Agile Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! In today's video, we'll explore the nifty, nefarious world on Agile Marketing, which I talked about at MozCon a few weeks ago. We'll take a look at four key principles of Agile Marketing and talk about how you can use them to hack your organization to deliver more value to your customers more often by breaking down barriers and removing impediments to your progress.

The strengths of Agile are that it focuses on bringing customers into our marketing and development efforts; it focuses on interaction with your colleagues by building cross-functional teams; it pushes us to always stay in motion by prioritizing delivery to our users and customers above all other concerns; and it follows a strong, iterative "Build-Measure-Learn" cycle, just like Eric Ries talks about in The Lean Startup.

You know how fast things change in the world of SEO and inbound marketing - Google published 52 changes to their algorithm last April and another 39 changes in May. Agile methodologies can help you respond and react to those changes so that you can stay on top of new opportunities.

Enjoy, and I'd love to see your comments below! I'll be jumping in to answer your questions as they come up.

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. I'm Jonathon Colman from REI, and today we're going to be talking about agile marketing. This is a discipline that we are picking up from software developers, who have been practicing agile for decades, and we're applying it to our discipline of marketing and we're doing that for a couple of really good reasons.

First of all, agile helps us focus on our users and create more value for them more often, in ways that make sense, and it also helps us, as an organization, adapt to change. And you know better than anyone, how much change there is. Google's releasing algorithm updates, 52 of them last May, 29 right after that. There's Panda, there's Penguin, all of the news and tips and tricks we see on Inbound.org.

We are constantly taking in new information to our organizations. But, oftentimes, our organizations aren't able to respond to them. And why is that? Because they're structured like this, because they're structured in a big hierarchy that's not centered around the user. So even when they take in new information, they can't apply it directly to the people who matter most, their customers.

Secondly, we tend to work in models like this, which is a waterfall development model, where we take in requirements at the beginning, and then we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and we do a chunk of work, and so on. But if change is coming down the road, if something happens here, like a Penguin, we can't respond to that because that's six months later. And, as you know, SEO, inbound marketing, social media, that's changing hourly, not in six-month or one-year cycles. So we have to become better at changing, and that's what agile helps us do.

So let's talk about four principles of agile and a couple hacks that we can use to change our organizations.

First of all come customers. They're the most important people. They're our reason for existing as a business. So we like to say, "Users are number one." "We're number one!" So what we do is we structure our work and ourselves all around the user. And one great way of doing that, here's a hack you can use, is to develop user stories. So as you're doing research with your users, as you're collaborating with them and sort of bringing them into the business to find out what they need to succeed in their goals, you'll start building these out. And they have a really simple formula.

As a user or buyer or shopper or, in our case, maybe something like backpacker, I want whatever is that they have as a goal. Perhaps I want to be able to find the lightest weight backpacking products so that they can succeed. So this would be so that I can have a great time in an outdoor adventure, hiking the Adirondacks. And what this helps us do, what user stories are so good at is keeping us focused on that increment of work that we need to do so that our customers can succeed. So this is a great way of doing light and quick documentation to help us fulfill user goals.

The next principle we're going to talk about is cross-functional teams, and that's where we really blow away this hierarchy from the old-school business days. What we do is we take all those institutional silos and we just reduce them to rubble, and we form this sort of cross-functional team, where content design, code, inbound marketing, data or analytics, project management, we all sit together, all in the same place, work together on the same thing at the same time. No one is ever gone. You don't have to walk to another building or send a long e-mail to explain something. We cut down on documentation, on all those pesky e-mails and IM's, and we actually have person-to-person interactions. It's a real strength of agile.

So I have a couple tools to help you with that. First is the stand-up meeting. This is one of the few meetings you have in agile marketing, and if it takes longer than 10 minutes, something has gone wrong. Imagine just having one meeting of just 10 minutes, 10 minutes, once a day, and then being able to focus on real work that creates value for users. It's awesome.

So here's how the stand-up meeting works. Everyone gathers around, you stand up, and that helps keep it short, and you talk about first what you did, then what you're doing, and then anything that might be blocking your progress. We'll talk about how to deal with problems like that in just a second. Some tools that can help you out with that, if you visit Trello.com. They're an online collaboration tool. Distilled used them as part of their creation of DistilledU, which is an awesome tool. And then the Meeting Cost Calculator, which you can get at bit.ly/meetcost, and you can also click in these links below us here.

So next, we have the principle of having a bias toward action, and really this is very simple. Doing is always going to be greater than not doing. So when we deal with problems like analysis paralysis, when we have problems like a politician who has the power to say yes or no, and here's my favorite, when someone comes up to you and says, "It sounds like a good idea, but we just don't do it that way," agile helps us break that down, because we always go back to our user story and we say, "Well, this is something the customer needs."

