Google has been repeating itself for years: paid links are spam. Yet an entire economy has sprung up around paid guest posting — essentially just another form of paid links.

What is the difference between selling or buying a link on a webpage and paying someone to write a webpage with the link in it? There is no difference to Google.

Yet paid article writers have been selling linked articles to the naive marketer for years. However, Google has drawn a hard line: paid guest posts are spam. And it doesn’t matter who you paid … if any fee is involved, then you are in the danger zone.

The latest developments absolutely send a clear message that paid guest posting as a way to build links will not be tolerated. And here are the lessons we’ve learned.

• Lesson 1: Guest posting services selling links are spam
• Lesson 2: Know when to tell Google about the links in guest posts
• Takeaways for guest posting

Lesson No. 1: Guest Posting Services Selling Links Are Spam

On June 3, 2020, SEMrush (a popular SEO tools SaaS company) received a tweet from Google’s John Mueller. The message? Your guest posting services are spam.

That’s an unnatural link – the kind the webspam team might take action on. https://t.co/kfQQithCnK & https://t.co/q5GmAxx2YM have more. Making sure the links use rel=nofollow / rel=sponsored would still allow sites to get visibility without having to worry about manual actions.

— John (@JohnMu) June 3, 2020

You can read more about how this came about here at Search Engine Roundtable for context. SEMrush was caught up in the turmoil because it had a service clearly called out by Google. They promptly responded to the community saying that the links through their service were not paid placements. Were the posts and included links free? Of course not — someone somehow made money.

Fantastic tool but this is incredibly concerning.https://t.co/Weo1astBPg

Feel like I’ve travelled back in time 10 years.

Sort it out @semrush

— Ryan Ogilvie (@ryanogs) June 3, 2020

Exactly who did not receive payments? No one can argue there wasn’t some form of payment involved.

Looking at Google’s advice on steering clear of link schemes, we can see some examples here of what to avoid. In Mueller’s tweet to SEMrush, he pointed to this article on links in large-scale article campaigns.

Some relevant excerpts from that article include:

Google does not discourage these types of articles in the cases when they inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company. However, what does violate Google’s guidelines on link schemes is when the main intent is to build links in a large-scale way back to the author’s site. …

For websites creating articles made for links, Google takes action on this behavior because it’s bad for the Web as a whole. When link building comes first, the quality of the articles can suffer and create a bad experience for users.

It’s pretty clear that Google does not want people or businesses to manipulate their rankings using links on paid guest posts. That’s due to the long history of guest posting as a way to extend and disguise link spam.

If Google does not take action to curb link spam, then pretty soon the first page of results will go to those that have the most money to buy guest posts instead of those worthy of ranking. Sounds like a breach of trust to me.

Ultimately, SEMrush decided to rethink its guest posting service and sent out a message to its community about it.

At the end of the day, this is not about pointing the finger at SEMrush, but about the lessons we can continue to learn about guest posting and link spam. SEMrush, like many, I think just got caught up in the moment and the fact that Google was quiet about it for so long. Now the signal is clear.

So this first lesson is understanding what link spam is.

I talked about this in a recent article on guest posting and manual penalties. It’s not just the people who are placing paid guest posts that should be aware of link spam. Websites that accept guest posts stand to suffer the most from Google penalties on their websites.

Back in 2017 (link earlier), Google said:

Sites accepting and publishing such articles should carefully vet them, asking questions like: Do I know this person? Does this person’s message fit with my site’s audience? Does the article contain useful content? If there are links of questionable intent in the article, has the author used rel=”nofollow” on them?

Add:

• Am I getting a fee? If yes, then it’s spam.
• Am I paying for placement? If yes, then it’s spam.
• Is this a link I would normally use and support? If no, then spam.

That brings us to our next lesson about paid guest posting and link spam: How to actually handle the links.

Lesson No. 2: Know When to Tell Google About the Links in Guest Posts

On June 3 and then again on June 11, 2020, John Mueller described how people should be handling links in guest posts: “nofollow” or the newer attribute, ”sponsored”:

@JohnMu Since your recent tweet with SEMrush, it would be good to get total clarity, as there now seems to be a lot of confusion around.

We all know, ‘paying’ for a guest post is against the guidelines BUT what about guest posting in general, where no money changes hands?

— Mark Preston (@MarkPreston1969) June 11, 2020

Mueller followed up in the same thread, clarifying a little bit:

Essentially if the link is within the guest post, it should be nofollow, even if it’s a “natural” link you’re adding there.

FWIW none of this is new, and I’m not aware of any plans to ramp up manual reviews of this. We catch most of these algorithmically anyway.

— John (@JohnMu) June 13, 2020

In typical Google fashion, the message is not 100% clear. One would assume that he meant that we were to disclose to Google the links pointing to the guest poster’s website.

But his message seems to say all links, even if they are “natural” (which could mean links to supporting research, too).

I assume he is doing this to make it easy for guest posters not to intentionally or unintentionally have spam links. If you “nofollow” all links, you have less of a chance of harming the site.

There are plenty of people who disagree with Google’s latest suggestion. Is it that big of a deal to go ahead and comply by using those attributes? Not really. Because even with those attributes, Google is likely to figure out more about the links on its own.

