1. Brand + Mission = Excellence
2. Think Bigger: Startups Save the World
3. Focus on Users with “Youtility”
4. Responsive Design isn’t the Only Choice That Makes Sense
5. Click-to-Call Extensions Reap Major Rewards
6. 75% of Users Access Pinterest on a Mobile Device: Optimize Accordingly

Brands Must Have Mission

Keynote speakers at Pubcon had a lot to say on the subject of mission, vision and “youtility” of a brand. If we can take these CEOs and bestselling New York Times authors at their word, successful brands must have a mission greater than sales, possess a clearly defined vision, and think of creative ways to be useful.

1. Brand + Mission = Excellence

“Brand is the outward expression of a mission. Mission is what drives your deepest purpose. Match these well for excellence,” said Chris Brogan, CEO of Owner Media Group, as he delivered a passionate address that appealed to idealism and the bottom line simultaneously. According to Brogan, brands that are fueled by a mission — something they could write on a flag and get people to march behind — are the kind of brands that reap the greatest success.

By infusing your company with a mission, your consumers will feel like they belong to something greater. Brogan asserts that if they feel like they belong to something greater they will become content creators and spread the word of a brand themselves. Brogan points to Crossfit as an example of this, noting how actively and avidly Crossfitters share Crossfit’s mission on social media. What Crossfit inspires (that ordinary gyms don’t) is that sense of belonging — and that allows them to offer their services at a premium.

2. Think Bigger: Startups Save the World

Angel investor Jason Calacanis examined the global impact that mission-minded brands can have. Calacanis discussed six major world problems (cancer, climate change, energy crisis, hunger, unemployment, and repression) and showcased startups that are finding solutions. His final thought? That the work entrepreneurs, engineers and the tech elite perform is the work that lifts the world up. Calacanis believes that even bigger things are coming.

3. Focus on Users with “Youtility”

Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, also believes brands are on a mission — a mission of “youtility”. Youtility is the idea of focusing on the “you” who is consuming your content. It’s marketing with the chief aim to be useful. As Baer said, “it’s marketing that people cherish rather than tolerate.”

Marketing that people cherish means abandoning a “me, me, me” attitude. It’s not about touting your brand, but about knowing your audience and supplying them with content (apps, articles, social presence) that will help them. For example, Hilton has a Twitter account called @HiltonSuggests. The account’s entire mission is to find traveler’s looking for suggestions or tips and help them. A look at their Twitter feed shows them talking food, attractions and sights; there’s no call to stay at a Hilton. This kind of youtility, though, leads to something priceless: brand recall and top-of-mind recall.

“Great Youtility can transcend the transaction. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger – you don’t just have to talk about your own stuff. You can talk about other things that are relevant and useful,” said Baer.

A natural consequence of focusing on the “you” is something all brands are hungry for: loyalty. Joanna Lord, vice president of marketing at Porch.com, echoed Baer’s sentiments at SMX East, using Starbucks as an example.

Lord explained that we’re in a place today where businesses need to be just as loyal to customers as they want customers’ loyalty. Look at the messaging on the Starbucks website. It’s hyper-focused on words like “you” and “we” and “our” and “us,” punctuated with three to four word phrases. Marketers are empowered when every morning they can wake up and know they’ve delivered a message to the world.

Consider Mobile Traffic at Every Turn

Mobile optimization has been a hot topic all year long. 2014 was, after all, the year that saw mobile search traffic overtake desktop search traffic. I recently interviewed Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, and he reported that BrightEdge data shows mobile traffic is outpacing desktop traffic by 10. That’s precisely why digital marketers are focusing their efforts on mobile optimization and paying close attention to design, user experience, content and SEO. Like Bruce Clay said at Pubcon, “Mobile will disrupt everything. It’s already disrupting everything.”

4. Responsive Design Isn’t the Only Choice

Each type of mobile site implementation comes with its own set of unique pros and cons. Knowing, however, that Google’s preferred method is responsive design (as opposed to separate sites or dynamic serving), digital marketers tend to advocate responsive design, as well. But not the panelists in “What SEOs Should Be Doing with Mobile” at SMX East.

Cindy Krum (CEO of MobileMoxie) asserted digital marketers shouldn’t feel bound to one type of design; each page should be taken into account on its own.

“You don’t have to commit 100% to one mobile type. Part of your site can have one architecture and other pages can have a different architecture. If it provides a better user experience, then you should do it. Google is not against this if it’s warranted,” Krum said.

Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, agreed. What Google cares about most, he said, is making the user happy. He also emphasized that responsive design does not lead to ranking boost, and a lack of responsive design does not lead to penalty.

5. Click-to-Call Extensions Reap Major Rewards

Jason Spievak, CEO of Invoca, and Daryl Colwell, Senior Vice President at Matomy Media Group, shared statistics that demonstrated the importance of implementing Click-to-Call functionality on PPC ads in the Pubcon session New Mobile Behavior and Click-to-Call Strategies:

• 47% of mobile users will explore other brands if there is no phone number associate with the business’ search results (Google Mobile Playbook 2013).
• The average American consumer spends 34 hours a month browsing the Internet on a mobile device (source: Direct Marketing News).
• By 2018, mobile search will drive 73 billion inbound calls to advertisers (source: BIA/Kelsey).
• There are 30-50% conversion rates on a call.

Given these statistics, it seems more important than ever to make sure people viewing your ads can easily call your business.

6. 75% of Users Access Pinterest on a Mobile Device; Optimize Accordingly

In Pubcon’s Pinterest and Other Missed Social SEO Opportunities, Cynthia Johnson, director of social media marketing at RankLab, pointed out that 75 percent of users access Pinterest from a mobile device – it’s the digital marketer’s job to optimize accordingly. Practically, this means first and foremost have a mobile-ready site – there’s no point in sending users from Pinterest to a site that they’re going to bounce back from.

This also means limiting the characters in your pin description to those that can be seen on a mobile device (100 characters on iOS/125 characters on Android). It’s also important to consider the order of your boards. When you go to a brand/pinner’s page on desktop, the top eight boards are visible above the fold – on a phone, only the top four boards are visible above the fold. This means, then, that you need to strategically place your best four boards in the top four slots, rather than thinking you have eight to work with.

In addition to mobile optimization and mission-minded marketing, there was an abundance of new and insightful information in all arenas of digital marketing. Virginia Nussey and I liveblogged 36 key sessions throughout the conference. Find an easy-to-read overview of all of them in 36 Coast-to-Coast Liveblog Posts Covering Pubcon Las Vegas & SMX East 2014 and click through to the topics that interest you most. You’ll find coverage of sessions featuring the latest SEO, SEM, SMM and content marketing tactics.