So what we do is we negotiate to "Yes." What we do is, we find that ground that allows us to proceed with our work. There's actually a role in agile that does nothing besides remove impediments to your work. So doing is always greater than not doing. And another hack that you can use is to just say no, because once you have your set of user stories developed, if someone comes around and tries to give you extra work or tries to say, "Well, you need to do this, and this, and this," which happens quite a lot, the old, "Yeah, I'm going to need you to have to come in on Saturday and, yeah, maybe on Sunday too," that doesn't create value for the customer right now. What we have to do is get this prioritize user story out the door as quickly as possible. So we want to maximize the amount of work that we do not do by just saying no.

And our last principle is to "Don't Hate, Iterate." I'm stealing this from a colleague at REI. It's just a great phrase. When we don't release on a six-month or a one-year cycle, when we're releasing every two weeks or every four weeks, we fall into Eric Ries' "Build, Measure, Learn" model here, where we develop our products or we do our marketing campaign, we get it out the door, we launch it, and then we see how it works for customers. We have this measurement phase. We see how it performs, and you know what, if it's not up to snuff, that's okay. It's all right. We learn. And then, two weeks later, we release a fix. When we do an iteration, we do something better that customers are going to respond to. And if that doesn't work either, that's okay. We go through the cycle again until we get closer and closer to what the customer needs to succeed in their goals.

And that leads to our final principle, which is "You're Not Perfect." I'm not perfect. Rand Fishkin is not perfect. He's pretty good, but he's not perfect. And that's okay. We don't want to be perfect, because perfect, chasing perfection holds us up in our work to get something out the door to customers. We don't want that. We want to always be delivering, always be shipping to customers as fast and as quickly as we can. So you shouldn't chasing the A+. You should be chasing what's going to be valuable for your users. Go back to your user story. That's what you need to succeed at. And if you don't get there, it's okay because two weeks later, you'll have another chance.

So, I talked about this at MozCon, and you can download my presentation at bit.ly/agilewins. There's also a link below. Please comment on the story. I'll come in and try to answer your questions and direct you to more resources.

So that's it. Thank you everyone, and see you next Friday.

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Smarter Internal Linking - Whiteboard Friday

Hey there SEOmoz readers! This week we are talking about what I like to call "Smarter Internal Linking". Rand mentioned internal linking a few months ago before Penguin even hit, back when we were still calling it the "over-optimization penalty". A few months later, we can see the potential effects that Penguin has had and the factors causing them.

So how can we be smarter in our internal linking? How can we target our important pages so that they are able to rank well for competitive terms, yet not be in danger of being slapped by algorithm updates? This is exactly what we are talking about in this video, including a few pro-tips I've picked up doing SEO in the competitive travel industry, especially in regards to microsites and ccTLDs.

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. My name is John Doherty. I'm from Distilled in New York City, out here in Seattle for about a week, for MozCon. I came out here a couple days early, and SEOmoz was happy enough to let me shoot a Whiteboard Friday for you.

This is a topic that I've been thinking about a lot recently. It's the topic of internal linking. Today, in a post-Penguin world, we need to be careful about how we're linking to the other pages on our websites, both internally and externally.

Internal linking is a factor in Penguin, from what we've seen. I've been digging around on a lot of travel sites recently for a client, and I realized that sites that are in competitive niches, such as travel - there are a bunch of others that you can think of that we all may or may not have worked in at some point - that use a lot of internal links, site-wide footers especially, point to here site-wide footers in order to drive targeted anchor text deep into their site.

The problem I've been noticing here is that when you have a set-up like this, this is a beautiful little webpage that I drew for you, with a little URL bar, and I guess this is Chrome because we've got the extensions there, maybe a map here. You've got some text, and you've got your different products through here. It's just going to be an e-commerce site, or it could be a travel site. Here are sidebar links. So this could be your categories, what have you. But then often here, in the footer, there are links that say, "Atlanta Hotels, London Hotels, New York Hotels," and they're on every single page of the website. If you have a site that has 200,000 product pages, you have 200,000 links saying this. One term, two-
word term, key term, pointing back to that page. Something is going to look a little bit suspicious, right?

What I've been seeing here, as I've been going through, doing some competitive analysis, is I look at their search visibility using a tool. I use a tool called Search Metrics Essentials. I look, and a lot of them, their traffic is going up. It's ticking up.