In March of this year, Google began treating these attributes (“nofollow” and “sponsor”) as merely “hints” when considering the links they are applied to. But a hint of what? A hint that you are probably selling links?

From its announcement of this change back in September 2019:

When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal to use within our search algorithms. This has now changed. All the link attributes — sponsored, UGC and nofollow — are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hints — along with other signals — as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.

Why not completely ignore such links, as had been the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.

In other words, as Danny Sullivan at Google mentioned in a tweet, using these attributes is now a way to send more granular signals to Google (which, of course, is good for Google and some say not so good for others). But a signal of what? A signal that you are probably selling links?

And then Google can determine whether the link is good and will count, or if it’s a paid link and spam that will hurt the site.

And there remains the issue. According to the FTC, this may be an advertorial and it needs to be clearly identified as a paid page. I really think this is an entirely new blog post, so I only mention it here.

Takeaways for Guest Posting

So what’s the takeaway for a business that wants to guest post? Do it for reasons other than link building. Do it for traffic and users.

If you want to contribute content as a way to add value to a community, that is fine. But don’t expect it to build quality links or boost your website’s authority.

A better strategy is building links to your site by creating great content published on your own site. As I wrote in that post:

You want to build authority and you need links. But there are good links, bad links and downright ugly links. The good links you earn naturally by creating great content on your site that people want to link to. The bad or ugly links are usually those that come out of a “link building” program.

If you’re a website publisher who is accepting guest posts, create guest post guidelines that meet Google Webmaster Guidelines. If a link in the article is off-topic, the quality of the linking site (i.e., yours) will likely suffer.

Only accept posts that don’t diminish your website’s expertise, authority and trust. And make sure you and an SEO pro review all posts before publishing.

Only accept guest posts that you wish you had written. Otherwise, consider them poison.
Click To Tweet

When in doubt, it’s a good practice to use a “nofollow” or “sponsor” attribute on relevant links in guest posts.

But keep in mind that Google may catch spam links anyway:

The other thing is that because this is so old, we have a lot of training data for our algorithms. I wouldn’t be surprised if the largest part of those links are just ignored automatically. If all that work is for ignored links, why not just do something useful instead?

— John (@JohnMu) June 14, 2020

This is something I talked about in my article on guest posting and manual penalties:

In most cases, “nofollow” is a hint to Google. But on Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages like news, finance, health and so on (see the list in Google’s guidelines), Google may ignore “nofollow” entirely. In other words, if you have a spam link on a YMYL website, consider yourself open to more scrutiny by Google and potential penalties.

Also, have you ever gotten an email telling you about all the wonderful sites you can get a paid guest post on? Think about it: Who owns Gmail? Do you really think Google does not know who is manipulating the link landscape and the sites to ignore?

I think that selling high domain authority (DA/DR) posts for the value of the links where Google probably ignores the links is unethical.

So does that mean every single link in a guest post needs to have “nofollow” or “sponsored”? If you want to be safe and are unsure, yes. The reader cannot tell if the link is followed or not, so making them all nofollow is a viable choice.

But for those who are savvier when it comes to the nature of link spam, you can make the call on which links should have which attributes.

As a reminder, here is Google’s help file on qualifying your outbound links.

Note: If you receive guest blog post spam requests, you can report them to Google as “paid links” webspam.

Closing Thought

Remember Penguin? Now think about what happens when (not if) Google rolls over onto paid guest blogging.

I am imagining a world where, like the Penguin penalty, Google marks paid guest posts as spam. Not simply a zero value, but rather a hard loss of rankings that takes websites years to recover from.

Google does not want link manipulation by any means. What would you do if you were Google trying to protect your product?

If you need help deciding on the most effective ways to increase your website traffic and revenue, contact us today for a free quote and consultation.

The post Paid Guest Posting: More Proof That It’s Bad for Business appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Several years ago, when the Penguin algorithm update hit target spam links, link penalties were at the center of most conversations in the SEO community.

But then things got quiet. When Penguin rolled into the core algorithm in 2016, Google said it would devalue spam links rather than demote sites. But that didn’t mean manual penalties would go away:

Conversation on Facebook with Googler Gary Illyes

Fast-forward a few years, and we are still hearing about manual link penalties (albeit not as often). Just recently, however, the SEO community has reported manual link penalties related to guest posts.

This article in Search Engine Journal (SEJ) in February reported a manual penalty against a page that Google believed contained a link that violated its guidelines.

From what I gathered from the report, there was a link with branded anchor text within a guest post without a nofollow that was possibly a paid placement.

Here was the manual-action message from Google, as reported in the article at SEJ:

Manual action message from Google, originally published on Search Engine Journal

In a conversation about this article on LinkedIn, someone accurately pointed out:

Also in February, Alan Bleiweiss reported a client’s manual link penalty, suggesting it had to do with guest posts as well:

And a client just got slapped with an unnatural outbound link penalty. This is the price you pay when you allow “guest posts” without proper due diligence, or without ensuring your site is not exposed to shady tactics.

— Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) February 15, 2020

To be clear, these penalties are not likely against guest posts per se. They are against the same types of links that Google has said are unacceptable for years. But that doesn’t mean website publishers can adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards guest content.

