Category: Managed Services

Magic at TED

It never ceases to amaze. During a serendipitous conversation with Red Maxwell, the Brand Doctor, he did it again. The last time, several years ago, we were having lunch discussing my obsession with altruism in marketing.

Red began to share broad stokes of, “An amazing guy I just had lunch with at TED”.  I realized he was describing one of the three legs of my new altruism stool – Michael Shermer author of Mind of the Market. The other two legs (at that time) were Robert Wright’s NonZero and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (turns out the selfish gene isnot be as selfish as the title implies).

Today Red shared a great story about helping rocker Amanda Palmer. Red’s latest random share comes two days after I wrote a long a long post on Google Plus, a note to Amanda (below) and thanked my friend Phil Buckley (@1918) for sharing Amanda’s TED presentation on the ASK and the GIVE (embedded below).

The Ask and the Give

Red helped Amanda rehearse. I shared how confident and sure her pace was in the video, how calm. “She was scared to death,” Red told me humanizing Amanda. You see nothing but a beautifully paced, practiced storyteller at the height of her craft on the video:

Lessons For Every Marketer

“Cool and everything Marty,” I can hear some readers thinking, “but what is in this story of the rocker and brand doctor for my company or personal brand?” Red and Amanda created a nexus presentation, a presentation that beautifully connects themes let’s wrap and pack as Save The World Marketing including.

• The line between FOR PROFIT and NONPROFIT is fading fast (core idea).
• Everyone who used to only ASK will need to GIVE (implication 1).
• Everyone who used to only GIVE will need to ASK (implication 2).
• The NATURE of ASK and GIVE is changing fast (see David Amerland).
• The TRUST necessary for ASK and GIVE is key (see Mark Traphagen).
• When choice spreads toward infinity, we buy from those we LOVE (Me).
• Be remarkable or be obsolete (Red Maxwell).
• Give your art away and it comes back to you (Amanda Palmer, Seth Godin).
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Trust, Love & ART > Money: Godin’s The Icarus Deception

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Memories and hearts belong to LOVE and love is many things boring, ordinary and routine almost never.
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Amanda Palmer Is An Artist.

Here is the quote from Amanda’s video I listened carefully to hear and copy after Phil tagged me on his Facebook share of Amanda’s TED Talk:

The perfect tools are not going to help us if we can’t face each other and receive fearlessly and more important to ASK WITHOUT SHAME”. (emphasis mine).

I would add, “…and give without expectation”. How do we eliminate SHAME and EXPECTATIONS? We need to rethink some core capitalist ideas such as:

• Zero-sum – I win by your losing. (NonZero)
• Competition – Can we collaboratively compete?
• THEM and US – Lines are disappearing fast.
• Control – Who is in charge here? A: The sentient mob.
• ROI – What does a GIVE and ASK P&L look like?
• Exchange – “currencies” abound how do we “pay” or get “paid”.
• TRUST – How gained/lost in our Social + Mobile times?

Quite a list and I am sure I’ve left things important out. Good enough list to realize everything we KNEW or thought we understood is gone. I’m listening to REM’s End of the World as We Know It and it feels appropriate, on point and true.

The end of the marketing world as we’ve known it, and I feel fine.

I feel fine because Amanda, Red and friends with good brains and rhythm are singing a new tune, the song of GIVE and ASK.

Before Red’s wife called her tired husband, Red was in New York, I asked him to please assure Amanda Palmer I am not a stalker just have too much enthusiasm combined with too little time. Here is the message I sent Amanda on Facbook after being moved by her TED presentation:

Amanda my friend Phil Buckley shared your ted talk knowing I am working on Cure Cancer Starter, a crowdfunding platform for cancer research (I have leukemia).

I think Phil thought I would love that you were so successful crowdfunding on Kickstarter. I am as it gives Cure Cancer Starter hope for raising cancer research donations, but your eloquence on becoming comfortable with GIVING and ASKING hit home too.

Cancer is somewhat analogous to your experience as the 8 foot woman. Cancer Patients MUST ask for help. To do anything else is foolish and means we (cancer patients) exit faster. Like you I’ve NEVER been disappointed by asking.