The post Bringing Your Brand Mission & Mobile Strategy to the Next Level: 6 Digital Marketing Lessons from SMX East & Pubcon appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Pubcon Las Vegas 2014

1. New Mobile Behavior and Click-to-Call Strategies

Learn how to enhance your PPC campaigns with click-to-call extensions — and why they matter so much — as Jason Spievak (CEO of Invoca) and Daryl Colwell (Senior Vice President, Matomy Media Group) take the Pubcon stage to talk mobile search advertising.

2. Chris Brogan on Mission-Driven Execution

In Wednesday morning’s opening keynote from Pubcon Las Vegas, Chris Brogan shares inspiring examples of brand and mission. Keep the mission alive with content and participation. Content is the drum that calls us together.

3. Search Algorithm Chaos & Keyword (Not Provided)

In this Pubcon Las Vegas session, Bruce Clay (president of Bruce Clay, Inc.), Prashant Puri (co-founder of AdLift) and Jake Bohall (vice president of marketing at Virante) are going to talk about an always-hot topic in SEO: Keyword data (Not Provided).

4. SEO Mosh Pit

It’s Pubcon’s 15th birthday (and the final panel), and you know it’s a party when there’s beer and cake and an SEO Mosh Pit, a Q&A session where conference attendees get to ask their questions of some of digital marketing’s best minds and leaders, including Bruce Clay, about the current SEO state of affairs.

5. The Importance of ‘Buyer Legends’ with Jeffrey Eisenberg

There’s so much that goes into online marketing, and marketing at largeBuyer legends” are what marketer and bestselling author Jeffrey Eisenberg calls the narratives that craft a customer journey – and it’s also the name the company that he runs with his brother. In this morning’s keynote, Eisenberg will dive into buyer legends, exploring why they matter and what goes into them.

6. SEO Copywriting Style Guide: Tools & Tricks for SEO Writers

The lessons shared by these panelists, including Bruce Clay, Inc.’s SEO Manager, Mindy Weinstein, help writers craft content for people that’s also rich for search engines. Whether you’re writing an article, a blog post, your home page — where do you start? You need to start with the human element.

7. Link Building Without a Penalty

Rhea Drysdale, Joe Youngblood and Russ Jones talk about link building. While this session was covered, Bruce Clay, Inc. does not endorse any of these tactics. Always proceed with caution when it comes to any link building effort.

8. Jay Baer, Author of Youtility – Help Not Hype

Marketing is more challenging than ever. Attention spans are shorter, consumers demand more knowledge, and what worked twenty years ago won’t work today. What does work for gaining mindshare? Being helpful.

9. Real-Time Content Marketing with Wearables & Google Glass

When it comes to wearables, devices and technology are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and Internet marketers are embarking on a new frontier: real-time marketing.

10. Link Building through Press Outreach

Rob Woods, SEO consultant, will share insights on press outreach that leads to strong links in this Pubcon Las Vegas 2014 session. Caveat: Going after press links are hard work, take time and money, and you are going to face rejection from reporters.

11. Jason Calacanis on Startups that Save the World

Angel investor Jason Calacanis’s keynote is unique – it’s not tactical or strategy-driven. It’s steeped in reality and meant to simply inspire and inform the audience of the amazing progress that startups and forward-thinking companies are bring to the world in the areas of six global problems. Startups, he asserts, will solve our world’s problems rather than governments. His keynote, that is meant to inspire us, will cover major advances by tech and startup companies.

12. Pinterest and Other Missed Social SEO Opportunities

Have an interest in Pinterest? You should – there are 70 million users are Pinterest, and their business is up for grabs. John Rampton, editor-at-large at Search Engine Journal, Stephan Spencer, vice president of SEO at Covario, and Cynthia Johnson, director of social media marketing at RankLab, share their insights on wielding Pinterest for to drive traffic, build community and boost sales.

13.Utilizing Personas in Social Media Contests

One of the most common reasons why business fail to gain ROI from their social media marketing efforts is their failure to fashion their content to target specific personas.

SMX East 2014

1. Google’s Gary Illyes Talks HTTPS & the Future of Secure Search; SEO VIPS Share Data/Experiences with HTTPS

Googler Gary Illyes, talks about the future of secure search, Google’s thoughts on secure search, and the possible return of keyword data (scroll to Q & A at end). Eric Enge says he’s seen “no material change” in moving to secure search, and Raza Zaidi weighs in on RSS and WordPress in relation to secure search.

2. BuzzFeed Founder Jonah Peretti Talks Going Viral, SEO, Social Media and More

Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed, has a history of Internet brilliance. Before founding BuzzFeed, he was a co-founder of the Huffington Post. For tonight’s grand finale, Search Engine Land Founding Editor Danny Sullivan picks Peretti’s brain on the early days of SEO at the Huffington Post, the nature of social sharing, the nuances of different social networks, the role (or lack thereof) of SEO at BuzzFeed, native advertising, and more.

3. 25 Smart Examples of Structured Data You Can Use Now

Have you reviewed your website inventory ad implemented structured data markup wherever applicable. Perhaps most important to your decision of whether or not you need to add markup now, speaker Mike Arnesen shares how to track the ROI of rich snippets.

4 . How SEO & SEM Can Help Each Other

SEO and PPC VIPs Lisa Williams, Aaron Levy and Brett Snyder break down the relationship between SEO and SEM from an operational and tactical level during the first session of Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2014’s Tactics Track.

5. All Search is Now Social

Think of an apple and a bag of marbles. Both simple images, and when you compare the two you’ll get an idea of the shift that social media has caused brands to make to stay relevant today. An apple is the old way of thinking of your brand, unified and on-message. The bag of marbles is a little more assorted, a collection, not a unified message but it has 300% more surface area. You’re able to increase the surface area of your brand by releasing individual advocates.

6. SEO Is Never Dead — Marshall Simmonds

In this opening summit session at SMX East, the SEO thought-leading veteran Marshall Simmonds puts to rest the popular critique of search engine optimization, “SEO is dead.” He explains: “If Google is constantly changing, we [search marketers] have to be constantly moving to meet those changes.

7. Branding Your Data Visualizations with Annie Cushing

Annie Cushing makes data pretty and meaningful for her clients with Excel dashboards customized in their colors and fonts and will be imparting her guidelines for making your data visualizations fit your brand, making it a brand identity tool online.

8. The 4th Wave of Content Marketing

We’re at the forefront of a movement to make technologists and marketers talk to each other. This session is called “The 4th Wave of Content Marketing: From Passive to Interactive” and it’s about the next thing in content. Don’t just publish more, make it interactive with marketing apps.

9. Twitter Cards & Facebook’s Open Graph

Take your social game to the next level by implementing Twitter Cards and Open Graph Tags. The speakers in this panel assert that social strategy means thinking about social posts as if they are ads (and therefore crafting them with the same amount of care and creativity).

10. Automation Does Not Equal Strategy

SMX speaker Kevin Ryan posits that “a Tool Box Does Not a Cabinet Make” as referenced in the alternate title of this session on marketing automation. Ryan is going to speak on a bad habit: focusing on the new, shiny new technology and neglecting the strategy.