As a reminder, these are the kinds of links that Google doesn’t want you to have. And just because Penguin devalues links versus demoting sites, we are not in the clear. Manual actions still exist, and they can deeply impact a business.

The following video with former Googler Fili Wiese published in March 2020 discusses these manual actions further:

Wiese said in this video:

So the key thing with manual actions is that when you have one applied to your website, that pretty much stops the growth potential of your website … the manual action, while it is applied to your website, means you can’t grow further and your competitors potentially could.

He added that these things need to be resolved but that once you resolve it, you may not necessarily regain your former rankings.

That leaves us again at a crossroads when accepting guest posts. For many websites, guest posts are a beneficial way to add expertise and depth to their site on a variety of topics that an audience would want to read about.

But website publishers beware: Scrutinize guest posts in the same way you would scrutinize your own quality content. That means creating guest post guidelines that meet Google Webmaster Guidelines and accepting posts that don’t diminish your website’s expertise, authority and trust.

As part of the guest posting process, submitted posts need to be carefully reviewed with both an editorial eye and SEO expertise before being published.

So what if you are hit by a manual action for guest posts or other content and links?

First, do what Google tells you to do in the message you have received from them right away.

If you need more information, Google gives instructions on how to remedy manual actions and what to expect (with a section specifically on spammy outbound links) here. And this classic video by Matt Cutts is still helpful:

Sometimes, people are confused about whether they should remove the link or add a “nofollow” attribute. It’s easy to see how this confusion can happen. In the Google manual action screenshot shared earlier, it first says to remove the links; then it says to remove or use “nofollow.”

In most cases, “nofollow” is a hint to Google. But on Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages like news, finance, health, and so on (see the list in Google’s guidelines), Google may ignore “nofollow” entirely.

In other words, if you have a spam link on a YMYL website, consider yourself open to more scrutiny by Google and potential penalties.

As for paid link placements on your site, Google’s advice now is to apply rel=”sponsored” attributes.

Concerned about your website’s performance in Google Search? We can help you with that. Contact us today.

FAQ: What are the consequences of manual link penalties for my website?

Manual link penalties imposed by search engines like Google can severely affect websites. These penalties are typically the result of violations of search engine guidelines, particularly those related to manipulative link-building practices. Understanding the repercussions of these penalties is crucial for webmasters and SEO practitioners seeking to maintain and improve their online presence.

The Impact on Search Engine Rankings

When a website incurs a manual link penalty, its search engine rankings often plummet. Search engines seek to maintain quality and relevancy within their search results by penalizing websites that engage in link schemes or spammy tactics, including link spamming. In such instances, websites could lose their desired positions on search engine result pages (SERPs). This reduces organic traffic and diminishes the visibility of your brand or content.

Erosion of User Trust

Beyond the immediate SEO repercussions, manual link penalties can erode the trust of your website’s visitors. Users have become more adept and wary regarding online activities, leading them to consider your website untrustworthy if penalized due to manipulative link practices. This loss of faith could result in decreased user engagement, reduced conversion rates, and an online reputation, which will be difficult to regain.

Recovery Strategies

Recovering from a manual link penalty is a complex process that requires diligence and adherence to search engine guidelines. Recovery requires identifying and disavowing damaging backlinks, improving or removing low-quality content, and submitting a reconsideration request with search engines. Recovery times vary greatly depending on how severe a penalty was assessed and your remediation efforts’ success in mitigating it.

Manual link penalties can profoundly affect your website, affecting its search engine rankings, user trust, and overall online performance. To mitigate these risks, it’s essential to maintain a clean and ethical approach to link-building and promptly address any issues if you do receive a penalty. Doing so can protect your website’s integrity and ensure its success in the digital landscape.

Step-by-Step Procedure: How to Address Manual Link Penalties

1. Identify the Penalty: Begin by confirming if your website has incurred a manual link penalty. Check your Google Search Console account for notifications or messages regarding penalties.
2. Audit Backlinks: Conduct a thorough audit of your website’s backlink profile using tools like Ahrefs or Moz to identify low-quality or spammy links.
3. Disavow Harmful Links: Create a disavow file containing the URLs of harmful backlinks and submit it to Google through the Disavow Tool in Google Search Console.
4. Remove Toxic Links: Reach out to webmasters of websites hosting harmful links and request removal. Document your efforts for future reference.
5. Improve Content: Review and enhance the quality of your website’s content, ensuring it complies with search engine guidelines.
6. Submit a Reconsideration Request: Craft a detailed reconsideration request explaining your actions to rectify the issues. Be transparent and honest in your communication.
7. Monitor Progress: Continuously monitor your website’s performance in search results and user engagement metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.
8. Patience and Persistence: Understand that recovery can take time. Be patient and persistent in your efforts to regain search engine trust.
9. Avoid Future Penalties: Implement ethical link-building practices and maintain a clean backlink profile to prevent future penalties.
10. Regular Audits: Periodically audit your backlinks and content to ensure ongoing compliance with search engine guidelines.
11. Stay Informed: Stay updated with search engine algorithm changes and guidelines to adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.
12. Quality Over Quantity: Prioritize high-quality content and natural link acquisition methods over shortcuts that could lead to penalties.
13. User Trust Restoration: Rebuild user trust by consistently delivering valuable, reliable content and engaging with your audience authentically.
14. Monitor User Feedback: Monitor user feedback and reviews to address any concerns promptly.
15. Rebuild Brand Reputation: Use positive online reputation management to counter negative perceptions.
16. Measure Success: Continually measure the success of your recovery efforts through SEO metrics and user feedback.
17. Educate Your Team: Ensure your team is educated on SEO best practices and the consequences of manipulative link-building tactics.
18. Maintain Transparency: Be transparent with stakeholders, clients, or partners about any past penalties and your recovery efforts.
19. Seek Professional Help: Consider consulting with SEO experts or agencies if you face challenges in penalty recovery.
20. Adapt and Evolve: Stay adaptable in your SEO strategy, as search engine algorithms and guidelines may change over time.