Get to the Venice update, which happened back end of March or the beginning of April, which basically prioritized local content. This especially affected the travel industry, so category pages weren't ranking quite as well. They were bumping up the most well-linked-to individual hotel pages, what have you. Traffic dropped for most of them. Almost every single travel site I've seen, traffic dropped. It happens. Google made an algorithm change.

Then they take tick along, and we get to the next algorithm update, Penguin. Every single site that I've seen that has site-wide links like this, boom, dropped. Most of them have recovered a little bit. They've started ticking back up, but almost every single one has dropped. The sites that didn't, that are not linked this way, might have seen a little bit of a dip, but by and large they were good.

So what's going on here? The only thing I can think of, when it comes to internal linking, that I can see on these sites was these site-wide footers. They're also doing this externally. A lot of these brands, especially, have microsites, individual hotel sites that are linking back using the exact same footer as is on the main website. Same terms on every single page on those sites. Multiply this by four thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, once again, you have thousands upon thousands of links saying these terms. This is a problem.

Today I want to talk about smarter internal linking. How can we link to our important pages in a smarter way? I have a few points for you. How can we be smarter? This is the question we should ask ourselves. How can we be smarter about our internal linking?

Question number one: Go back to the user. What would the user expect to see? Google wants to reward a good user experience. They want people to be able to find what they want to find as quickly as possible. So I always start with the user. What is a person going to expect to see? Then, from an SEO perspective, I think, "Which pages are the most competitive?" You go and you do your keyword research, maybe use SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool. You look at the SERPs. You figure out which sites are ranking. You look at all the links that they have. Which ones are going to be the hardest to rank for? Especially if you're working in-house, you probably know what this. You probably think off the top of your head, "Oh yeah, I know this keyword." This one is going to take a lot more, not only external links, but also internal.

So which pages are the most competitive? You need to prioritize those, but not the way that I just showed you. The third point is think about your taxonomy. Think about the page types on your site. I've drawn out here a little site architecture for you, right? We start with our home page, and then this is another page type of ours, the category. Then we have the product, and then we have the product details. If we're keeping with the hotels example, it's going to be your home page, domain.com. Your category, domain.com/londonhotels, or language/londonhotels, what have you. Product, so this is going to be a hotel page. Product detail, this could be like amenities for the hotel or something like that. It's a subpage of your product page.

Obviously, these are going to be your most important pages. They're higher in your site architecture. They're going to be more useful to the users. These are going to be the ones Google wants to serve up for the competitive search terms. We link to as many of those as we can off the home page. If you have a thousand of them, how are you going to be able to do that? If you have hotels in every single city in the United States, there's no way you can link to all of them from your home page, nor would you want to. You're diluting your link equity basically irreparably.

Here's another category page. This guy's sad. He's like, "What's going on?
I'm getting no love at all." Then he's got product pages underneath there, who are also getting no love. I'm not going to link. First of all, this isn't going to be my most competitive term. This is probably going to be like second-tier competitiveness. I'm not going to link to this guy.

Let's say this is London, this is Atlanta, this is New York, this is Boston. I live in New York, and there's a New York-Boston feud going on, so we'll make Boston second-class. If you're from Boston, I apologize. I love you guys. But I don't want to link to the Boston page, necessarily, from the individual London product page. But it will make sense for me to link to Boston from New York, from Philadelphia, etc. It's the same thing. If this is Atlanta, and this is New York, I don't necessarily want to link to it. London and New York, I don't necessarily want to link to an individual New York hotel page, but I may want to link to the New York hotel page from Boston and vice versa. We're joining these two up. Or if I know I need to prioritize Boston a little bit, I'm just going to link to it from New York, because that has more link equity going to it, because it's more of a direct line from the home page.

Be thinking about some creative ways that you can do this, some creative ways that you can link between your different page types and your important pages.

Some that I've seen, that are working, especially in the travel industry right now, are sidebars. Once again, these are not site-wides. Most of them are doing it in the form of popular products, popular locations, trending locations, something like that. A lot of them I think that they update them semi-frequently. If I was doing it, I would update them semi-frequently. Keep the main ones. Keep London and Boston, etc. Keep your very competitive ones. But then you can switch them as other keywords become competitive. If you know people are going to New York for Christmas, you can switch that out, and you can prioritize that page for a while to get that ranking right before the Christmas holiday hits.

Here's a little pro tip for you, something that I've seen working. This isn't necessarily internal linking. It's like quasi-internal linking. Think about your ccTLDs. If your company is in the U.S. or in the U.K., in France, etc., think about how you can use the ccTLDs to link back to these pages from the relevant page on that ccTLD. So you've got domain.co.uk/londonhotels with UK English. Domain.com/londonhotels with U.S. English, think about how you can link from this page, from this London hotels page, back to this page. You're still driving the targeted links. You could do it through an image. I've seen some sites doing it with all of the countries down in the footer. On that UK page, if you mouse over the US, it says "London Hotels," pointing back. Super-smart way to do it. They don't do that site-wide, and so they're able to drive those targeted links back from a different domain. Those are going to be very valuable for them.