11. The Future of a Brand

What is a brand and how are marketers in control of a brand? These are the questions she’s been tackling this decade because things have changed, and branding is now a business driver. As such, a brand should have it’s own budget, it’s own team and it’s own conversation with the executives. Joanna Lord explains the best practices of what some better brands are doing.

12. SMX East Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan

Search Engine Land Editor in Chief Danny Sullivan fields questions from the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2014 audience. Find out what he had to say about Authorship, markup, local SEO, how to teach SEO in college and much more.

13. Tough Love: What I Wish CMOs Knew About Search Marketing

Internet marketers know the importance of SEO, SEM and content marketing … but that’s not always the case with the C-Suite. Hillary Glaser stresses the importance of maintaining SEO. If your CEO/CMO is unconvinced of the power of ongoing Internet marketing, Glaser’s insights are definitely must-shares. Erin Everhart shares the seven things she wishes execs understood. Tom Alison rounds out the session by sharing compelling statistics on the future of Internet marketing, and why PPC is necessary for branded terms.

14. Creating, Testing & Optimizing Paid Search Ads

PPC pros share their top tips on testing ads, including tips that account for the shift of mobile users. From “always be testing” guidelines to creating ad testing framewor, discover what matters most when it comes to creating, testing and measuring ads.

15. Learn With Google — Attribution Strategies

In the Learn with Google classroom, the topic of the morning is: Attribution Strategies to Inform Your Search and Digital Investments. Because understanding the interplay of channels leads to smarter marketing investments.

16. What SEOs Should Be Doing with Mobile

When it comes to mobile, Google prefers responsive design. But there is no ranking boost or penalty for using this method when designing your mobile site. Cindy Krum, Michael Martin, Jim Yu and Gary Illyes talk about what happens when sites use dynamic serving, separate sites and responsive design — or some combination of all three.

17. The Importance of Imagery

In a stream of consciousness presentation of images, SMX speaker Rhonda Hanson, Sr. Director of Digital Marketing, Global Marketing, formerly of Concur, thinks about using images to your advantage and points out a few dos, don’ts and trends.

18. Making Moments Matter

The sales funnel has exploded. However, the pieces of the funnel are still highly relevant. You need to be there in the consideration phase. You need to streamline the purchase process so it’s frictionless. You need to work to maintain retention and get fanatical loyalty.

19. Keyword Research for Better Content & Audience Engagement

SEO masterminds Michael King, Jason White and Joe Pawlikowski share their top insights on keyword research. Discover their favorite tools, tried-and-true tactics, thoughts on persona research, (Not Provided) and much more.

20. Deconstructing Pigeon, Google’s New Local Search Algorithm

In July, the quality of Google local search results took a turn for the worse, experts say. The cause? A pesky little creature called the Pigeon Update crawled into the maps, local packs and authoritative one boxes. Learn what changed for searches with generic terms, geolocally modified terms, and see some of the wacky-broken results that have cropped up since Pigeon landed.

21. Conversion Rate Rock Stars

Luke Summerfield shares brilliant insights on designing your site and content to appeal to people’s unconscious brains (i.e., where emotions live). Then Paras Chopra and Khalid Saleh talk technical CRO matters.

22. Search & Find: Marketing in the Age of the Internet of Things

In this session at SMX East, speaker Erynn Petersen takes a high-level view of a future where we don’t go to a phone or computer to get online, but rather all the devices and appliances around us are online.

23. Competitive Research for SEO

This session dives into competitive research that will help you identify your true competition (it isn’t always who you think it is) and then assess why and how they are outranking you. Armed with this information, you can fight back and rise to the top of the SERP.

The post 36 Coast-to-Coast Liveblog Posts Covering Pubcon Las Vegas & SMX East 2014 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Leading the charge is moderator, Brett Tabke, Pubcon CEO. Introducing the SEO Mosh Pit panel and their predictions for SEO in 2015:

Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.

The industry will be 90 percent mobile within a year, and it will change everything.

Gareth Hoyle, Co Founder / CEO, LinkRisk / Marketing Signals

Google will give more clarity to updates and Matt Cutts was kicked out because of Penguin!

Joe Laratro, President, Tandem Interactive

Just introduces himself, no predictions.

Jenny Halasz, President, JLH Marketing

A Dismal prediction: the divide between SMB and enterprise will widen and it will be hard for small businesses to compete in the space.

Tony Wright, CEO/Founder, WrightIMCG

He welcomes the Google overlords, as it takes content from websites and displays it for its own monetization.

Eric Enge, CEO, Stone Temple Consulting Corporation

Dramatic expansion in Knowledge Graph and answer boxes. More structured snippets, and more webmasters won’t like it.

Mike Grehan, CMO & Managing Director, ACRONYM

Matt Cutts is a multi-millionaire and doesn’t need to work anymore.

Greg Boser, President & Co-founder, Foundation Digital, LLC

Mobile is going to be huge, predatory aggregation is going to be huge, and we will all be here moaning about Google and its products.

First Question from Brett Tabke: Is SEO dead? Should it be called something else?

GARETH HOYLE – SEO is never going to be dead, it’s just going to change what we do. It’s never going to die, and will become 5 spots as opposed to 10.

ERIC ENGE – SEO is never going to die, but there are new technologies coming out that someone needs to be on the front lines of trying to figure out, discovering new ways to get traffic. The SEOs of tomorrow will always be figuring out new stuff.

JENNY HALASZ – SEO will never go away. There is an intersection between content that people want to see and availability of the content. There is also “Subject Experience Optimization.”

BRUCE CLAY – Many years ago he said, “SEO is dead as long as it’s alone.” Because SEO is part of larger digital marketing, there is always something new. Every Monday, SEO is a brand new industry. As long as there are web pages, there will be SEO, and it will be integrated with all forms of digital marketing.

TONY WRIGHT – SEO has come back from the dead so many times. If you can’t adapt to change, then you are in the wrong business. To most, SEO is dead, but to the rest of us, we figure out what works, and we implement it. SEO is not dead as an industry.

MIKE GREHAN – Danny Sullivan was in his office recently, and together they reminisced over an interview from 14 years ago and they couldn’t recognize what SEO was.

Next Question: Does Google have too much power and influence in our lives?

JENNY HALASZ – A simple “yes.”

GARETH HOYLE – Google in the EU has created a great barrier to entry, but we don’t need to use Google. But we keep coming back to it.

TONY WRIGHT – He was in PR with Microsoft, and fought antitrust action against the company in the 90s, and Microsoft was taken down by 2 guys in a garage, not the government. This is the cycle, but no one knows what’s going to replace Google.

ERIC ENGE – There needs to be something dramatically different, but we don’t know what it is. Google will run out of runway eventually.

MIKE GREHAN – In ‘06 Google stopped calling themselves a search engine; they are a digital marketing company now. Google has made so many changes, but they’re not for us, they’re for the user. Hummingbird is not meant for people with a keyboard, because we are talking into mobile phones.