The post Yep, Manual Link Penalties Still Happen and It’s Your Job to Regulate Guest Posts appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Enhanced Campaigns, they are a-comin’. The pros and cons have been heavily discussed, so we’ll jump right to a few set-up tips that can help you get a jump on optimization.

Geo-Targeting

Be as granular as possible with geo-targeting. Select states, regions, or metro areas over countries. This will allow you to optimize your bidding by geo. Get a head start on setting this up; you’ll need to allow enough time to collect data before optimizing.

Once you are ready to optimize, go to the locations tab under the campaign settings tab and click on the “Bid adj” for any geo. Select increase or decrease from the drop-down, set the percentage, and click save. Rinse and repeat for all other geos.

In the case where you have numerous geos to set at the same bid adjustment, you can select multiple geos and set them all at one time.

Ad Scheduling

Campaigns perform differently during the week versus weekends, so set your campaign ad scheduling to allow you to optimize for weekdays versus weekends by selecting each day of the week.

Go to the campaign settings tab, click on ad schedule, and click “Edit ad schedule” button. On the drop-down menu, select Monday and then click on “Add” to add another daily schedule until all days of the week are showing, then click save.

Now you have each day listed and have the ability to make bid adjustments by day:

Device Targeting

When it comes to mobile, some campaigns will do better and others will do worse, so make sure to take advantage of bid adjustments for your mobile targeting.

You will also want to take advantage of creating ads specific for mobile devices. Make sure to check the mobile box during the ad creation process when creating ads for mobile. Both text and image ads can be mobile-specific.

Enhanced Campaigns, all protests aside, do introduce a lot of useful features. Get used to using them now, and someone will thank you (and your metrics) later.

The post PPC Set-up Tips for Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

While I’m not going to get into the merits of spending thousands of dollars on a hypocritical ad campaign, I will say this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company do this and it certainly won’t be the last. So why not look at the positive side? Results!

When it comes to bad-mouthing competitors, one of the biggest benefits is the boost to your company’s SEO efforts through links & SERP real estate.

Links & Mentions

People love talking about controversy. It makes good news and don’t we all enjoy watching two giant companies battle it out? At the end of the day, controversy drives mentions and it drives links.

If we take a look at the Bing campaign, then there are currently over 1,000 news stories listed in Google News and over 17,000 mentions on Twitter alone. The biggest thing to note is people are talking about the Scroogled campaign and Bing itself.

On top of that, many articles are featuring the video ad and even more are linking to the “Scroogled” microsite (no longer active as of 2015)

The site didn’t exist 30 days ago and now it has a good number of links from authority sites. Not bad, Bing.

SERP Real Estate

Over the past 18 months, GoDaddy has had its share of PR disasters. From the elephant shooting video to the company’s support of SOPA, the Internet has been none too kind to GoDaddy. Neither have their competitors.

While many competitors jumped to declare their stance on the issues, NameCheap took a different route, publicly calling out GoDaddy, offering discounts for domain transfers, and during the elephant debacle, donating $1 to Save the Elephants for every domain transferred from GoDaddy to NameCheap. The story was picked up everywhere, especially after 20,000 domains were transferred.

By calling out GoDaddy, NameCheap not only garnered mentions and links, but they were able to grab some real estate in the search results for the GoDaddy brand name. One year later, when you search NameCheap, you still see them being associated with GoDaddy in the related searches and competitive searches:

Gaining search share against a major competitor can be next to impossible but by calling out GoDaddy and taking advantage of their errors, NameCheap was able to do just that.

So there you have it. Bad-mouthing a competitor may be bad for business but it can be great for SEO. The next time you’re struggling to come up with a link building strategy, look no further than the competitor you like the least.

Note: The author of this post does not condone bad-mouthing competitors for the sake of SEO. Happy Holidays!

The post Scroogled: The SEO Benefits of Bad-Mouthing a Competitor appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

As with any business in the information age, marketing has become a more and more specialized discipline. Long gone are the days when companies would just put up a billboard or record a radio advertisement, and expect the compelling copy to make the sale. Even within the Internet age, there has been an evolution—the indiscriminate pop-ups of the early World Wide Web era have evolved into the current search advertising market, which predicates itself on complex algorithms meant to divine the most effective results.

Effective Web marketing relies on cutting waste; business owners can no longer afford for their marketing to cast wide and survive on the scant percentages that are converted by a national ad campaign. The “Holy Grail” of marketing, therefore, targets the people most interested in buying your merchandise/booking your service at the moment of peak interest.