One last thing that I've mentioned briefly at the beginning here was beware of your microsites. Beware of your microsite site-wide links. If you have sitewides on your microsites, as well as on your main site, this is exactly the kind of thing that Google can easily figure out. They can see everything. They can see the code. They can see the way that it's structured. They can look at the Who Is information. Of course, we can do things to try to finagle and try to trick Google, but those are only going to last for the short term. So think about building for the long term. Microsite site-wides are not really working anymore, from what I've seen, so beware of these. Think about the taxonomies within these as well. You can still link. Think about these the same as you would think about your ccTLDs, linking to the relevant pages back on your main website.

Now I want to get a little bit bluebird for you. I want to think a little bit big. If I were Google, what would I do if I were Google? If you were Google, what would you be wanting to see? How would you want people to structure their sites? How would you want people to link? What kind of content would you want on there? How should people link between all of that? Google wants the best user experience. If I'm trying to serve the best user experience, I'm not necessarily going to have a travel guide on another page. If I have a London hotels page, why I'm not going to have a travel guide that I'm sending people all around? It's bad from a user experience. It's bad from a conversion experience, etc. I'm going want all of that right there.

If I were Google, I'd be looking to rank sites that are like a London hotels page that also has a travel guide on there. I saw one site doing this recently. I was like, "Light bulb brilliant." Put your travel guide there on the page. You get links saying London hotels travel guide, London hotels, hotel travel guide. You can also link to the travel guide internally so you're not just using London hotels to link to it. That's the kind of thing that I would want to be rewarding, if I were Google.

In summary, I hope this Whiteboard Friday has been helpful to you. I hope I've given you some things to think about when it comes to internal linking. Feel free to tweet at me, dohertyjf on Twitter. Email me, my email is on the Distilled website. Once again, I'm John Doherty from Distilled New York City. It's been a pleasure. Please leave your questions and comments down below. Thanks.

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Improving Social & Subscription Calls to Action - Whiteboard Friday

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we'll be discussing ways that you can improve your social and email calls to action to make them more effective. Often times, when wandering the web, you'll find web pages that are filled from head to toe with all the possible calls to action that are available. By limiting your usage of these calls to action and by placing them purposefully, you will a significant increase in your conversions.

As always, don't forget to leave your tips, tricks, and pieces of wisdom in the comments below. Happy Friday everyone.

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to make your social and email calls to action more effective. I've drawn out a page here that I think represents what a lot of us see on the Web, what a lot of us do, particularly when it comes to blogs, but also when it comes to a lot of e-commerce types of pages, pages on the Web that we use for B2B types of content, really, any pages that you find where there's social calls to action, calls to action that want you to take some . . . subscribe to me, follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my email, become our fan on Facebook, follow us on Google+,
post to our Pinterest Board, whatever it is.

All of those types of actions that are generated on the Web often follow this format where you see, okay, here's a site. Here's the menu. There's a page title. And then they'll be just littered, literally littered with calls to action. I'm going to highlight in red all of the places where I see social calls to action oftentimes simultaneously. Over here on the sidebar, we'll use this left-hand nav that kind of pops out. Then we'll have some areas up here that have got a few. Oh yeah, make sure to put our Facemash on the right-hand side to show off all our Facebook. Oh, and let's have our tweets. Then we'll have the subscribe to email. Oh, at the bottom of the post we've got to have it there too.

Are you kidding me? I know you really, really, really want people to follow you on these social services and subscribe to your email. But is this the right way to go about it? Imagine if it was an e-commerce page, and it was just littered with buy buttons. Everything always said buy, buy, buy, add to cart, add to cart, add to cart. Kind of crazy. Right?

There should be one place where there's that one call to action, but instead we've overwhelmed. We've let the social web overtake our normal logic, our better knowledge of UI and UX practices, and we're delivering an experience that is essentially, "Where's the content man? If I subscribe to you, it's because I want to follow your content, and all you're telling me with your page is, 'Follow me.'"

This is a little overwhelming, and so I wanted to provide some best practices, some ways, some tips to help streamline this process and make it a little bit better. Let's walk through those. First off, as you can imagine, one of my top tips, one of my best ones is limit the choices. Don't overwhelm. I mean this two ways. I mean, number one, limit the choices in terms of decide where you're getting your best usage, your best customers. Limit your network to those places.