This is not to say I’ve achieved everything desired. I rode a bicycle across America in the hope we could raise $50K for cancer research, we raised almost $30K. Am I disappointed? Not at all. I remember the doctor in Savannah TN who peeled a $100 bill of his cash and handed it to me, “To help with expenses” he said. And it did. There were expenses believe me. We were not unlike a touring band for 60 days living in an RV and riding a little bit further everyday.

The ASK and GIVE is always more generous on both sides than either realizes at first. Connection is more valuable than MONEY. I spent last week changing all the designations on my life savings to the Story of Cancer Foundation. Nothing makes an idea ring like a clear bell on a quiet morning as much as changing things that will happen when  you are gone (lol).

I am no Bill Gates. Allocating “retirement” funds to do good, THE GIVE, made not living until 80 feel meaningful. I don’t feel owed something I am unlikely to get but I am receiving something valuable I wasn’t owed. The GIVE without expectation of a quid pro quo return is grace.

Long note to say THANKS for your moving definition of what I’m going to do with the rest of my life – ASK and GIVE.

I like to tell my friends they ROCK when they do some amazing thing. In your case you do ROCK and in more ways than you know or realize.

Thanks,

Marty

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Finding Search Engine Gamification Again

There it was again. Sitting with friends Tonia Zampieri (@Finder411) Mark Traphagen (@MarkTraphagen), Melinda Thielbar (@Mthielbar) and George Stevenson (@NCHomeBuyer) an old idea surfaced during our Saturday Free Internet Marketing Consulting lunch at Saladelia Cafe in Durham.

Tonia is co-founder of Finder411.com, a cool hyper-local startup, Mark is one of the preeminent experts on Google Plus, Melinda is my favorite quant and George knows how to help “sell” your home by renting to buy. We were discussing TRUST. I see why now (lol). Not long after our meeting Mark published Trust: The Currency of the New Economy on NewMediaLeaders.com. A must read for anyone wanting to understand Internet marketing.

In Google We Trust

Google is one of the most important TRUST creators in our digital age. Google is a massive legitimacy filter. If you aren’t in Google and don’t rank #1 for your name you don’t have as much legitimacy as if you did. Despite all of our Social + Mobile changes Google still rocks valuable branding support, the kind of support any startup or idea needs to scale and thrive.

This post is about a slip in time I saw working for Bill Bing and Mitesh Patel at Loyalese (now RIP unfortunately). This “slip in time” idea will be worth millions to the team who reads this Search Engine Gamification post, understands the marketing implications and pulls off this big idea – that Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can become valuable partners in SEO.

Search Engine Gamification Defined

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) may be the biggest game ever. Search Engine Gamification (SEG) is understanding the game’s rules well enough to enlist the services and support of the KING (Google). It is good to be the king because Kings set and change rules at their whim and based on their needs. Certainly kings don’t RULE with the iron hand they used too, but rule they do as Google proves with each Panda and Penguin algorithm adjustment. Another Panda update hit last week, btw coolest tool to see impact on your website’s traffic of Google’s algorithm changes is the free Panguintool.com tool.

Inside “Search Engine Gamification” there is an implied idea few know and fewer still use. Search engine gamification makes Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) an active partner in your branding and Internet marketing. Once Google created their “float”, that you and I see different results even if we type the same query at the same time, the ability to view SERPs as another feature in YOUR Internet marketing sits like a big, green frog waiting for someone to kiss it and produce the Prince inside.

How Loyalese Kissed The Search Engine Gamification Frog

My friends Bill and Mitesh kissed the frog and produced an amazing prince with Loyalese. I consulted on Loyalese before joining Atlantic BT. I failed a little too. I tried to pivot Loyalese inside of the box presented instead of seeing what I see now – the engine Loyalese built was more valuable than the thing itself. Loyalese “kissed the frog” by connecting browsers, SERPs and website in an infrastructure-like platform, a platform capable of spinning SERPs in a website’s favor based on social signals and THAT realization is the “moneyball”.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is how Loyalese created Search Engine Gamification to alert members to websites whose affiliate money could be paid as tax free “cash back” to members (or their charities):

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Loyalese tied their app to “schema” provided by Google (and available to anyone) to identify member stores (the little Loyalese Logo the green things highlighted above). Stores with the logo were willing to pay Loaylese and their members to BUY from them. Loyalese members earned post purchase “cash back”. Loyalese’s idea was somewhat similar to my friend Tim Storm’s FatWallet.com website (without the Google touch). This post isn’t about affiliate money or chasing cash back, but almost any online purchase, unless you type the URL DIRECTLY into your browser, earns a middleman website a “commission” for sharing your click and subsequent purchase with websites such as Amazon, REI, and Walmart.