For the search marketing industry, targeting has taken many shapes. Ads are placed by their relevance to a keyword within a search session; by behavior type when tracking cookies are involved; and by demographic in the cases of hyper-local ads.

Semantic technology is an additional tool starting to come into favor. For small business owners, who feel pressure to utilize the most effective marketing solutions in the most cost-effective manner due to limited resources, semantic search-based advertising, especially on a pay-per-click model, is one of the best ways to quickly target receptive buyers in the most effective fashion.

As we say in Britain, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; semantic search-based ads react to their surrounding content more like a human than a standard keyword search ad, meaning that a conversion- someone visiting the site because of an ad- is more likely.

On top of that, a semantic-search engine is more likely to display what is already on the user’s mind. This all adds up to a compelling package for the advertiser- if someone is on a food Web site, a semantic search package will ensure that they see ads in the food or cooking sector, and likewise with their search queries.

The pay-per-click model is especially attractive to small businesses because it is completely scalable—businesses can set a cap, and only pay when their prospects “come into the shop” by clicking on the ad.

A small-business owner looking to enter into a semantic-based marketing campaign needs to be aware of a few things going in. First, they need to get a sense of where their campaign will go- how many people will see it, what type of content will it accompany, etc. After they’ve reviewed the publisher list, and made sure that it matches their targets, they need to double check their hosting agreements- a truly effective semantic search campaign will draw clicks, and much like a “group coupon deal” participant running out of inventory, a DNS crash makes the advertiser look worse than if they were invisible. My company, Vertical Search Works, has had a few clients stop a campaign because the traffic boost within the first week was running them close to a site crash.

The semantic search market is just beginning its rise, much like keyword search did in the late 90s and early 00s. As it becomes more widespread, small business owners and marketers will see its effectiveness, and semantic search ads will be a necessary part of every company’s marketing mix. Companies that take advantage of it now will be miles ahead of their competition.

The post A Shortcut to the Grail: How Semantic Search Can Boost Internet Marketing for Small Businesses appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Chris Silver Smith: Chris, director of optimization strategies at KeyRelevance, is a copious blogger who can be found offering opinion and reporting at his blog, Silvery.com, and on the Search Engine Land column Locals Only. He’s also on Twitter, @si1very, and now here on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog — this week only!

Read Chris’s post for power optimization tactics for your images: 10 Image Optimization Tips For Local SEO

Colin Jeavons: Colin is the CEO and founder of NTENT, a company using semantic search technology to enhance the visual appeal and relevancy of paid search results. A former political blogger, Colin will be sharing his perspective of the future of better advertising through semantic search. Check out Vertical Search Works on Twitter at @WithNTENT.

Read Colin’s post to discover how small businesses can better reach customers with semantic search technology for online ads: A Shortcut to the Grail: How Semantic Search Can Boost Internet Marketing for Small Businesses

Tracy Falke: A new-to-the-wild Internet marketing consultant, Tracy is a repeat guest blogger thanks to her sharp insights and irresistible charms. For proof, see her last post for us, Big Business Heart Social Media 4ever.  I expect the same brutal honesty coming your way this week. For a year-round dose, follow Tracy on Twitter at @Tracy_Falke.

Read Tracy’s post to journey to a not-so-distant future where implanted and wearable computer chips allow for visual search: Augmented Reality and the Future of Visual Search

Mitch Monsen: Unafraid of tackling technical SEO topics as a blogger, Mitch is CEO of SEO consultancy firm WhiteFireSEO. He specializes in on-page optimization strategies and tactics and content creation, along with filling in as a guest blogger in a pinch. ;) Follow Mitch on Twitter at @mitchmonsen.

Read Mitch’s post for a reality check about Web content’s over-rated reputation in SEO: Dethroning the King: Why Great Content Won’t Beat Your Competition

The post Welcome to Guest Post Week on the Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

She’s all grown up now, standing in front of you in a skirt so short you wonder:

• Can you contract STDs from sitting on the bus?
• Where did my baby go?
• What happened to the days when I baby-proofed every room in the house so she wouldn’t trap her little fingers?

CC BY 2.0

Remember how proud you were when she had her first steps? As she turns to smile at you & step out of the door for her first prom night, you almost shout “Stop!” You want 10 more minutes to coach her on all the things you should have said, the things she needs to know to protect her innocence from the perils sure to come. But you stop. You smile back & let her walk away, praying that all the advice you’ve dispensed over folding the laundry together sticks. You’ll know she’ll be back & she’ll be ready to listen.

Your brand is your baby. Social media is…scary.

I work for a digital agency with a portfolio of clients who’ve just entered the social media space. After years of careful, reluctant acceptance of the ‘Learn, Measure, Engage’ model, they’ve moved from baby steps to full on careening round the house with the big headed balance of a toddler. Of course I’m scared. Of course I’m worried. But here’s how I sleep at night.

Good Old Fashioned Values: Social Media ROI for B2B Clients

So you taught her that it was better to be herself, to know what she was good at & to work hard to be the very best she could be. You taught her manners & the basics of how to get on in the world. But when she’s standing on the dance floor with some over developed goon breathing down her neck — will she remember these fundamental lessons?