If Twitter and Facebook are the place for you, great. If it's Facebook and email, great. If it's Pinterest and it's LinkedIn, fine. You can provide, if you want, and a lot of people will do this, where they'll put one section up in the top right-hand corner. That's got the little icons for each network so that all of those are findable, sort of like the contact us page and the about us page or the terms of service and legal use and privacy policy. Those things are findable. Great. That's fine. That way, someone can go to any page on your website and, "Hey what's these guys'
Twitter? I want to tweet something at them. Great. There it is, right there."

In terms of calls to action, things where you're actually trying to get the subscription, where you're saying, "Hey, here's our Twitter box, and subscribe to us, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our email," in terms of those calls to action, limit those choices. I would highly recommend max, max one to two. Really, seriously, you should only be trying to drive one or two social email actions on a single page. That should probably be relatively consistent.

You also probably don't want to overwhelm, meaning there's no reason to have this many. If you've got one box that's got them all somewhere on the page, in the footer, near the header, at the top, great. Then you want to have your one call to action in the place . . . this is tip number two. Promote where the action is most likely to happen.

I'll give you a great example of this. If you follow OkCupid's blog, which is called "OkTrends," I urge you to check it out. They have lots of phenomenal, interesting content there. What OkTrends has done is a ton of testing to see what's most effective. They found Facebook to be their most effective channel. What happens is, as you scroll down and are reading the page, in fact you'll see something like this. I've reached the bottom of the content, right, so all the content's up here. They have great graphics and images. Then here are the comments starting down on the bottom of the page. What you're going to see that's fascinating is as I've scrolled down, as soon as I reach the bottom here, where I've essentially said, they can detect via the browser, via JavaScript, hey, this person just reached the bottom of our content, the end of the blog post. Now is exactly the moment where we're going to drop down this little blue thing up here, and it's going to have a message sort of written in here that's like, "Subscribe to us on Facebook," or "Like us on Facebook."

Brilliant timing. They know which of the right call to action is to make, and they're making it at the time when you've finished consuming that blog post and you are most likely, because clearly, you've been engaged throughout reading the post. Think of asking for this at a time in normal conversation before you've even given the value proposition. Right? It's not like I tell you, "Hey, I want you to share what I'm about to tell you with all your friends." "What is it? Why do I need to share it before I know? Shouldn't you ask me that after you tell me what it is?"

And that's exactly what OkTrends is doing here, and that's what I would urge you to do as well. Make it happen at the call to action time. If there's content that makes someone scroll down a page, I really like having it at the bottom. At the same time you're asking for the add a comment or make a purchase on a page, that's the time to ask for that sharing activity. Prior to that, it's just a little odd. It's a little out of place.

Customize. Don't just use the standard calls to action. Right? Standard calls to action would be like the Tweet Me button, or the Facepile, embed, or those kinds of things. Those can be fine. Those can work. You can certainly test them, but I really like customizing, because the problem with the standard ones, especially those Facepile, Tweet Me, and that kind of stuff is that those buttons, those images, those graphics, those embeds, they start to look the same across page and sight and all over the Web.

When that happens, ad blindness happens, banner blindness happens. This is the same sort of thing that advertisers talk about with branding advertising that the ads just don't stand out anymore. People stopped noticing them. If you can customize, if you can make it unique, you can add your color scheme, you can your brand, you can add clever messaging, you can make it unique and different from what everyone else is doing on the Web with their social, that's when you'll stand out. That's when you'll have a much different experience that makes people stand up and pay attention to what you're showing them.

Number four, create an expectation and then, please, fulfill it immediately. This is most important with things like email, but it's also important with tweets and Facebook, etc. What I mean by this is if you have a call to action that says, "Like us on Facebook and get updates like this," or "Be notified when we do these kinds of things," your Facebook feed, the Facebook page should be a list of a lot of those things with not a whole lot else. It should be doing exactly what you say.

If you tell them, "Subscribe to our Moz Top Ten email" - we have a Moz Top Ten email - one of the things that we should probably do is as soon as you subscribe, we send you the last one. We don't do that right now, but we should. We're working on it. That way you get this sense of, "Oh, look, it's just what I asked for. It's as promised. Here we go. This is great."
Now they're delivering on the expectation they've created, and that creates a sense of trust immediately. Excellent way to go about this.

Use relevant social proof, number five. A lot of times people will say, "Oh great, I'll put the Facepile in, or I'll show them who else from their network is following me." Sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's not. Social proof is very case specific. For example, if I am going to be going out and buying a consumer product, maybe I am interested in what my friends are doing. But if I'm going out and I'm buying a product for my business, I might actually be interested in what people like me, who are relevant, who are at companies I know and like and trust, who are influencers and authority figures, their opinions may be much more interesting and important to me than, hey, your friend on Facebook, or hey, your LinkedIn connection bought this. That's kind of less interesting.