Loyalese faced a “login” challenge. Nothing happened UNTIL a Loyalese member logged into Loyalese.com. Since many people login to Facebook or Google in the morning and stay logged in all day now, tapping into the Facebook and Google APIs would reduce much of the “login friction” Loyalese faced three years ago. Add the “always on” ubiquitous nature of Social + Mobile (SMobile) and Loyalese might work today. Other similar plays such as FatWallet.com and QuidCo.com have scaled (and without the powerful Google touch).

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Million Dollar Search Engine Gamification Idea and The Trust Mark Game

We know websites are being replaced by platforms capable of generating increasing amounts of User Generated Content (UGC). We also know that “login via Facebook” et al. is ubiquitous and an easy and FAST way to sign up new users taking full advantage of OPP (Other People’s scaled Platforms). Add these two facts together with the ability to TAG and FLAG the SERPs with a trust mark and you have a million dollar B2B and/or B2C idea.

Trust is the game all Internet marketing depend on. If a website achieves TRUST it can get PAID. Atlantic BT creates websites for B2B and B2C customers. If we create Search Engine Gamification and enlist the SERPs by tying browser, to member profiles to search results we gamify Google.

Imagine I own a 3 store gift chain called MartysGifts.com. I hire Atlantic BT to build my website. Once we create MartysGifts.com it is part of our “ecosystem”. When other members use Google they see a distinct Atlantic BT trust mark next to MartysGifts.com (see Loyalese example above).

“Yeah but the only people who will see the Trust mark are other Atlantic BT customers,” you might be thinking and you might be right, but do the Search Engine Gamification math.

Search Engine Gamification Six Degrees Math

1,000 Stores (in Atlantic BT’s ecosystem)
50 People (directly associate with each store)
50,000 people (in the “direct touch” zone of those websites)
300,000 people (in “indirect touch” zone of those websites)

We live in a “triangle” of three cities: Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. The combined population of those three cities is 700,000, so the Atlantic BT’s ecosystem (our “network”) can touch almost half of the residents in our area. What is that level of reach worth to MartysGifts? If you were considering two Raleigh website design companies and one supported your site after the sale with an ability to touch half the people in your area and the other didn’t who would you buy the design from? Now multiply that realization times a million and you see the impact of Search Engine Gamification.

Search Engine Gamification Works For Every Website

Think my example doesn’t apply to your Small to Medium Sized business? You don’t have enough people who will want to “join” your website to make the idea worth anything.

WRONG!

First understand “joining” your website is a simple click of “allow” when the Facebook “create an account with Facebook” app fires. You may be a doctor, lawyer, insurance salesperson or Realtor.  I would NEVER presume to tell any of those professions how to do their jobs, but anyone with a mouse tells me how to create winning Internet marketing (lol).I don’t mind, but I’ve NEVER met an amateur who understands how the Internet marketing game is played.

There are GIFTED amateurs, but the Internet marketing game is a “pros only” zone now. Even pros can fall behind, be too arrogant for their own good or make MISTAKES. The difference between PRO Internet marketers and gifted amateurs is about 5 degrees, but those five degrees are worth MILLIONS and MILLIONS of X where x is traffic, awareness, User Generated Content (UGC), attention, money or any other “currency”.

“But I don’t need something so elaborate, so complicated,” some will be thinking and they may be right. Over the 13 years I’ve been an Internet marketer I watched the bar rise, rise and rise. My Internet marketing friends LOOK FOR keywords and business verticals that are winnable with the “inside baseball” tactics they know. Listen to Gregory Ng explain why he crated FreezerBurns.com.

Gregory created a successful website now generating six figures in income yearly NOT because he loved frozen entrees. Gregory is a PRO and he entered the frozen food content marketing play because IT WAS TAKE-ABLE  He could do a little work, the kind of content marketing and SEO he knows better than most, to generate a big return.