For your business, it’s the same. CEOs, CMOs, PRs & marketers across the globe are worried about sending their darling brands out into the uncertain & tenuous world of social. They know they have to do it. They’re also expected to make this endeavour into a commercial & PR miracle. All eyes are on their interactions in these spaces with a global scrutiny that leaves little room to fail. So how do you prepare your brand for the adventures surely to come? How do you turn what you thought might be a new marketing fad into a profitable way to expand your business & satisfy your stakeholders?

Let’s lay it out in no uncertain terms:

Understand your unique selling points: Back to marketing 101. What does your business do very well? Why would I choose you to provide me with products & services? What would I look for as an investor to ensure your organisation was fit for purpose? Why would I want to work for you? What is your company doing that deserves column inches with my media group? If you haven’t hit all the stakeholder bases, go back to boardroom with some post it notes & your top level execs & hash it out.

Understand your audience & their issues: Beyond the simple “Who?” of your target market, think: “Who’s sitting on the other side of the computer screen?” What are their dreams? How would your business make their life easier? What are their sales objections? Have they been burned before? How do they educate themselves online to continue their development within the business they work? What might they type into a search engine to find this info? What are they interested in that might overlap with your company’s objectives (eco-friendly policies, corporate social responsibility efforts, innovative technologies). You get the gist. Find their need. Fill it.

Understand your objectives: It’s not all about the other person. When you enter the long dance of funnelling a big business lead into a tangible conversion, it’s also about getting what you need out of the situation. In the end, whatever you’re doing to engage with your audience & stakeholders, it should also come down to protecting & improving your bottom line. What can social media offer you in tangible, real numbers you can take to the boardroom? How will you use these metrics to get you from “We want a website/app/social media campaign” to a fully fledged, integrated digital strategy?

Understand SEO: If you do nothing else I say, please do this. Learn as much as you can about search engine optimisation (Bruce Clay’s training courses are a great start) & use this power. If you can find the words that people use to discover you or your offering, you’re onto the best thing since sliced bread. Sound keyword research & planning these keywords across your digital activities (from press releases to CEO blogs to how you create new content pages on your corporate site, or what you Tweet or upload to Facebook) will be the core of your success. Good SEO knowledge can help you discover where your audiences are, what they’re talking about, & how they’ll find you. Use this more advanced method to audit your keywords, & you’ll soon be on the way to completely targeted, perfectly crafted SEO, PPC & social media campaigns (read: more money with less time & effort!).

And when it comes to the pay-dirt of SEO — inbound links — you’ll find that your knowledge of the keywords & keyphrases you’ve discovered will not only allow your audience to find you, it’ll make them happy to link to your relevant content, too.

Understand Digital: Build with integrity from the bottom up. More important than any other weapon in your arsenal, digital provides answers. But only if you’ve married your analytics bone to your CMS, CRM & your Social bone. Execute your web development with every consideration for search, your audience, & your objectives. Work every back end system & front end interface to the max. But it’s not just about technology. Make sure you integrate the whole of your marketing efforts, matching your digital & social media strategy to every single outreach carried out in your organisation. Across the globe. Use analytics systems to prove increased traffic referred from social networks. Give these ‘micro-conversions’ a monetary value, just as you’d tag a banner ad. Use these systems to document your social interactions, then feed them into your CRM systems so that you can begin to prove the kinds of things that make financial directors smile. We promise.

Understand why IT departments hate Social Media: Imagine it, you rode the crest of the digital wave & found yourself transformed from closet computer games geek to Head of IT. Suddenly, you have power. With that power comes a lot of anxiety too. People come to you for everything from a faulty computer cable to a missing email. The last thing you want is the nightmare of potential viruses that social media can unleash. So how do you release the corporate shackles of group IT policies so that all relevant members of your staff can be your very own army of brand ambassadors? Give IT back the power. Ask an outside agency to audit their perceived challenges with opening up your business to social media platforms. Then ask them for solutions to these challenges (tiered security profiles for different levels of the business, restrictions on downloads, etc.) Re-package this feedback in a way that presents a good business case for social media & your job is done. Kick it up the chain as high as it needs to go to get it done. After all, you won’t find many boardrooms that aren’t chattering away about social media these days.

Understand Social Channels: Social media is dead. Gotcha. Never have four words elicited so much attention online. But it’s the truth: it’s just the way we ‘do the internet’ these days. So get out there. Experiment in the channels on your own time, use the platforms you hear about so that you understand their functionality. More importantly, follow the FedEx ‘Launch a Package’ model & spot the gaps in what these social environments offer so that your business can provide a solution. What else can I say about social media that you don’t already know? Be polite, be just as you would be when you’re standing in front of another human being. The clue is in the name of this new media: be social. Like you’d tell your daughter: you don’t need to wear revealing clothes & tons of makeup to attract attention. You just need to be there & be yourself. It’s about opening up, knowing the audience, being confident in your organisation, & using these channels to spread your word. If you build it, they will come. Which leads to my next point:

Understand Crisis & Reputation Management: Like your daughter, out on her first prom night, it’s important to understand that bad & weird stuff, so it’s best to be prepared. What am I talking about now? When you’re being ‘social’, you just can’t stop. You’re there. So if your organisation makes a mistake, or there’s a bump in the road, don’t lie. Be honest & open. Because social media platforms are much, much more than a campaign channel. If you begin to engage in these channels, you have to keep the dialogue going. Your social media properties (the Twitter handles, the Facebook page, the LinkedIn & YouTube accounts) are permanent digital communications. Get them optimised & running like a well-oiled machine so that if disaster strikes, you have a real & immediate way of both communicating your messages to interested stakeholders as well as protecting the first page of your search engine results. Remember: don’t go Nestle, get even. Flood your networks with well-optimised copy that protects your brand values & your corporate site’s position in the search engines.