BRUCE CLAY – Asks how many people owe their jobs to Google’s changing all the time? Most raise their hands. Of course.

Next Question: How is mobile changing the game for marketers?

ERIC ENGE – It changes the website fundamentally, based on mobile users and devices. Organizations without mobile are already behind and will feel the financial pinch next year.

TONY WRIGHT – Makes a prediction that there’ll be 2x the mobile analytics tools at the conference next year.

JENNY HALASZ – We need to consider where the customer is and the context of how they are using devices.

JOE LARATRO – Very few are starting to scratch the surface in mobile behavior. Important issues need to be addressed as a result of this new behavior. The greatest opportunity for mobile is building direct connections with users.

MIKE GREHAN – Google does parlor tricks, they don’t actually answer real questions. Example – is it moral for girls to take the pill? See what answers you get. Google is just a database.

ERIC ENGE – Build your own audience, no matter the platform – this is how businesses succeed.

TONY WRIGHT – Web presence should be the center of your universe. You will avoid a lot of problems if you execute on this concept.

BRUCE CLAY – What if Google decides that organic is no longer needed on mobile phones? That would change our lives dramatically, and there’s nothing to prevent that from happening.

MIKE GREHAN – Does Google have all the power? What about Baidu, and Yandex? He’s a new grandfather again for the fifth time (congratulations), and never sees his grandkids open a mobile browser. It’s all apps.

Up next from Brett Tabke: What would be the top recommendations for earning money in the coming year?

BRUCE CLAY – Get better at PPC. He believes that people will get squeezed out of organic, because Google is not in the business of giving away free traffic. The problem is competition, and we are going to have to spend more money to make more money. Because Google doesn’t make money on organic, the real estate on SERPs will be shrinking.

MIKE GREHAN – Everyone is a publisher, and creating your audience. Build your own audience.

GARETH HOYLE – Paid social. Not all people hang out on Google. Use the context of different social platforms to increase presence. If you can make a website, you can make money.

TONEY WRIGHT – There are big opportunities to create better websites. And websites that work on mobile. People need sites that just work.

ERIC ENGE – Yes, create an audience, but how do you do that? We should all strive to solve problems without asking for a penny.

JENNY HALASZ – Diversify. Build content, audience build, brand build. Mobile marketing. Do not be solely dependent on Google for your audience.

BRUCE CLAY – For brick and mortars, be afraid of Amazon. They are opening up a brick and mortar on 34^th Street in NYC. Do not underestimate the ability of large online companies to jump into real life.

Audience Questions

Do you think there will be any profit in semantic optimization for the Knowledge Graph?

JENNY HALASZ – Google has developed a knowledge base on how to properly implement schema. Google recognizes the need to make it easier.

MIKE GREHAN – If Google understands the intent of a query, then structured data is not necessary.

ERIC ENGE – Google is getting good at understanding how likely a user is to be satisfied based on UX, which is somewhat outside the realm of schema. This validates the research by Searchmetics on co-occurrence.

MIKE GREHAN – Co-occurrence has been around for forever, but as the lexicon changes, how does Google adapt? One third of queries everyday Google has never seen before. Keywords used to be strong, but Google thrives on end user data. How media is consumed is the most important thing, which is why content is so important.

Q: Where will marketing strategy be on wearables next year?

TONY LARATRO – Don’t be a glass hole.

TONY WRIGHT – Looks forward to the day he can optimize his fridge.

ERIC ENGE – Consider all searches as voice search, because no one types things on their watch.

JENNY HALASZ – Voice and video

Q: Can Siri compete with Google? Will Facebook create a search engine?

ERIC ENGE –  He published a study using 3000 keywords running on Google, Cortana, and Sir – Google answered 58% of questions, Siri 29%, Cortana 21%. But were the questions fully answered? Google: 83%,  Siri: 40%,  Cortana: 20%

TONY WRIGHT – Facebook will have a Knowledge Graph type function.

MIKE GREHAN – You are tapping into a network of trust, so a Facebook search engine will be powerful.

Q: Why does SEO matter more than just to SEOs? How does a company that doesn’t want to invest in SEO do so?

TONY LARATRO – There are a lot of roadblocks, and sometimes SEO is not the best way, like with competing with Google products. No breaking that ceiling. You have to find opportunities to get through to the organization.

JENNY HALASZ – SEO is about marketing. Companies should continue to invest in it because understanding customers never changes.

TONY WRIGHT – SEO is not an island. If it is, you will fail. You must be able to integrate. Requires more than just on-page optimization. It’s about web presence, which must include an all of the above strategy.

ERIC ENGE – If there are big competitors in front of you on the SERPs, you’re not going to win that battle. You must find the battles you can win in the space.

GARETH HOYLE – Buy ads. Maybe SEO is not the right avenue depending on the topic/keyword. SEO is the glue that brings everything together. Everyone needs to speak to everyone. Google what you want to rank for and assess where you need to place your SEO efforts.

That’s it, nothing but applause for the SEO Mosh Pit. Entertaining as always, and happy 15^th birthday Pubcon!

The post Pubcon Liveblog: SEO Mosh Pit appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Knowing your personas at a really detailed level is important. Personas should play into all your social media efforts, Bird and Katz explain.

What Is a Persona?

“A buyer persona is a semi-functional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” –Hubspot

Persona research is taking data and turning it into a person. That person is your persona and you think about him or her whenever you’re creating your content.

Create a Persona

• Conduct target market research:
  • Surveys
  • Creating gated content
  • Analyzing social behavior
  • Utilizing an external partner (like Simmons Data)
• Divide results into persona buckets
• Create a story for each aspect that you identify
• Edit, edit, edit
• Make the personas personal and detailed
• Name
• Job title and where they work
• Details about their role
• Age
• Gender
• Salary
• Location
• Education
• Family
• Values and fears

What a Persona Should Include

Be best friends with your persona – you’re targeting them constantly. You want to build a relationship. Have images of them.

Social media is where your customers are. It’s where you, then, conduct customer service! 71% of customers ended a business relationship because of poor customer service (according to Forbes), and only 23% of customers think that a company values their business (according to CBS News). Responsive social media is a key differentiator.

Personas and Social Media Contests

What do personas have to do with social media contests? If you don’t understand your personas, your social media contest is likely to fail. One of the most common reasons why business fail to gain ROI from their social media marketing efforts is their failure to fashion their content to target specific personas (according to SquareFish).

Social Media Contest Fails

• Audi: They did a social media contest targeting and featuring hipsters. Rather than using a photo of a car, they used a photo of a hipster and came under fire. They weren’t adhering to what their personas wanted to see. Their actual persona should be 30 to 40-year-old businessman – that’s the demographic that buys their cars.
• Molson Canadian: This beer purveyor held a contest asking fans to promote Molson Canadian. They invited college students to share pictures and show why their school is the number one party school and feature the drink. It really didn’t work. In fact, it was a PR nightmare for the colleges. They should have been targeting their actual personas – beer-drinking fisherman, downhome people.

