Ad business

Hat tip to my colleague Jeff Couret, for the pointer to this informative Moz article on how to identify low-quality content on your site:
https://moz.com/blog/low-quality-pages

I've been in discussions with a startup client about how important it is to have a content strategy, and how much value we could get from a content strategist.
Of course, everyone thinks they're a great writer - just as everyone has a nephew who could build our corporate web site; so why do we need a professional to sort out our content? Can't we just write about our product and trust Google to pick up our articles and blog posts?

If you think that, ask yourself if you understand what bounce rate tells you about the content quality of a page (hint: a high bounce rate isn't necessarily bad). And do you know what pogo-sticking is, and what is says about your content quality?

A content strategist will monitor and improve your offerings to site visitors in a way that gets you SEO credit for your great writing, and satisfies your users. And that makes Google very happy.
 

Joe Coleman presents his range of writing in different levels of obnoxiousness, from "slacker who couldn't be arsed" to "Going Out For Business in Times Square" insanity.

 

 

 

http://getcoleman.com/

Anyone doing Search Engine optimization will appreciate Ikea's clever play here - when someone searches for a relationship problem ("My partner is annoying"), their product pops up on the SERP.
Apparently only in Sweden, but still...

Conveniently, ...searches for terms like "He can't say he loves me" will lift Ikea's product ads to the top of the Google Adwords pile—a visibility coup so maniacally clever that it's hard to hold a grudge. 

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/ikea-renamed-products-after-frequently-googled-problems-those-products-solve-175005

Brian Dean is best known as the backlink guy, but his SEO and keyword research info is well worth a read. here's the update for 2017.

If you can master the art of finding awesome keywords for your business — you’ll not only benefit from more search engine traffic – but you’ll also know your customers better than your competition.

http://backlinko.com/keyword-research

And here's what it feels like to be less than authentic...

A few weeks ago I asked a friend who has been doing “growth hacking” for a long time to help promote Asteroid and to show me a few tricks. What I learned was depressing.

https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/the-dark-art-of-growth-hacking-e3f7f5514f38#.2tr7d7yvu

"The combination of Fetch and Render plus Search Analytics has more or less rendered Content Keywords obsolete. "

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-kills-off-content-keywords-search-console/179803/

If you're doing local listings at all, or your clients are, you may be interested in some recent tweaks to Google My Business listings:

http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900

"It's far easier to sell someone on a new kind of fruit than it is to get them to eat crickets, regardless of the data you bring to the table."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/08/pattern-matching-as-a-shortcut-to-growth.html

The best elevator pitch is true, stunning, brief and it leaves the listener eager (no, desperate) to hear the rest of it. It's not a practiced, polished turd of prose that pleases everyone on the board and your marketing team, it's a little fractal of the entire story, something real.

Link

Over a Dangerous Minds, a trenchant critique of Facebook's gonad-crushing "Sponsored Stories" strategy:

The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day.

This will hit small publishers, mom-and-pop businesses, and non-profits like Kitten Associates hardest.

At Dangerous Minds, we post anywhere from 10 to 16 items per day, fewer on the weekends. To reach 100% of of our 50k+ Facebook fans they’d charge us $200 per post. That would cost us between $2000 and $3200 per day—but let’s go with the lower, easier to multiply number. We post seven days a week, that would be about $14,000 per week, $56,000 per month… a grand total of $672,000 for what we got for free before Facebook started turning the traffic spigot down in Spring of this year—wouldn’t you know it—right around the time of their badly managed IPO.

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