Who will be the Gregory NG of your space? Death, taxes and your space will be rolled up by a PRO are life’s new immutable truths. The question is not IF your business segment will be rolled up but WHEN. Why don’t YOU do the rolling?

“Roll Up” means a particular thing to a PRO IMer. Rolling up a space is when your website’s content and links own the search engine high ground. Google is shifting more and more traffic to your website because it is  the HUB associated with a group of keywords or a business vertical. HUB or Authority status is Internet marketing nirvana.

Badging the SERPs makes any website with a badge  OR any site creating the badges look BIGGER and MORE LEGITIMATE than competitors. Short distance from looking more legitimate to being more valuable in a highly viral and inter-linked content network. The Search Engine Gamification “Sell the Idea” benefit PALES in comparison to those who use Search Engine Gamification (SEG) to create TRUST and LEGITIMACY.

Tonia and Finder411 could offer an awesome value to every triangle “hyper-local” business (restaurants, dry cleaners, childcare) who joins their network. Finder411 could paint the local SERPs with “Finder411 Trust Marks” making those websites and businesses inside their ecosystem stand out ON GOOGLE. When Finder411 businesses stand out the path to TRUST and LEGITIMACY is shorter than for non_Finder411.com businesses.

Q: What is this search engine gamification idea worth? A: Millions and Millions.

PS. I didn’t give this idea to the world. Bill and Mitesh at Loyalese deserve credit for teaching me (and I am sure they had mentors). I got back in touch with the idea thanks to my Free Internet Marketing Consulting Saturday conversation with Tonia, Mark, Melinda, George and joined by Young Fenton. What do I ask if you create Search Engine Gamification and make millions? Share some of your windfall with cancer research and we will call it more than even.

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A great session of “Technical SEO” tonight at Phil’s SEO Meetup was mind bending and fun. Fun if you like twisting your mind into a pretzel which I do, but many were lost between Content Delivery Networks, Mod Rewrites and Canonical URLs. This post starts at the beginning focusing on 5 SEO BASICS every marketer MUST know since to NOT KNOW endangers everything including your ability to hire help.

Must Know SEO #1 = Page Titles

Your page titles are always the highest words on your rendered web pages. You can also see page titles in code. In FireFox, go to Tools > Web Developer > Page Source. Here is how your page title will look:

<title>SEO, LinkedIn and The Real You ScentTrail Marketing</title>

Page titles should be keyword rich and unique.

WordPress and other blog software provides a place for YOU to create a title. Your WordPress blog may have the ability to vary your titles. Sometimes you want to feed the search engine spider one title and customers another, but be careful to be sure this passive rewrite of your title is consistent with the page’s content. Titles that don’t speak the same language as the page get you in trouble with Google.

I’m writing this post after eating a great Cheeseburger at the Zaxy’s Restaurant on Glenwood. Here is the ZaxyRestaurant.com title:

<title>ZakyRestaurant.com: Homepage</title>

Anything in a tittle is a word you want the page to rank for, so keywords are your friends.
There are 5 MAJOR mistakes in the current ZakyRestaurant.com title including:

• No keywords such as “Raleigh”, “Mediterranean restaurant”, “Glenwood Ave”, “Gyro”, “Lebanese” or “Hummus”.
• Zaky is concatenated into “restaurant” (no space) signalling the two are one word to Google except they aren’t. People will search Zaxy Raleigh or Zaxy Restaurant not ZaxyRestaurant.
• Never put a period inside of a tag since periods can looks like code.
• Never use a : inside of a tag, use a | so the punctuation doesn’t look like code.
• Never put “homepage” or a keyword so general it is meaningless in a title.

Here are Zaky’s description and keyword tags:
<meta name=”description” content=”Zaky is a downtown Raleigh Mediterranean restaurant in a convenient Glenwood location.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Mediterranean, Raleigh, Restaurant, Glenwood, Food, Lebanese, Pita, Gyro, Hummous”>

These are not as terrible as the tittle. Too bad Google doesn’t even glance at these tags anymore. These tags tell me the person who created the page knows a little SEO, but not nearly enough.

TEST your title simply by making sure ANY word inside the tag (showing on the very top of the page) is an important KEYWORD you want your website to be found for (to rank for).