It’s All About How Much You Put In

The way you leverage social media in your business & beyond is all down to the right upbringing. The success or failure of your brand & business in these environments depends entirely on how much you’ve prepared. If you love yourselves & your babies, do it right. Once you set this prolific marketing machine running, it will keep on going. Whether it comes back to take care of you in retirement is entirely in your grasp.

How Much is This Going to Cost Me?

Worried about resource, time & the amount of hard work that organising your social media strategy will take, don’t panic! Need to understand the finer arts of how to work each social media channel to your corporation’s best advantage? Get in touch — tracy@streetsmartsocial.com or sign up to Streetsmart Social’s  Corporate Social Media Marketing newsletter for more!

The post Big Business ♥ Social Media 4ever appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Photo by vauvau, CC-BY

Don’t adjust your monitors; Lisa really is back blogging on Bruce Clay, Inc. If you listen closely you can almost hear the sounds of Bruce having a heart attack. Weee!

If you’re new to the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog or me (hi, I’m Lisa), you may not know that this blog served as my stomping grounds for nearly three years. It was my baby and where I formed my own personal brand, a brand that allowed me to move from LA to New York, write for some well known marketing blogs, and eventually, start an SEO consulting company called Outspoken Media.

That’s right. My name is Lisa and I built my personal brand on someone else’s dime. And you can do it, too.

Branded employees sometimes get a bad rap for being time-wasting job hoppers, but the truth is forming a strong personal brand while working for someone else benefits both the employer and employee when done correctly.

How?

• When there’s more interest in you, there’s more interest in the company as a whole.
• Your personal success and connections can be leveraged by the company you work for.
• You become a more efficient worker thanks to quicker access to information and contacts via your network.
• A company with two (or three. Or four!) A-listers is more interesting and worth more than a company with 1 A-lister.
• Today’s market place is social. Users want to connect with people, not logos.

How can you go about building your personal brand while working for someone else? Here are a few suggestions.

Get permission.

Before you start a campaign to create a personal brand, talk to your employer. You don’t want to start putting yourself out there only to accidentally brand yourself “unemployed”. When you have “the social media talk”, you want to show how building the Brand of You will directly benefit the company. Stress how it doesn’t make you a flight risk, but instead will allow you to bring more value through increased brand awareness, speaking opportunities, press mentions, and a larger network that the whole company will be able to utilize.

When you get the okay, you also want to have in writing who the owner of the social accounts will be. You’re going to be building your name accounts (at least partially) on their time, but you want to make sure you own it, if possible. Stress how much more authentic this will make it feel for your audience. Obviously you hope to be with your employer for a really, really long time, but things do get messy when you break up. You want to prevent mess down the road.

Work like an asset.

When you’re building a personal brand, you stop being an employee. You’re now an asset, both to the company and to yourself. This realization changes how you work. It’s not about being there 9 to 5, it’s about figuring out how you can bring the most value to the company you work for and then putting that idea into action. For me, it meant working overtime to create an engaging blog that the search community wanted to interact with. It meant differentiating myself at conferences by NOT being the drunk girl at the bar, but instead being in the front row of a session an hour before it was even set to start so I could liveblog. It meant responding to comments at midnight if that’s when people were talking. It meant working like an entrepreneur even when someone else was still signing my paycheck.

Whoever you are, you have some skill that no one else in the organization has and something that you can use to build a name and provide value back to the company. Figure out what that thing is and change how you work to leverage the hell out of it.

Pick your character.

I’m of the mind that you shouldn’t be basing your personal brand off exactly who you are. Your personal brand should be a heightened, slightly exaggerated version of who you really are. This will help you to exaggerate the trait and qualities in you that will attract others. Because you’re basing the brand off traits you actually possess, you don’t have to worry about it not feeling authentic. Remember that entrepreneurs (and brands) are created to be respected, not loved.

Putting yourself out there is going to expose you to people who want nothing more than to kick you in the face. It may sound harsh, but it’s a truth we need to accept. There’s a dark side to being the face of a community. The character you create becomes your shield. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows out there in personal brand-land. You’re going to need it.

Be it.

What you do is just as important as how you do it. So once you get your character figured out — start being it. Start that exact moment.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with personal branding is that they wait for permission. They know what makes them different and how they can stand out, but they convince themselves they “can’t” act that way.

• No one’s watching yet.
• They don’t have enough authority to say that.
• They need more followers first.
• No one challenges that Social Media God.
• They don’t have the readers they need to write that.

Listen: You find your readers and your following by BEING your brand, not by waiting for permission to be it. Or, as Justin Kownacki once wrote: Don’t wait until you’re popular to start being relevant. You don’t become popular asking for permission and you definitely won’t attract an audience that way.

Create opportunities.