Persona-Driven Social Media Content Successes

User-generated content is trusted 50% than traditional media. (Crowdtap). UGC is an excellent way to collect creative material for marketing purposes or to get photos of your products on the social web to drive sales and brand engagement (Mashable). When you understand you persona … it gets your audience is excited. You’re speaking to them.

• Eggo Waffles: Kellogg’s held a contest, people were invited to share pictures of their Eggo creations/recipes. This spoke to the 30-something moms that Katz and Bird envision are the persona that Kellogg’s was targeting. The contest was wildly successful, and it is because Kellogg’s understood their personas.
• Brush Buddies: Brush buddies is a singing tooth brush. The brand held a karaoke contest where users posted videos of themselves singing with toothbrush, and users voted. There were only 30 contestants, and it drove 23,000,000 impressions and garnered 65,300 votes. Again, Brush Buddies understood their audience: teenage girls who love to post videos of themselves and sing.

5 Things You Need to Know About Personas

1. They should be a person, not a segment.
2. Know their input and their outputs.
3. Understand their story.
4. Be personal to what they care about.
5. All content should be directed at a persona.

The post Pubcon Liveblog: Utilizing Personas in Social Media Contests appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

“When you’re dealing with inbound links you have to consider whether the links are organic or inorganic to your site’s theme. You have to understand the policies of the search engines relative to possible penalties. You wouldn’t want to overwhelmingly support a single technique. You have to use any technique in moderation,” Clay advises. “You shouldn’t go from one to sixty links overnight on one technique – that sends a signal to the search engines that you’re involved in a heavy link development program and it could ultimately lead to a penalty. Follow the Google Guidelines. Links should be good for your users, contribute to your site content and make sense.”

Rhea Drysdale

Editor’s note: Coverage included here is only a partial reporting of Drysdale’s presentation due to Jay Baer’s keynote address running long.

Don’t just pay attention to Google Guidelines, Drysdale asserts. Pay attention to the actual law – make sure you understand the expectations for giveaways and contests. Take the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as seriously (if not more seriously) than you do Google Guidelines.

Build a real business. You need to have a firm grasp and understanding of your brand/business. What we do as marketers ends up becoming business strategy. SEOs go into a meeting and are asked to build backlinks. What SEOs need to know, though, is who are the client’s audience and what content resources we have to give them.

Invest in diverse growth strategies. Marketing strategy has to be robust.

Russ Jones: Broken Link Building

“Broken link building is a link building tactic where a marketer contacts a webmaster who has a broken link on his/her site and recommends one or more alternatives that include his/her target site.” (Moz)

Why Broken Link Builders Succeed Where Others Do Not

Prospecting

1. Identify broad and related keywords to prospect for resource pages related to your topic. TOOL: Use nTopic to find words and phrases that occur on content like yours.
2. Find resource pages. Use smart search queries to identify resource pages related to your topic. TOOL: Brokenlinkbuilding.com
3. You can outreach to the resource page to tell them about their broken link, or you can look up the backlinks to broken.com on Majstic, Moz and ahrefs and reach out to all of them about their broken link.

Panda Rules

Find what the page used to look like and examine the content. Follow the Panda guidelines to make your new version even better. Consider:

• Was this content written by experts?
• Would you consider this content trustworthy?
• Is this page an authority on the issue?
• Would you see this content in print?
• Are there any obvious errors on the page?

You’ll have more success if you create a replacement piece of content that is superior to the first.

Use Archive.org to determine relevancy, quality and potential for improvement.

Contact Finding

Finding good webmaster contact information is one of the most difficult parts in this process. Consider outsourcing it. Try Mechanical Turk or the outreach app in brokenlinkbuilding.com.

Finding the right outreach style can dramatically improve your conversion rate!

• Long form: take the time to personalize a long email that will explain why your new piece of content is better than the first. This is the most successful strategy, but also the most time-consuming.
• Short form: simple and quick heads up
• Slow play: send an email that says you have a broken link, but don’t tell them what the broken link is or offer a replacement. Then, the webmaster is likely to email back and ask
• Double tap: webmasters don’t need a nudge – they need a complaint. Create a false demand by sending complaint emails from email addresses (that aren’t yours).

Follow Basic Ethical Rules

• Don’t spam
• Don’t commit fraud
• Don’t steal content

Joe Youngblood: The Royal Guide to Google Safe Link Building

Youngblood offers four different link building strategies (see slides).

Scholarship Link Building

1. Set up the scholarship via scholarship management service.
2. Create a page on your website describing the scholarship.
3. Find targets on .edu sites to link to your scholarship page.
4. Get listed in scholarship search engines and directories.
5. Use scholarship-related content to drive links.

Interview Link Building

Google has slapped down guest blogging. Interview link earning is a very similar concept, but it’s much better.

1. Join the FindExpertsToInterview.com email list and MyBlogU.
2. Seek out an expert to interview and arrange how you’re going to do the interview (phone, email, Google Hangout, Tinychat, in person, etc.)
3. Write up some ideas for questions you’ll want to talk about and let the person you’re interviewing know your rough idea of how the interview will go so they know what to expect.
4. Once the interview is done publish it and ask them to share socially.
5. Use that interview for outward-facing communication to show that you are a go-to source for this information.

Photo Credit Link Building

This is a passive strategy. Find images that people are looking for. Use Ubersuggest.com. Find a highly trafficked image request that you can create.

1. Use UberSuggest.org set to “images,” and type in a base query.
2. Take list of all applicable keywords and put them in Google AdWords Keyword Planner under “Get search volume for a list of keywords or group them into ad groups.”
3. Sort by search volume and fin image keywords that match content you’re creating such as blog posts, articles, product pages, etc.
4. Find image queries that currently don’t have a lot of good results.
5. Make the images and publish them on your site with ALT and Title tags.
6. Do reverse image searches at least once a month to find new websites that have used your image and ask for a photo credit with a link to the original article.

Reddit Link Building

Reddit was accepted into Google News, and journalists are paying increasing attention to Reddit.

1. Look at the types of content shared on any of the default sub-Reddits such as DataIsBeautiful.
2. Create content that matches that sub-Reddit and target Reddit users to share the content on your behalf (some allow you to self-submit also).
3. Once your content is shared, join in the conversation about the content.
4. Encourage upvotes on your content by sharing it in social media (but don’t ask for upvotes – the Reddit community heavily frowns on this).
5. Consider using Reddit ads to target a sub-Reddit with thank you’s, special discounts, etc. for sharing and liking your content.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We recommend checking out our online SEO Tutorial for step-by-step guidance on proper link building, link profile maintenance, and many more search engine optimization topics.

The post Pubcon Liveblog: Link Building Without a Penalty appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, opens the keynote by explaining that marketing is more challenging than ever – attention spans are shorter, consumers demand more knowledge, and what worked twenty years ago won’t work today. In a keynote packed with real-world examples, Baer shows how brands are wielding transparency and “Youtility” to build trust and business.