PS. Another quick page title note. Google assumes position = value. Your most important and defining keywords should be far left and count down toward things you should win anyway (like your name). Use of | doesn’t interfere with the spider’s “read” and creates better usability. Titles are “spider food” mostly, but the most important spider food on the page so create titles carefully, with research and don’t exceed Google’s 69 character (spaces count as characters) limit.

SEO Must Know #2 – Consistency

Your titles, page content, image alt text (the keywords attached to images to explain what they are) and navigation should tell a consistent story. This is why it is so damaging to use a keyword like “homepage” in a title.

Zaky won’t have homepage anywhere in the page’s content so the keyword will stand out like a sore thumb and look spammy to Google. You and I know the designer who created the page didn’t know better, but ignorance of SEO guidelines is NO EXCUSE. Google is clear. Knowing SEO’s “laws” stated and unstated is you and your designer’s /programmer’s job not Google’s. Doing a few hours of reading on SEO is a good idea.

SEO Must Know #3 – Unique & Accurate

The good news for ZakyRestaurant.com is at least their designer created unique page titles. Many templated sites simply copy the same title on every page. Make sure your have unique titles and that each page’s titles is accurate to the content on the page.

SEO Must Know #4 – Junk In The HEAD

Google’s bot starts counting the moment it enters. It works its way down through the head content, the content that controls important tags like your <title>. Many designers like fancy roll overs. They jam the controlling code in your website’s Head. Don’t let that happen. Keep your Head CLEAN.

If you want fancy rollovers there are ways to code them with less spammy code in the head. If you see lines and lines of code in your <head> you have a problem.

SEO Must Know #5 – First Rule = Do No Harm

If your website exists then Google knows it. This means Google has expectations for how your website will ACT (your update frequency, your link add frequency, your inbound link gain frequency, etc. to infinity).

Here is a good question to ask any SEO. Ask any potential SEO how they would change your page title to rank for a keyword you want. This is a trick question since I don’t operate unless I know WHAT is WHERE. The right answer is NOTHING until research is created.

Here are other danger signals. If you here hear or see any of these RUN:

* I can get your website ranked #1 on X keyword in Y time (no they can’t).
* I guarantee your will rank (VERY dangerous for many reasons, RUN).
* If you ask about the Google float and they stammer or make something unreal up RUN.

The “Google float” is Google’s increasingly individual search results. Social signals, your past browsing history and even your friends LIKES ans SHARES mean you and I see different results even if we do the same search at the same time. The only way to benchmark and understand SEO progress is via analytics. Any SEO who can’t explain the float is dangerous and you should RUN.

Hope these 5 tips help you avoid the Zaky problem where a little knowledge proved to be a real problem. If you are a Zaky make sure you ask for a simple WordPress blog YOU can maintain. That way if some goofystupid person make mistakes you can easily fix them AND you have the added benefit of being able to easily add content. Adding content is KEY for any website these days. Static 4 page websites don’t rank, so get a blog YOU can maintain.

Don’t worry. You can and will make mistakes, but there is only one Internet marketing mistake that is unrecoverable – doing nothing and you are already out there trying so keep it up and avoid these simple mistakes even if your designer makes them.

Moore’s Magic  Bus

Last week Facebook passed Google as the web’s top destination (chart at bottom). Comparing Google and Facebook is like comparing apples to oranges. Yes both apples and oranges are fruits and they taste good, but apples and oranges are distinctly different things. Instead of thinking about Google and Facebook as THINGS this post is about an experiment. What if we think of Google and Facebook as TIME. I’ve argued once Gordon Moore created his famous law noting how computational power would square even as costs dramatically fell every few years Google (or something) was inevitable.

Google is and always has been a must. Once content stretches toward infinity some  Dewey Decimal system had to be invented to assign priority or MORE = we drown. If Google wasn’t invented then someone would invent something to organize the content explosion Moore’s law promised. Arguing if Google is the best or worst is moot. Google simply is.

Perhaps Facebook was inevitable too?

Daniel Pink, one of my favorite authors, proposes an interesting idea in his book A Whole New Mind: Moving From The Information Age To The Conceptual Age. Pink suggests that we’ve exhausted the road left brain engineering was driving. The next age is a conceptual age, a creative right brain age. It is not that engineering doesn’t matter, but that engineering is exhausted and incapable of creating the kinds of connections and experience we seek.