So I would urge you to figure out what the social proof is that's case specific to you and then apply that on these pages. If it's we are followed on Twitter by . . . I don't know if we are but Danny Sullivan or Avinash Kaushik or Richard Baxter or Will Critchlow, whoever these people are that you sort of go, "Oh, I know those guys. I really respect what they say." I will also follow SEOmoz or whatever your business is.

This is UX 101. Make the process dead simple. I have started to see these more complex social subscription, particularly email ones, where it pops up in a box and it asks you for more information, wants you to confirm before you do this. If you can, make it dead, dead simple, meaning, if you have an email box, I want it to look like this. Your email, subscribe. When you click subscribe right here, you get a little popup that says, "Thank you. We've just sent you an email to confirm your address. As soon as you click on the confirmation, you'll receive your first email from us." Amazing. Dead simple. Took me, literally, my email, a click and a confirm. Done. Sold. Easy. That dead simple process, that's the kind of thing you want to create, not just here, but anytime you have calls to action, because simplicity will promote higher conversion rate, better funnel mechanics.

Number seven, eliminate the noise from your social and email feed. If you are sending a lot of email blasts to your subscribers, if you are sending a lot of tweets, you're doing a lot of Facebook status updates, and you're looking and seeing the click through rate and conversion rate and engagement rates are low on a number of them and then occasionally high, gets a little spiky, try to focus on the spikes. Get rid of the noise and focus on curating that content better so that you have essentially fewer messages, but more high quality messages.

This works extremely well as people who subscribe to these services start subscribing to more and more. In the early days, very early days of Facebook, early days of Twitter, early days of email, way back in the day, people didn't get as overwhelmed and, therefore, more messages were more welcome. Now signal to noise ratio matters a lot more.

Finally, number eight, so, so important, if you can at all, measure the channel ROI that you're getting. What I mean by this is measure the difference between the value of someone coming from Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Google+ or email, or whatever it is, your RSS feed. Look at those different channels and say to yourself, "All right, I see that when I get someone subscribing to our RSS feed, that is just a huge value ad, because they come back to us on average 5 times in a month, and within 3 months, they become a buyer, and 60 percent of the people who touch our RSS feed, within 6 months will buy something from us." Fantastic.

Figure out what those different numbers are, and then focus on the channels that matter most to you. It might seem weird sometimes, but I've seen a lot of B2B case studies where LinkedIn is the highest referring. I've seen a lot of case studies where email is a much higher converting source than Facebook or Twitter or any of the other social networks.

Pay attention to this and make sure you focus on the ones that matter most. Don't be persuaded by popular media, social media, technology media that says, "Oh, Pinterest is the next hot thing." And you think, "Oh no, I don't have a Pinterest board. I've got to get people signing up for my Pinterest board and following me on Pinterest." Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Is that actually a valuable channel for you? If you don't know, you should test. You should spend some time there. If you do know, and it's low, well, don't bother. Maybe that's not your demographic. Maybe that's not your psychographic. Maybe your customers just aren't there. Maybe, for some reason, the medium and your media don't connect well. That's okay. If you focus this, then you can do a great job on limiting the choices, promoting the right actions, and all of these other things.

All right everyone. I hope to see some fantastic calls to action for your social and email campaigns in the future, and I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Leveraging the Power of Slide Decks to Boost your SEO, Social + Content Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we are going to be discussing how you can use slide decks for web marketing. I've been leveraging the power of slide decks for quite some time now and would like to share a little bit about what I have learned.

Please share some of your own tips about using slide decks for SEO, social and content marketing in the comments below. Happy Friday everyone!

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about slide decks. A lot of folks talk about how different sorts of content can be used, can be powerful on the Web for content marketing, for SEO, for social. Slide decks are a particularly powerful and useful piece and one that I've made great use of and I've seen used in lots of different spheres. I think it's actually underpowered, and I think it's what I'd call underexploited or underused on the Web today, particularly in industries outside of technology.

Slide decks are easy for virtually anyone to see. They're a simple, powerful way to present content. You can present visual content. You can present charts and graphs. You can even embed video. You can do all sorts of stuff, and they are easy to make possible because you can screen capture elements from all sorts of websites and then quickly show attribution. If I want to say, "Hey everyone, here's how you do keyword research, and here's to watch out for the exact match portion in the AdWords tool," I can screenshot AdWords. I can screenshot the exact match. I can point that out. I can make that very visual and compelling, and I can have a progression that tells the story.