Being a great marketer is harder than ever. There are three enormous obstacles to great marketing.

1. Reach is fragmented.

It is way harder to reach audiences today than it used to be. In 1977, the No. 1 television show (Happy Days) had a 31.5 rating. In 1987, The Cosby Show had a 27.8 rating. In 1997, Seinfeld had a 21.7 rating. In 2007, American Idol had 16.1 rating. In 2011, Sunday Night Football with Al Michaels had a 12. As of May 2014.

We spend more time looking at phone and computers that we do at televisions. People are doing their own thing, and it’s more difficult to reach them.

2. Marketing and customer service have collided.

Ten years ago, what would you do if you stayed at a bad hotel? You would write a letter or call customer service. But today, the Internet has enabled us to be passive aggressive. We take to the web to write reviews like this:

Customer service is now a spectator sport. All the trust and awareness you build with your Internet marketing can be undercut by a review like this.

3. Competition for Attention

Our personal and our professional lives have converged in unprecedented ways. When social feeds are filled with posts from both companies and friends, you’re not competing against other companies – you’re competing against everything. You are competing against people that your audience actually love; are you more interesting to them than their husbands and wives?

Stop being amazing and start trying to be useful. Amazing isn’t a strategy – useful is. The difference between helping and selling is just two letters – but those two letters make all the difference. When you help someone, you create a customer relationship for life. It’s not about right now. It’s about lifetime relationships.

Baer shares an example. Hilton has a Twitter handle called @HiltonSuggests, and the whole aim of the Twitter account is to help people with traveling questions. Hilton called together 20 employees to look for ways to help travelers in their spare time via Twitter. The aim is to help, not sell.

Herein, Hilton is playing the long game. Hilton is making relationships. Notice in the above example, Hilton doesn’t mention their own properties.

Youtility

Youtility: marketing so useful that people would pay for it.

Make marketing that people cherish rather than marketing people tolerate.

Useful articles are forwarded 30% more than average. We are wired to appreciate youtility.

Do you have the courage to create youtility?

Consider Clorox’s Find a Stain/Take a Spin app. It give you information on how to remove a stain. Clorox determined that they are not always the best answer. And if Clorox was always that answer, moreover, that would change the experience of the app. Clorox considered sharing coupons through the app, too, but decided not to – because it would make it an ad, rather than a piece of Youtility.

3 Ways You Can Create Youtility

1. Self-Serve Information

We crave information like never before. Google interviewed tens of thousands of users and found that the average American consumer need 5.3 sources of information (review, article, testimony from friend) before making a purchase (2010). In 2011, they needed 10.4.

Every single person here has access to all the world’s information at all times in their hands, via smartphone. Today customers are hyper researching everything, because why wouldn’t they? There’s no barrier to research.

Mobile data usage doubled in 2013. Today, if you make a bad decision (bad restaurant, bad hotel, bad sweater), you’re just lazy. All the information is right there.

Baer shares an anecdote. He was recently watching “Orange is the New Black” and wanted to know where he had seen one of the actresses before. He simply looked her up on IMDB on his phone. After getting the information he wanted, he considered the fact that before the Internet, this would have been impossible. He wondered what it would have taken to get the answer – he determined at least four hours to go to the library and scour information. He reasoned that he wouldn’t have done that, and would have just settled on “I don’t know.”

But today, “I don’t know” is no longer an acceptable answer for anything. Your phone knows, Siri knows, and we all have to know.

He shares an anecdote about a swimming pool and spa company that was on the brink of going out of business. They decided to write blog posts on every customer question they fielded. On evenings and weekends, they wrote 400 blog posts (they now have well over 1000 blog posts). Those 400 posts turned their business around. They now have more traffic than any other swimming pool company in the world.

B2B customers contact a sales rep only after 70% of the purchase decision has been made (Sirius Decisions 2012).

The better you teach, the more you’ll sell. Relationships are created with information first, people second.

2. Transparency and Humanity

The truth always comes out. There’s nowhere to hide. It didn’t used to be that way. Smart marketers realize, then, that they need to come out with the truth first. Smart marketers choose to be radically transparent.

This is Domino’s entire marketing message: “Hey, our pizza used to suck. Now, not so much.”

Trust is the prism through which all business success must pass. Without trust, nothing else matters – not search rankings, not price, not anything. The best way to keep trust is to be radically transparent and give away useful information.

McDonald’s has a functionality on their Canadian website where consumers can ask any question. And the questions are not easy.

“Maybe you could post a picture of these happy ‘family farms’ in which you say your animals are raised with the best care?”

In the old days of marketing, businesses would have run away from questions like this. Now they run toward them. What did McDonald’s do? They made a video showing McDonald’s Canadian Senior VP Jeff Kroll visiting a farm in Canada where the animals are raised.

Since implementing this Q & A functionality, the trust rating in Canada has gone up 31%.

3. Real-Time Relevancy

Be hyper relevant in some particular circumstance. Take, for example, The Corcoran Group. Every time it rains in New York City, they share a tweet that directs people to a very useful piece of content they created.

Nowhere in the article do they attempt to sell – but they’re creating relationships by being useful. And relationships like this lead to top-of-mind recall.

Great Youtility can transcend the transaction. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger – you don’t just have to talk about your own stuff. You can talk about other things that are relevant and useful.

Focus on what people really need. Nobody ever, in the history of the world, has ever needed socks. But everybody in the history of world has needed their feet to be warmer. Know the real need. Know your customers better than you already do.

We are surrounded by data, but we are starved for insights. We have more data than ever before, but every time we run a report we are by definition treating our customers as a number and they are more than that. If you are not regularly having conversations with customers in person or on the phone, you are doing it wrong. Talking to them will lead you to amazing, useful ideas that can help them.

Content is fire, social media is gasoline. Remember, you’re competing for attention against people’s real friends,

Twitter was not created to be the world’s shortest press release outlet. The only reason brands are even tolerated in social is because it keeps us free for the rest of us.

Youtility is a process, not a project. Inspiration doesn’t respond to meeting requests.

Baer’s book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype, is a NY Times best-selling business book.

The post Pubcon Keynote Liveblog: Jay Baer, Author of ‘Youtility’ — Help Not Hype appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Elements of Real-time Marketing

We’re shifting from passive to real-time engagement. Wearables represent a new kind of content marketing. It’s app-based, mobile, experiential, location-driven and context-driven. It brings immediate physical world experience into social, search and content consumption spaces.

Technologies Driving the Wearable Tech Change

• RFID
  Bluetooth
• Beacons (active and passive)
• Smart things (communicative objects)
• The Internet of Things
• Gesture and touch control
• Local digital marketing

Did you know there is a smart mattress in development? $20 million dollars has been invested into it. The smart mattress does not degenerate, but gets better with time. It learns how you sleep and adjusts to your body and sleep patterns. It molds to your body.