If you want to create a brand, you’re going to have to work for it. And that may mean setting aside otherwise good sleeping or TV watching time to put things into action, because personal branding is more than just building an active Twitter account. It’s about differentiating yourself by busting your ass.

Look for opportunities to promote your company by bringing what you bring. If you’re a strong writer, then that may mean picking up some extra guest writing opportunities to portray you as an expert within your company. If you’ve got the verbal thing down, maybe it’s speaking or providing training services to people inside and outside your organization. Maybe it means going off the beaten path for what your company typically does, creating something new that you can use to go rogue. Virginia created Bruce Clay’s SEM Synergy podcast. Susan co-authored the SEO for Dummies book. It’s up to you to create opportunities to build your brand and the company. The more opportunities you create, the luckier you become, and the bigger your brand grows.

[If you’re seen working your ass off, you’re also likely to get less resentment from your coworkers who haven’t hopped on the brand wagon and actively hate their lives. Actually, no, they’ll probably still hate you.]

Be everywhere, loudly.

This is the part of personal branding everyone always thinks of. It’s when you’re on Twitter during the day and afterhours talking to people. It’s when you’re sharing what you’re up to, the problems you’re facing, what you’re working on, what you love, and answering their questions to help lighten their load. It’s when you’re making connections by having real conversations and showing the person behind the company. It’s the chatty side of brand building.

This step is important. It’s important that you’re visible, accessible and that you create as many touch points as you can for your brand. The more out there you are, the more you help yourself become the “go to” person for a specific topic. People have to know that you exist to care about you, but don’t get stuck here. Twitter can only help your personal brand if you have something else to bring to the table. Remember that.

You can build a personal brand while working for someone else and you can do it in a way that benefits not only yourself, but also your employer. Focus on that value.

The post How to Build Your Brand Working For Someone Else appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Do you remember your life before social media? When you weren’t tweeting, ‘like’ing posts on Facebook, uploading photos to Flickr, or sharing what you’re doing with your infinite number of friends? It seems that just about everyone is using social media these days, making social networking sites the perfect breeding ground for online marketers.

For small businesses who are looking to handle their social networking in-house, problems arise when trying to find a balance between time spent and achieving the maximum outcome. That’s why niche social media marketing has become so popular; choosing a small number of sites to concentrate your efforts on while still achieving results.

So Where Do You Start?

Targeting your social media efforts only seems logical. You’re probably barraged with experts telling you to be on Twitter, Facebook, but don’t forget about your friends on MySpace, Bebo, Digg, Stumbledupon, Reddit, and how about forums and groups on other platforms, can’t forget those. Enough is enough. First, figure out your strategy, then find out where your peeps are, and finally: implement.

Social Media Strategy, What’s That?

I’m a geek for information: infographics, tutorial videos, and great blog posts that aren’t just regurgitated crap. That’s why I’m obsessed with Jay Baer of Convince & Convert. He constantly puts together blog posts that give you information you can actually implement and use in the future! His post, “Develop a Social Media Strategy in 7 Steps”, is extremely helpful. He suggests you determine: your pitch, the point of all this work, relationship with the audience, how your audience is actually using social media, what’s your ‘one’ thing, how to be human, and how you’re going to measure success in order to build a social media strategy.

Niche Social Media Sites, What Should I Look For?

Alright, so now that you know your strategy you must find your niche sites. A study done by Pingdom looked at the ages of social network users, which can help you figure out which sites your prospects are on. The study doesn’t examine all social media sites of course, but doing your own research can help as well.

A simple Google search for niche social media sites yields many resources that list out social media sites by niche. Find the sites listed for your industry and go a step further: examine the site as a whole to see how the community interacts, and then check the site demographics on Quantcast.com. How many visitors does the site get per month? What’s the age range of users on the site? Etc… This data will help you come up with a narrowed down, targeted list of niche social media sites you should consider having a presence on.

Then What?

Implement! Put together a social marketing strategy. For my clients I usually give them ideas on what to do for a 4 to 6 month period with their social media marketing: sites to work on, messaging strategy, tools to help reduce time spent implementing, resources for information, blogs to follow to keep up to date with social media trends, and more. You should do the same. Work through your messaging plans, measure your results, figure out who will do what, get suggestions from experts on how best to manage your profiles, and stay up to date with the latest trends.

I subscribe to Smart Brief for Social Media, my lifesaver when I’m having a busy week and can’t spend a lot of time looking for what’s hot in the blogosphere in my industry. They offer e-mail summaries of the hottest posts in your industry, and not just in social media. Whether you’re in banking, finance, marketing, or many others you can get a quick e-mail summary of the days blog posts.

One Last Thing…

Don’t forget about SEO. Integrate the expertise you’ve acquired over the years about search engine optimization into your social media marketing. Use keywords when possible, even if it’s just by customizing the anchor text of your short URL (I use bit.ly to shorten my links). Link to your homepage, use alt tags on images, import your blog when possible, create a vanity URL when given the opportunity, etc… Look for ways to optimize your efforts.

Want more information?

In March I presented a webinar titled “Targeted Social Media Campaigns that Work for SEO”, one in a series of webinars presented on a monthly basis by those of us at Vertical Measures. In this webinar I go more in depth with each of the steps above, and also give some very helpful resources in the blog post accompanying the webinar.

Have some resources to share, list them in the comments below!

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