This is a great way to show off not just technical stuff, but anything where there's photography, where there are visuals, where there's information that lends itself to a narrative format. This common format that slide decks have, usually PowerPoint, is something that all readers can download and share, and that's another excellent thing because it gives your content the ability to spread further and wider.

I'd use this in all sorts of places. I recommend using it on the slide sharing platforms, we'll talk about those, embedding it in content that you've got on your site, possibly making specific landing pages for it. If you're tape recording or videoing audio over it, then what you can do is you can add those in as webinars or viewable video. There are just a lot of options for this type of content.

I wanted to provide some best practices and some tips that we've seen. A few things here. Number one, I want to talk about the process. Now, typically, what I recommend if you're doing a classic slide creation is to create your slide deck, upload it to one of these major services. SlideShare, Scribd or Docstoc, all of them have reasonably good audiences. My favorite right now is SlideShare, and the reason is that it's relatively easy if you get a decent presentation, get a good presentation, get it some traffic and attention awareness, particularly in the social world, so a lot of tweets, a lot of Facebook shares, a lot of LinkedIn shares. SlideShare will put content that does well on its homepage, and it can be featured and that means a lot more visitors who never would have seen your content otherwise. If you have a compelling title that's interesting to your particular audience and you've got a good first slide that captures the attention and awareness, even in the thumbnail format, you can do really, really well on SlideShare. This is true in Scribd and Docstoc as well.

The other one I recommend is Box.net or Dropbox. You can upload and embed from those services, and remember, you don't just have to put the slide on these services. You can then embed on a page on your website if you want most of the traffic, the attention awareness, and the experience to be controlled and owned by you. We do this a lot. I'll upload to SlideShare with one title, and then I'll create a page on SEOmoz, just a static page, embed the slide there, and you can expand to whatever size you want, and then I'll make that the URL that's shared and that works tremendously well.

Once you've uploaded, give your presentation publicly, whether that means it's a webinar that you do online, whether you're giving it in person. If you're not going to, you can skip this step. But if you do it, there's something really, really powerful being in front of even just a small audience, and that is you can do this. Once you start your presentation, say, "Here's my presentation. I've made all the slides available for download at this URL," and then you make a quick, easy to remember URL. I usually use bit.ly to shorten whatever the URL is so I can say it's at bit.ly/mytalk or bit.ly/inbound2012 or bit.ly/seoforstartups, and I've got a lot of these. This process is phenomenal because what you can actually do is get the audience to be sharing that content right away. Super, super cool.

Now, when you do that, make sure that you don't just say, "Hey, here's my URL," but also say, "If you enjoyed this talk," so you have it at the start, you finish your presentation, you go to the end slide and you say,
"If you enjoyed this talk, I would love if you shared the presentation download link on social media." Super cool way to go.

Number three, you can use and reuse the slide on your website or blog in a post on a page through the embed and then invite others who see it there to be able to use the content, but they need to reference back to it. This is a great way to get something we all need - links.

Number four, watch your stats. Watch your stats from your blog post, that kind of thing. Watch your stats on SlideShare Pro if you're using that. I've upgraded to SlideShare Pro so I can kind of see where things go and which presentations perform better, but they'll show you number of views regardless. From there, you can get a sense of what's performing well, what's not performing well. Keep doing the good stuff, not doing the bad stuff, and you can find other people's presentations and see, "Hey, what's been really successful for them?"

Finally, a few tips for the slides individually. Number one, link to the content. Let's say I've got a slide here. See how I've got the URL below the graphic? That's what you really want to do, and you want that because that will send a lot of traffic. People were curious like, "Huh, where's that chart come from? What site information? How can I learn more about that?" Click. Now, they come to your website. Now, you've captured them there.

Number two, let your slides do a lot of the storytelling work. If you're going to use this format, remember that the vast majority of people are not going to be in the audience listening to you as you present. They're going to be on the Web just looking at these slides, and so that means that you want to do number three, which is if you've got some extra narration work, some content that you need to say, let's say I've got a big visual, but I don't have any context for that, go ahead and put, you can put down here in the slide some text. Upload the version that has the text at the bottom. Present the clean version when you present in person, and this works phenomenally well, because then someone who's getting the slide will see that in there. They don't have to listen to any audio. If you can explain the slide in one or two sentences, that's perfect. Honestly, you shouldn't usually have slides that take 10 minutes to explain, 5 minutes to explain, a paragraph to explain.

Finally, make sure you have your download URL on the first and last slide of the deck, like I mentioned, because if you do that, you can get people sharing at the start of your talk and people sharing at the end of your talk, and people will always be asking you for that download link. This is a great way to make sure that lots of people are reaching these pages and getting your stuff.