Experience Generated Content (EGC)

• Fitness trackers
• Google Glass
• Smart watches
• Health and wellness apps
• Gamification of many physical actions and tasks

Garner talks about a pest control companies whose technicians wear Google Glass while rooting around attics and what they see is displayed downstairs for the client.

How can you implement EGC for your business?

Thing-Generated Content (TGC)

In a world of the “Internet of Things,” content will be passively generated by context of the things in a physical space, whether it is a room or location. It will happen in real time, based on the arrangement and interconnection of smart things in a space or across spaces.

In many ways, EGC and TGC is the second coming of the Internet. Content marketing opportunity and innovation abounds.

Google Glass

Google Now is an intelligent layer that coordinates multiple services into contextually useful information that shows up as cards on Google Glass.

Types of cards:

• TV listings
• Currency
• Public transit
• Nearby attractions
• Place info
• Public alerts
• Stocks
• Flight status
• Hotel info
• Events
• Restaurant reservations
• Weather
• Breaking news
• Appointments
• Birthdays

Google Glass is like a mobile phone on your face. Garner talks about how Google Glass alerts him immediately his flight is delayed. He calls the device intuitive. You can take a picture by winking.

Common reactions to Google Glass that Garner has experienced:

• Delight
• Curiosity
• Fear
• Uncertainty
• Bewilderment
• Overwhelming excitement

The post Pubcon Liveblog: Real-Time Content Marketing with Wearables & Google Glass appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Why do Press Outreach?

• One of the few authoritative links left that are guaranteed to stay safe for the foreseeable future
• Press links have good link equity
• One link can lead to many links
• Don’t just focus on link equity – traffic is good, too, as are citations
• Press links are important for small, local sites as well as big, national sites

Caveat: Going after press links is hard work and takes time and money. When approaching this type of link building/link earning process, you are going to face rejection from reporters.

Getting Ready

Have something to say. A lot of people think they can reach out to the press without having something to say. Whatever you’re pitching must be newsworthy. You have to be helpful, know your stuff, and build a decent press page.

Press Page Must-Haves

• Basic explanation of who you are
• Proof of why you are an expert
• Social proof if you have it (we have 100,000 Twitter followers, etc.)
• Include the assets a writer would need (logos, infographics, images)
• Contact info

What to Talk About

• Leverage current events
• Leverage seasonal events
• Site or app launch
• Major events

Finding the Right Journalists

Search for your major keywords and comb through the SERP results (10 pages deep even) and find articles on your subject. You can also comb through Google News results.

Find out as much as you can about the journalist. Journalists and bloggers get a ton of inquiries – differentiate yourself by knowing how to get their attention by getting to know what they write about, what they’re interested in.

Look at their Twitter, their LinkedIn, their bio pages, etc. Maybe you’ll find a commonality that you can mention in your initial correspondence (for example, perhaps you went to same college or root for the same sports team).

Associated Press and Reuters should be your top targets. If you’re reaching out to them, make sure to write custom, carefully crafted emails.

Remember:

• Be useful.
• Be timely.
• Be available. Reporters work weird hours. Be there for them when they want you.
• Don’t be afraid to give away the farm. Give them lots of information up front.
• Respond quickly.

Tools

• Muckrack: a good place to find journalists on Twitter, searching by “beat” or niche. Through Muckrack you can save lists and create alerts
• Followerwonk: search Twitter bios by keyword
• Use Vocus or Cision to find journalists and their contact info

Acing Your Interview

• Be prepared for written, phone, Skype or live interviews
• Make and use notes
• Know your stuff
• Be professional
• Be flexible with your time. If they want 8 p.m. … be there at 8 p.m.
• Get media training of public speaking experience
• Practice
• Bend over backwards
• Have unique data or insight they can’t get anywhere else
• Don’t be afraid to ask for the link

The post Pubcon Liveblog: Link Building through Press Outreach appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

“I spend a lot of my time thinking bigger,” Calacanis says. “And a lot of that has to do with watching Google say ‘I have absolutely no limit to my ambition.’ I spend a lot of time meeting with startups and founders … And that puts me in a unique position to be optimistic and opportunistic.”

Calacanis’s keynote is unique – it’s not tactical or strategy-driven. It’s steeped in reality and meant to simply inspire and inform the audience of the amazing progress that startups and forward-thinking companies are bringing to the world in the areas of six global problems.

Startups, he asserts, will solve our world’s problems rather than governments. His keynote, which is meant to inspire us, will cover major advances by tech and startup companies.

“A lot of the stuff in science fiction is becoming our reality today. You can see it in the pace in which we have to respond in our industry. Amazing opportunities are coming our way … We are at the safest, wealthiest and most optimistic time in the history of our planet and species,” Calacanis shares.

Startups Save the World

Global Problem #1: Cancer

Cancer is the second most common killer of Americans after heart disease. In 2014, 585,000 Americans will die from cancer and 1.6 million new cases will be diagnosed.

• COTA (Cancer Outcomes Tracking and Analysis): Allows doctors to look at big data associated with cancer – this data helps them know what’s causing the cancer and how to treat it more effectively. This generation might be the last generation to see cancer as a fatal disease.
• D-Wave Systems: Looks at DNA and creates custom solutions for patients. It’s twenty years away.
• Immunophotonics: Labels the cancerous cells in your body and creates a virus to kill those cells.

Global Problem #2: Climate Change

Humans are causing extra warming in ocean, land and atmosphere. Rising sea levels are disrupting farming and food, species migration and extinction. Current emissions rate will yield dangerous temper rises by 2100.

• Oroeco: Will create plants that take more carbon out of the atmosphere than the plants that exist today. Currently, Oroeco has created a tobacco plant that glows in the dark by gene sequence modification.
• Global Forest Watch: Crowd source techniques mapping every square mile of the planet’s forest and the forest density – then we’ll know in real time when people are destroying the forest and where we need to plant more trees.

Global Problem #3: Energy

Germany had a number of days last year where more than 50% of their energy came from renewable energy. Calacanis is not nervous about energy. Nuclear energy is hundreds of time safer than coal energy. France is 90% nuclear energy.

• Nest: Learning algo and customization can help us use less energy.
• Opower: Realtime app for looking at use of energy in your home, your city, your appliances, by room – it will be built into your outlets. The algo will know the energy patterns of each appliance.
• SolarCity: Stores solar power in your batteries.

Global Problem #4: Hunger

One in nine humans goes to bed hungry every night. One in six Americans is food insecure. We will need 70 percent more food by 2060.

• Bitty Foods: creating cookies made with cricket flour – flours made from ground up crickets. The crickets create a protein-based flour that is sustainable and less costly.
• Hampton Creek Foods: Fake eggs – when you mix into a cookie or baked good, you can’t tell the difference.
• Food Cowboy: Matches people that need food with people throwing food away.

