

Good SEO's will:

1. Make accessibility and indexability a must for your site

Good SEOs will crawl your full site with tools like Screaming Frog (or similar) to ensure the following:

• Your site is accessible to the search engines
• All of the pages you expect to be indexed are indexed
• The indexed pages are loading in a respectable time.

2.  Check all key areas of your site in order to:

• Make sure your page titles and meta descriptions are optimized for key pages
• Ensure your content is relevant for the keyword it's targeting
• Make sure your content is worthy of the keyword it's targeting
• Resolve any duplicate content issues that may be causing issues for your site
• Implement schema.org tags where necessary

3. Conduct a competitor analysis

A good SEO will look at your core competitors to see what are they doing better both onsite and offsite (to attract links), discover what are their weaknesses, and divise a plan for you to leverage them.

If you need more information on site audits, you can check out:

• How to Perform the World's Greatest SEO Audit
• 4 Part Guide from SearchEngineJournal

I want more of that funnel

What great funnel owners do:

Audit content to build a strategy to amaze prospects

The number of businesses who are going to place content marketing at the center of their marketing strategy will, undoubtedly, grow over the next few years. Great funnel owners can audit their content strategy for insights on what they could be doing better, develop a content strategy that is layered across their funnel, and provide benchmarks tied to business goals.

Therea are three key tasks to complete to help you create the right content strategy for your business:

1. Determine your "sweet spot"

Doug Kessler best summed up the sweet spot of your content in this post over on Econsultancy:

'Your sweet spot is the exact area of your company's expertise. It's the thing you are uniquely positioned to talk about'.

You must figure out what content area your company should own and, once it's decided, make sure you can allocate the resources to do it.

2. Conduct a TOFU content audit

What content is delivering against my top of funnel metrics?

You can build custom reports in Google Analytics to look at your content performance in terms of top of funnel metrics to see what content is delivering. Even better, you can categorize by topics to identify those working best for your company after identifying your sweet spot.

Looking just at top of funnel metrics in Google Analytics, your report may look something like this (I've excluded Page Title so you can see the metrics):

 

You can then extract this data and add the links and shares each piece has attracted, which is important for top of funnel metrics, but is not the sole objective of every top of funnel content piece (read more on that here). Kevin Gibbons wrote a great article around the subject of content auditing for further explanation.

What's really interesting is when you start to break your content out into topics. This called topic modeling: deciphering which topics are driving metrics across your funnel. For an example of topic modeling, here is a chart showing what topics are generating top of funnel metrics for Marketo (this is obviously a condensed version with only two metrics on display).

The data can start to tell you two important things:

• There might be topics you are writing a lot about, but aren't bringing in much inbound traffic. Maybe the topic isn't even important for top of funnel metrics, or maybe it's critical once a user is in the funnel, in which case, this should become evident in your mid of funnel audit.

• There might be topics that are important to your brand, but aren't getting very much attention. You may need to make changes in your editorial calendar to ensure these topics get more focus.

I want to know what content is getting shared, but also what content has the highest social CTR?

Finding data to support what content is being shared is important, but better yet, I want to know the social CTR of that content. This is not an easy task, but when you have the awesome guys from DataSift helping you, it makes things a lot easier. 

Let's use SEOmoz as an example. 

I was lucky enough to get a preview of an upcoming release of DataSift that provides an insight into social clickstream traffic. By filtering and analyzing these immense volumes of social click data, it provides a view into both how we share social content, and what content we are engaging with.

This view is much more informative than simply knowing what's being shared. I now know what percentage of people are clicking on each link based on the total social reach of the content on Twitter vs the click-data.

For SEOmoz, I looked at five of the most recent pieces of content from the blog. Below are the URLs with total shares:

 

This tells me what content got the most shares over whatever time period I chose. If I had taken a bigger sample, I could group the shares around topics.