We seek connection, meaning and value.

We know time is our most valuable nonrenewable treasure. We want to understand. We chase big questions. Think of a rubber band extended to its breaking point. We’ve snapped back home and want to know WHY something should be done. Just yesterday understanding HOW to play the game was enough. We were children with our first bicycles. We did wheelies and called our parents to watch.

We attached playing cards to spokes and, in our minds, we rode powerful hogs with full leathers and sunglasses. We were dangerous ten and twelve year old children at a time when anything was possible. We built fortes of cardboard and climbed trees because we could. Our joy was communal, competitive and  complete.

For a little bit there we Internet marketers got lost.

We became more intent on creating ladders than climbing trees. The more complicated the ladder instructions became the more obsessed and competitive we got. We would make the best ladder never mind the climbing. We were determined and solipsistic. We thought only of ladders and not the trees they were meant to climb. We were so invested in ladder production we stopped climbing trees.We dreamed of ladders and compared notes on construction. We attended conferences to learn how to create the most ornate ladder. We lost our sense of play.

Trees Not Ladders Are Magical

Then one day even the chief ladder maker realized the most important idea – we create ladders to climb trees. We climb trees because we can and because we are different for having climbed them. The magic is not in the tools. Magic exists within each and every one of us. A giant snapped his fingers and the percussion woke up millions. At first many ladder builders refused to believe. Some ladder builders were so vested and understood the old game so well they couldn’t accept what was so clear – we were asking the wrong questions in the wrong ways.

We should have known.

Any game that is both means and end is hollow. This game, the game of search engine optimization (SEO), became a tautology something whose manufactured truth reinforced itself over and over and in a million ways. If a game is complex enough and self reinforcing enough we will play it forever and for no reason other than because we can. Then the giant who organized the game realized his huge and spreading error. The giant too forgot. He forgot talking to yourself about yourself is no conversation at all.

If life seems less sure now then you are getting it.

Life always becomes less sure. We march toward entropy and entropy is our friend. Not that entropy and the great unknown isn’t scary and foreboding, but scary and foreboding is a challenge and less known or knowable. This new book careens from pillar to post. We hang on with fingernails and sweat. This is how life should be and we know it. Life should be a magical mystery tour always and for everyone. If life is an interpreted art understood only by some elite priesthood we can’t actualize, we can’t find or know our human potential.

Last week Facebook passed Google as the largest web destination signaling the truth of Pink’s 2005 prediction and snapping the giant’s fingers loudly one more time. One train’s journey is complete and we’ve taken seats on the Merry Prankster’s bus with its single destination proudly proclaimed on its brow, “FURTHER”.

Link to the Facebook vs. Google infographic

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What: Benefit For Sandy Hook Event

When: February 27th, 6-9 pm

Where: Downtown Raleigh’s Tir Na nOg Irish Pub 218 S Blount St

Website: TriangleCares.com (100% of donations go to Sandy Hook victims)

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Why I Gave Money To Triangle Cares For Sandy Hook

Money is a poor proxy for love or support, but it creates a meaningful exchange. Some love and support even via a poor proxy is better than none. When the monster of senseless chaos visits we use money as a proxy exchange.

We give money to:

• Share our hearts.
• Reestablish meaning and order in the face of meaningless chaos.
• Make a statement, a vote really, for GOOD over EVIL.
• Because we can.
• Because giving changes US.

Because Giving Changes Us

I spent yesterday signing my life savings into the Elizabeth Martin and Duncan Smith Story of Cancer Trust. I could be bitter about saving for a “retirement” that thanks to having leukemia is unlikely, or I can give money as a proxy for love.  I help others and in so doing help myself.

Time is much too valuable to spend being bitter. I’m an Internet marketer. The web only has one direction, forward and one speed, faster. Turns out that is a good way to live one’s life.

I am not Eckart Tolle. I always write braver and more generous than I am (lol), but I give because it helps create connection and find meaning even when there is no “meaning” and we will never be able to understand.

Triangle Cares is the pure essence of the give. 100% of money raised is headed to ease, to whatever tiny degree, the void chaos created in Sandy Hook. We know “the monster”. The monster has many names such as cancer, hurricanes and random acts of violence. Sometimes the monster touches us.