Global Problem #5: Jobs

There is a perception that there will always be jobs – it’s not true. The technology has caused the eradication of a lot of jobs. The efficiency of the American work is extraordinary today and jobs are going away. Occupy Wall Street was a moment of civil unrest.

• Airbnb: People in NYC are renting their apartments for $100-$300 dollars a night and making a ton of money. We have changed as a society. Hotel stays would have cost much more in the nineties – now you get jet off to Japan and not even worry about where you’re staying – there will be an Airbnb nearby.
• Uber: People are moving to cities with Uber, Lyft and Sidecar because the drivers are netting $20 or $30 an hour – well above the minimum wage. Calacanis recently rode with a driver who moved to San Francisco from Atlanta to get a job with Uber to raise money for his family. He’d been out of work and he saw Uber as the solution to his family’s troubles. He’s calculated he’ll be out of debt in six months, and move back home. Moral of the story? These jobs are saving people who can’t get work.
• Thumbtack: You type what you want (anything from design to tennis instruction), they send the request in detail to a bunch of freelancers, and you can buy their services. There are people on their platform that are making significant amounts of money through their talents.

Global Problem #6: Repression

More than 1.6 billion people in the world have no say in how they are governed. Citizens asserting rights suffer harassment and persecution without recourse. In 2012, one in six people lived in countries without free press.

• Twitter, Facebook and YouTube: It’s the new Amnesty International – people take to Twitter and let people know when injustices are occurring. You can’t hide your bad behavior when it’s broadcast publicly for millions by citizens. Government can’t ignore it when we all know about it.

Jason Calacanis’s Final Thoughts

“I am in shock over how many things that needed to change have, in fact, changed. It’s an amazing time for entrepreneurs.”

• Dare to be great.
• Do big things.
• Think even bigger.

“Our work is hard, but it’s lifting the world up.”

The post Pubcon Liveblog: Jason Calacanis on Startups that Save the World appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Stephan Spencer on Pinterest Magic: 20+ Tips and Tricks that Will Amaze and Astound You

• The boards in the top row will get the most views. If you’re a sizeable brand, you might have several boards, and the boards you want to get traffic should be in that top row.
• Your descriptions are not only important for SEO – if you have great descriptions you can show in Pinterest newsletters.
• Vertical images perform better. Consider longer pins, but don’t make them too long.
• Text on photos instantly jazzes up the photos and are more likely to attract attention. Only choose text that complements the photo – it’s easy to choose something bad.

Content Ideas and How to Spread Content

Take advantages of the popularity of memes, quotes and infographics

Create your own memes with online tools:

• Canva
• Pinstamatic (only for Pinterest)
• Visual.ly

Get content out there by interacting with influencers. Don’t have influential followers? Tag an influencer’s Twitter handle and then tweet out the pin!

To every turn there is a season. Seasonal items do fantastically on Pinterest. Be about a month ahead. Don’t be like Kohl’s and post Christmas tree pins in August. Do consider organizing your boards by season.

Enabling Rich Pins

Rich pins should show a little taste to what is on the website. Rich pins can highlight:

• Business location
• Real time pricing
• Article snippets
• Movie ratings
• Pinboards managed by several contributors
• Invite key influencers to pin to it
• Shows on every contributor’s page

Group Pinboards

Avoid pinning at dinner time – your audience is mostly women and that’s not a good time. Focus on early mornings or weekends.

The tool Ahalogy lets marketers:

• Schedule pins
• Edit photos
• License content

John Rampton: 13 Tips to Rock Your Pinterest Account

1. Connect all your accounts and share.
2. Tag other pinners in your posts. (You can only tag those you are friends with).
3. Like and comment on other people’s pins. 99% of the time you should be like, sharing, pinning and commenting – you should only be promoting yourself 1% of the time. It’s about building community, not promoting yourself.
4. Write an informative description. Use hashtags.
5. Tip iPhone apps to create beautiful pics. Rampton’s favorite apps are PicArt, Over, and BeautifulMess. Creating beautiful art leads to more engagement.
6. Auto add a Pin It Button to every photo. User Pinterest Image Pinner.
7. Replace your site with your website URL.
8. Add the price to your products. Consider changing the price on oft-pinned items by a penny – everyone pinning
9. Pin images of trending news in your niche.
10. Postris – Use this to see trends in your particular niche and gin inspiration for what people are searching and actually repining. Typically things start trending on Instagram and move to Pinterest. Posris is a tool for Instagram, but
11. Use ViralTag. Let’s your schedule out pins in advance.
12. Use NinjaPinner. This will automatically follow unfollow and like pins. (Side note: don’t unfollow people – there’s no point. Use NinjaPinner to follow those that follow you.)
13. Here is a 1 hour a week Pinterest Plan – Use Viral Tag to schedule pins of the next 7 days. Go to Pinterest, visit 30 to 50 pins that are popular to your niche and comment. Next, go to NinjaPinner and have it follow people that add you. Go into Google Analytics and check you stats.
14. Make sure your pins are visible to search. Turn privacy off.
15. Make sure Your Account is set up as business page
16. Verify your website.
17. Name your boards with keywords. Use location mode
18. Use keywords in your pin descriptions.
19. File names become your image name – change the file name to something relevant.
20. Create boards with repins only. They show up in search results.
21. Map your pins. Pinterest maps are powered by Foursquare – switch on the “add a map” functionality.
22. Share your boards.
23. Adjust your Pinterest strategy to support mobile traffic. 75% of Pinterest users will access Pinterest from a mobile device.
24. Keep your four best boards in the first four slots on your profile – why? Because those are the boards you see on mobile.
25. Consider your character limits. On iOS you only see up to 100 characters, on Android 125
26. Size your image appropriately.
27. Make sure you website is mobile-friendly. They’re likely going to be coming to your site via Pinterest on a mobile device – don’t send them to a bad user experience.

Cynthia Johnson: 14 Pinterest Tips to Expand Your Reach

1. Make sure your pins are visible to search. Turn privacy off.
2. Make sure Your Account is set up as business page
3. Verify your website.
4. Name your boards with keywords. Use location mode
5. Use keywords in your pin descriptions.
6. File names become your image name – change the file name to something relevant.
7. Create boards with repins only. They show up in search results.
8. Map your pins. Pinterest maps are powered by Foursquare – switch on the “add a map” functionality.
9. Share your boards.
10. Adjust your Pinterest strategy to support mobile traffic. 75% of Pinterest users will access Pinterest from a mobile device.
11. Keep your four best boards in the first four slots on your profile – why? Because those are the boards you see on mobile.
12. Consider your character limits. On iOS you only see up to 100 characters, on Android 125
13. Size your image appropriately.
14. Make sure you website is mobile-friendly. They’re likely going to be coming to your site via Pinterest on a mobile device – don’t send them to a bad user experience.

The post Pubcon Liveblog: Pinterest and Other Missed Social SEO Opportunities appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..