Taking the example above, I can look at my social CTR for each post:

More people are clicking on the post around link building than the post on Facebook resources, which got a lot more shares. Is this because of the headline? Is it dependent on the audience sharing it (more people might be interested in link building vs Facebook) and what content their follower's love? I can now start to answer these questions with data-driven hypotheses.

I can also see the Share: View ratio. This ratio is the total reach (sum of followers) that my content may be seen by, and the number of clicks throughs it's actually getting:

This kind of data can help me figure out how to get more users sharing my content on social platforms and, better yet, clicking on the links.

More and more companies are going to be using content as a way to grow their top of funnel, and you need to be all over your metrics to ensure the strategy you have in place will keep you top of the pile.

3. Conduct a MOFU content audit

Content driving traffic and shares is no good if it's not delivering on actual business metrics. Going back to Marketo as an example (you can do a version of this for B2C), I can look at the performance of topics for new names (Leads), First Touch Pipe created, and Multi Touch Pipe created (where a piece of content wasn't the first touch, but was consumed during the sale).

For example, if I look at new names (which are form completes by people we don't currently have in our database), I can see that content on social media is generating a high amount of new names for this time period (the data is a skewed due to the time period I chose):

You can start to match this up against your top of funnel audit and identify any topics delivering lots of traffic but no names. What's missing? Wrong topics? Not strong enough call to actions for those topics? Content assets not strong enough to move prospects to the next stage, such as filling out a form?

I am then interested in what topics are creating the most in First Touch Pipeline e.g. the first asset a prospect consumed on their path to becoming a customer:

Again, this data is heavily skewed by the time period when I looked at, but if I compare this against multi touch, you can see why it's so important to compare the two:

After comparing the charts, we can see that email is generating some good traffic for us in the top of funnel audit and that it's also generating some good first touch pipeline, but it's a really important topic once users are in our funnel. It's created 18% more when we look at it as a multi touch topic. We want to ensure that email assets are readily available to prospects once they are in the funnel, including in the lead nurture track we add them to.

In Marketo, we also do this by asset type, including eBook, whitepaper, checklist, video, etc. You can then start to figure out the right mix of topics and asset types for your business, like where to allocate resources and budget.

Once completed, you can then layer the right content mix by topic and asset type across your funnel (B2B or B2C).

How does a well-planned content strategy help great funnel owners?

Glad you asked. A well-planned content strategy helps open up many new doors for funnel owners, including:

• Thought leadership in your market
• Free visits, links, and shares
• Reduced bounce rate
• Increased engagement metrics
• Improved CRO results
• More money!

So what do you think about an SEO's ability to become a great funnel owner? Are we going to see many former SEOs become CMOs in the future? Would love to hear from you in the comments.

Until next time (another signature cheesy sign off :) ) '.. 

Draw Roger Contest

Howdy SEOmoz fans! Do you know what time it is? It's time to learn...

How to draw Roger!

We sat down with everyone's favorite Art Director, Derric Wise, and had him show us (and you!) how to draw Roger. It was truly a life-changing and inspirational time for everyone involved.

We can't think of a better way to celebrate our newfound knowledge than giving you the chance to draw your own Roger, along with the chance to win some awesome SEOmoz swag.

The Draw Roger contest is super simple: watch the video, draw Roger, send in your drawing, and win prizes!

The rules:

• Have fun with it. Remember to keep it PG. 
• Any age can enter! We have prizes for anyone ages one day to 100 years old.
• Try to get your whole family to participate.
• All entires must be submitted by 9:00 PM PST on October 28th.
• Your file name should be formatted as such: {First name}{Last Initial}{City}. For example, If Roger did a self portrait (how meta), his file name would be: RogerMSeattle.png
• We may use your entry online!

Once you have your drawing scanned or photographed, send it in to DrawRoger@seomoz.org.

You may need a few things to follow along with the totorial below, including:

Step by step drawing tutorial

1. 

2.

3.

4.

I know I'm practically an expert now, so the process should look something like this:

I'm very excited to see your submissions. Feel free to share your excitement in the comments below. Happy drawing, Mozzers!