In the moment when things we fear come to steal our life, love and belief, there is only one way to survive – with kindness and love from friends and family. Even if we never meet or know those who support and love us when the monster comes we know we are not alone. I gave money, a poor proxy for love, to Triangle Cares for Sandy Hook because giving allowed me to touch the face of God.

Donate To Triangle Cares For Sandy Hook 

Why Q&A Content Rocks Content Marketing

After joining Atlantic BT I was asked to evaluate client websites in 5 different business verticals. These verticals varied from Business Intelligence software to high end government research. A single theme kept coming up in my research – the power of Questions and Answer content. Q&A content was consistently over subscribed (high search counts) and under published (low competition). Why? Who knows, but conjecture says we often overlook the most basic things. Turns out those “basic things” when formed as Q&A content can be worth millions. This post is about how any small to medium sized business can mine the rich vein of golden Q&A content.

Evaluate websites by asking a series of cascading and linked questions such as:

Homepage PageRank (Use PageRank Checker)
Highest PageRank of Category Pages (use PageRank Checker)
# Links In (use Alexa)
PageSpread (#pages in Google, use site:www.URL.com and site:URL.com use higher number)
# of Twitter Followers (go to their Twitter page)
# Facebook Likes (go to their Facebook page)
Top 3 Competitors (who they think and then online)
* Same data as above for top 3 competitors.

Note: This post limits tool suggestions to free tools. We also use Raven Tools and SEOmoz but they aren’t free.

Know these metrics and you can know a website’s past and predict its future. One of the most difficult things to understand is how these metrics are tied to each other.

• PageRank is a signal of SEO strength or weakness.
• PageRank is tied to inbound links since Google places primary SEO value in links.
• High PageRank, low # of links in means the links in are highly valuable (probably .edu).
• High PageSpread (pages in Google) and LOW PageRank predicts low links in too.
• etc.

Look at Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like these often enough and long enough and patterns form. Patterns form maps for where to dive for more detail.

Next Stop: Keywords

Who is your competition? Competition in the world is not necessarily the same as competition online. Use Google’s free Adwords Keyword tool to review and understand keyword demand. This is not the post to explain Google’s keyword tool, but a quick note.

There are three kinds of searches: broad, phrase and exact. Think of these as BIG, MEDIUM and SMALL result set generators. At this stage we are creating a model of keyword demand. Use broad match terms because actual values don’t matter as much as the relationships or patterns in the data.

Everything online is a model. In a model the veracity of numbers is not as important as being consistent with treatment. You aren’t searching for a mathematical truth as much as modeled patterns, actionable patterns.

You need to know three things about keywords:

• Search demand over some time (monthly is what is normally used).
• Estimated cost of buying the term (we aren’t buying but cost is an important data point).
• Competitiveness of the term (sites with the term in anchors or title).

Construct a spreadsheet and then create a simple calculation of “efficiency”. Efficiency divides competitive supply by keyword search demand to identify over subscribed and under published terms, the nirvana of all keyword research. Sort the sheet by the efficiency and you’ve created a “long tail” list of keywords.

Q&A Content: The American Meltdown Food Truck Test

In virtually every vertical we’ve studied the most commonly over subscribed and under published content is Questions and Answers. I’ve been fascinated by food trucks since reading a feature about how popular food trucks were becoming in LA.

Today’s content strategy test is to quickly determine Q&A content to help American Meltdown.

The American Meltdown Food Truck looks delicious. The team is hard working. Let’s pretend the American Meltdown gourmet food truck and team are our clients.

American Meltdown KPIs

Homepage PR: 4
Menu Page PR: 3
Photos Page PR: 2
PageSpread: 272
Links In: 33

* Seeing these metrics American Meltdown had to be good in social since a PR4 with only 33 inbound links means support has to come from social or they wouldn’t have a PR4.

Facebook Likes: 851
Twitter Follows: 2,021

** Social strength is indeed why American Meltdown earns a PR4 with only 33 inbound links.

American Meltdown Food Truck Keywords

There are probably 3 to 7 keyword “silos” for American Meltdown. It can take a day or two to fully explore a keyword silo such as “food truck”. Today’s research is condensed into a few hours to provide a general idea of how to explore keywords.