Next week, I would like to talk with you about some of my tips for presentations, tips for building slide decks, tips for delivering presentations, and hopefully that will help. I'm even planning to send that video to the MozCon speakers. Hopefully, it will be some good stuff. Until then, hope to see lots more slide content from you all, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

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Getting Started with Guest Posting - Whiteboard Friday

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, I am going to be walking through how to get started guest blogging. There are plenty of articles all over the web that go into the finer details of guest blogging, but let's step back for a second and really talk about how to get started.

From getting into the guest blogging mindset to building up your list of guest blogging opportunities, we'll cover this topic from a top down approach.

Happy Friday everyone! Please leave your own ideas and advice in the comments below too.

Hi, I'm Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting. I'm here at SEOmoz to do a Whiteboard Friday today. We're a 25 person online marketing company that does consulting services for various people through the industry. What I actually want to talk about is how you get started with guest posting. There's a lot that goes into it, and there have been some great articles on SEOmoz that really get into the details of some of the aspects of it. But I want to step back and take you from the top down to help you get started.

The first thing I want you to think about is the mindset. The mindset is really important. There's a lot of stuff out there, guest blogging services that offer you all kinds of "sounds almost too good to be true" type options. The reality is, for the most part, they are too good to be true. Done well and done right, this is hard work, but it can bring really good returns. What I'm going to do today, I'm really going to focus on the high-
end approach to guest posting and how you get posts that are really brand building in nature. So let's dig in a little bit further.

The first thing I want you to do is I want you to tap into your team knowledge. Get your key team members together. Get them in a conference room. Get them brainstorming. Where are the places you'd love to be covered in an article? Great place to start, because after all, some of them it might be possible.

Once you have that kind of list in your mind, the next thing to do is to actually go check and see if they take posts. They may or may not have a policy on their site. If they do, that's a great thing to look for and can be very helpful. But sometimes they take guest posts without actually ever having been quite so overt about it. You can basically take this query here, site:targetdomain.com, whatever it is, and then put "guest post" or
"guest contributor" or "guest author." You can try different phases, and see whether or not they've ever taken those kinds of guest contributions in the past. Great place to start. Hopefully that gets you off to a good start.

If that's not enough, you can actually go to next step, which is you can try some industry search terms. You can try things like, let's say you're in the Tupperware business. Tupperware and then guest post and you search on that in Google. That can be very helpful in potentially bringing targets up.

These kinds of queries tend to be very noisy. You can actually do the same thing with Twitter by the way. There is a tool that somebody posted up on SEOmoz recently which is good at this. But it does tend to be very noisy. You'll have to sift through a lot of stuff to find targets that you'll want to deal with, but it still is worthwhile to get started if you have to go that way.

The point of all this is you're looking for initial targets. Where the big win really comes in is when you start finding other prominent people in your industry space who are doing guest posts, because then you can follow their trails and see all the things they're doing. That's really the next step here that I want to lead you to.

Once you've found authors, first of all you'll want to assess their prominence, because there are probably going to be a lot of spammy operators out there in your space that are doing guest posts, and you really don't want to follow their trails and see everywhere they've posted because you're going to get in the same kind of trouble that they're eventually going to be in. But you can see where these authors have guest posted by taking the author name in double quotes, and then put "guest post" or "guest author" or "guest contributor," those various flavors. You can then see all the places where these people have posted in the past. Wonderful way to get a long list of targets and really get your campaign off to a powerful start. To me this is really the big payoff that you're looking for in terms of developing a good target list.

Once you have this good target list, the next thing you want to do is you want to evaluate the target quality. You want to start thinking about: Are these sites where we want to be seen? Certainly if one of your prominent competitors or a prominent pundit in the industry writes on that site, that's a very good sign. Do they have a good readership? Is there a lot of social activity that happens from what they do at the site?

Also the types of links allowed. It used to be when people did guest posts, it was all about those free, in context links with rich anchor text. I am telling you that strategy, which may still work for some people, is really a Titanic looking for an iceberg. So you really want to focus on how you find targets which are actually a little more restrictive. It's actually good if they allow outbound links in the body of the article. But if they're allowing you to stuff anchor text links to yourself in the body of the article, that's actually not good for you. The main thing you should expect when you're working with the right kinds of targets for guest posting is you're going to be getting attribution, byline level links, and that actually is the safest place to be in the long term for guest posting. It's the kind of policies that you're going to find on the most valuable sites anyway.

So those are my thoughts on guest posting for today. I've enjoyed doing this Whiteboard Friday for you. Have a good day.

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