Legend: Keyword phrase, competitive ratio from Google higher is more competitive, Global Monthly Search demand for the keyword, Local Monthly Search Demand for the keyword, CPC or Cost Per Click when advertising on the keyword, Docs = documents returned a good competitive indicator with lower being less competitive and so better, Effic = Efficiency or demand divide by supply (documents) with higher being more “efficient” or more likely to generate positive Return On Investment (ROI). ..
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Q&A Content Wins Again

FoodTruck spelled with no space is our standout winner with high search demand and a small number of pages focusing on the term generating the highest “efficiency”. Efficiency means the chance of creating a positive return on investment (ROI) for work done on a keyword. It may seem strange to say “small” when there are a quarter of a million pages, but most search terms have millions of returns.

Another solid content phrase is, “What is a food truck”. If we use a tool such as the AnswerHub to create Q&A content to answer these questions there is a very good chance our content will rank well. There is something about forming a Question combined with an Answer that Google loves.

The best way to use a tool such as AnswerHub.com is seed some starter Q&A content, provide social capital for customers to create User Generated Content (UGC) and gamify the environment so it is easy to find loyal supporters.

American Meltdown needs a content strategy that can work while they are on the truck. This is another advantage of UGC generated Q&A content. Setting up an AnswerHub mini-site is easy and cheap compared to the SEO returns.

There are other Q&A tools from Bazaar Voice and OSQA, but I like AnswerHub’s gamification, ease of use and easy installation. AnswerHub.com is located in Cary and they have a supportive, creative and smart team.

Every website should have a store and every website, including our friends at American Meltdown, should have a dedicated Q&A environment powered by UGC and an occasional post from the team. I should have included AnswerHub in our 5 Magical Do More With Less Curation Tools, a post that went “mega-viral” with an audience past 1M thanks to power retweeters.

Q&A content can be worth millions in traffic and conversions for B2B and B2C websites. The keyword research above is only a beginning. If American Meltdown was our customer I would spend several days before finding the 5 keywords like “FoodTruck” that could be magical.

How would I use “FoodTruck”? Write content such as:

• 5 Differences between Food Trucks and FoodTrucks
• The FoodTruck Manifesto.
• Why FoodTrucks are way cooler than Food Trucks.
• Why American Meltdown is a FoodTruck not a Food Truck.
• FoodTruck Swag (the t-shirts etc. to support American Meltdown’s brand building).
• Etc.

If we wanted to create a castle around the keyword “FoodTruck” we might buy 2 to 7 URLs such as FoodTruckSwag, FoodTruckManifesto and FoodTruckGifts. These URLs are available and could prove immensely supportive to American Meltdown’s content strategy.

I would also be sure to create pages for Durham Food Truck Rodeo, What is a Food Truck and Food Truck Locations. American Meltdown has a calendar, but it is hard to engage with and understand. Since knowing where they are = money, I would rework the locations and calendar page substantially.

Since it seems like they have a regular circuit I would create pages for each place in the circuit. On these pages I would have a link to the “tracker”, pictures, some copy about what they like about that location and a Twitter roll. Twitter rolls, if positioned in the code correctly, can keep a webpage “alive” to Google. Some of this content I would put in the Q&A area, some I would include in the “stack” of American Meltdown pages.

Might want to take a quick look at Advanced SEO: Bleeding, Siloing and Bottling for more on how to form content silos for maximum impact.

Don’t Forget SEO Basics

Buying URLs with keywords is advanced Internet marketing. Before you go there, check SEO basics such as:

• Is your page title keyword dense?
• Do you have unique page titles?
• Is your body copy aligned with the listings you want?
• Are your images using alt text with keywords?
• Can visitors easily share your content via Facebook, Twitter and G+?

American Meltdown needs some SEO tuning. These days I tune AFTER working out a storytelling and User Generated Content (UGC) strategy. Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm changes made constantly improving site heuristics the most important metrics.

“Constantly improving” heuristics imply:

• Storytelling to promote page views.
• Photos and videos to promote time on site.
• Contests and games to promote user engagement.

Overwhelmed yet? Remember the power of Q&A content and you’ve found the secret RPG of content marketing.

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