Successful Blog

How Bloggers Can Capitalize on the Second Screen Wars

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By Sam Melton

The Internet has changed the way we live.

Many people gravitate to the Internet to do everyday things and to keep entertained. A decade ago, consuming media primarily involved watching TV, but in today’s technologically advanced world, there are dozens of ways to consume media without sitting in front of a television screen. 

Based on studies conducted by eMarketer, 2013 marks the first year in which the amount of time spent online surpassed the amount of time spent watching television.

According to the study, the average person spends five hours and 16 minutes on digital platforms, compared to 4 hours and 31 minutes with television. Not only has the time spent online increased by more than 15% within three years, the time spent watching television has also declined.

The television screen is taking a backseat to the new first screen – the Internet.

The modern individual and multitasking

Life is all about multitasking. Individuals do a myriad of tasks at once, and the Internet helps. Whether it’s to check email on a smartphone, access apps on a tablet, shop from an online store or pay bills, the modern consumer is capable of getting a lot done in a little time. ??The Internet offers a host of media from all around the world, and TV can be limiting. Although consumers still watch plenty of television, statistics show viewership has dropped by 500,000 households since 2012. This number is expected to decline as more people opt for high-speed services from providers such as Verizon FiOS Internet or Google Fiber.

With connections as much as 100 times faster than broadband, streaming has become a more affordable and convenient media option. Internet service replaces the need for television broadcasts because services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Vudu encourage binge-watching and replace the need for TV. 

Two of the most popular activities on the Internet

Just because the average person spends less time watching traditional television programs does not mean TV content is on the decline. With so many streaming services available, content being consumed online is on the rise, while traditional television viewership has fallen.

Although streaming television shows contributes to time spent behind the new first screen, perhaps the most popular activity to date is surfing social media. According to a research study conducted by Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange, the average user between age 18 and 64 spends 3.2 hours on social media sites daily. 

This emerging trend contributes to Internet surpassing television. 

Social media and streaming usage are on the rise, and this contributes to more time spent online. When more time is spent online, it takes away from what the average media consumer can spend watching TV. Although digital television services aren’t putting TV networks out of business, as a whole, the Internet is now the first screen.

How to capitalize as a blogger

Bloggers are well-positioned to take advantage of this shift.

No doubt the allure of the written word draws readership, but we can easily take it a step further.

  • Podcasts
    You don’t need expensive audio equipment. Such an addition to your blog gives your readers a chance to hear the voice behind the words. If you make it a regular feature, you’ll likely see a spike in readership.
  • Slideshows
    Flickr.com has an incredible tool that will allow you to easily construct a slide show of your photos on the side for your blog. It will even generate HTML code to place in on your page.
  • Vlog
    Give readers a visual and auditory version of you. It’s an interesting way to express an opinion. Be sure to make the content as engaging as your written word! It’s a good idea to find other vloggers’ styles you like.

Are you working to get own your slice of the screen time pie?

Author’s Bio: Sam Melton is a business professional turned freelance writer specializing in business technology. He blogs at: sammeltontalks.blogspot.com.

How to Use the Mirroring Technique in Online Conversations

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In psychological circles, mirroring is a subconscious reaction between two people who are very close.

Basically, mirroring is when two people who are in conversation mimic one another’s body language, facial expressions, or conversational style. Have you ever looked up in a meeting and seen everyone on your side of the table with their hands folded in the exact same manner?

mirroring technique

Closeness and rapport is what we all want from our online efforts.

Mirroring happens naturally when rapport exists, but it can also be helped along by proactive mirroring. Ham-handed sales dudes have been using the “mirroring technique” for years, but we don’t have to resort to cheesy parroting of whole sentences.

Judicious use of the mirroring technique can enhance your online conversations

  • If you’re writing a blog post, reflect the topics that your readers express the most interest in.
  • If you’re a sales person, include the same language in your response that your prospects use in their inquiries.
  • If you’re in customer service, repeat the issue back to the customer so they know you understand their problem.
  • If you’re an entrepreneur seeking partners or investors, sync your tone with the individual with whom you’re speaking.
  • If you’re a marketing communications professional, use language that reflects the terms and phrases familiar to your audience or industry.

The key is to be natural, and not force it. Have you ever tried using mirroring to strengthen rapport with your customers, readers, or partners?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

4 Precious Content Marketing Lessons from Startups

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By Tracy Vides

Startup founders have lives that are anything but normal: they have to deal with uncertain markets. Their ideas are vulnerable to deep dive into oblivion any time, they suffer scarcity of resources, and they are perennially strapped for cash. Startup founders put their soul – along with themselves – through rigorous (almost insane) time schedules.

A considerable amount of energy, passion, love and work goes into a startup, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. Although digital marketing, including content marketing, goes with the overall scheme of things, while running a startup, we’ll ignore that for a moment and consider content marketing separately.

So, what happens when you bring startup culture to content marketing? How does the way you do content marketing change when you bring in the ethos that startups are known for?

Here are some lessons from startups that you can apply to content marketing, blogging, and digital marketing in general:

Don’t Fall for the Single Founder Mistake

Paul Graham, author and founder of Y Combinator, lists out some mistakes most startups make, one of the first of which is to have a single founder.

Very few successful startups have just one founder. Google, Apple, Oracle are all examples of companies with humble starts and certainly more than one founder.

Having one founder, Paul believes, is a vote of no confidence. Even if that wasn’t the case, growing a startup is incredibly hard for one person. Startups need a way to weed out bad decisions, and a one-founder startup has no checks and balances in that regard. Having a team spreads out the hard work, keeps stupid decisions in check, and to brainstorm for more ideas.

Lesson: Content development, likewise, isn’t a one-person effort. Whether you are a business looking to develop content for marketing, a content marketer working on various types of content for other businesses, or even a content developer or freelance writer, you’ll need a team.

Working with professional writers, in-house content development teams, and collaborating with experts is a great way to give your content development work a boost. Content marketing is best achieved with collaboration – no matter how you choose to do it.

Starting Up without Research is Doomed

Startups are glamorous. That doesn’t take away the grueling work behind running one, though. According to Toby Ruckert of Stuff.co.nz, “research” is a fundamental building block for a startup. Technically, it’s called “validating ideas”, in startup circles. You’d go out to your potential customer base, launch surveys, brainstorm with your team, and gather material from the web, universities, or libraries.

To know is at the core of a successful startup.

Lesson: Content marketing is impossible without research. Of course, you can hash out trite content but by now, you know that it won’t work for your business. Include research into every piece of content you develop.

Know your readers, and gather analytics that matter to you. If you are approaching other bloggers, find out everything you can about them and their websites. Digging into site owners’ personal details and preferences is easy – you can get to know a lot from their About and Contact pages, and social media profiles.

However, to be a true online detective, you need to know their pain and pleasure points with regard to their day-to-day blog operation. You can use Whois to uncover site owner and administration information, whoishostingthis.com to find their hosting details, SEMRush to know more about visitor traffic and how they get it, and so on.

Startups are Hard

Uncrunched.com has a post with this simple message: If you are not comfortable with the fact that startups are hard work and that a lot of time and sacrifice will go into it, you should get yourself a job.

Startups are hard in more ways than you can imagine. Chris McCann’s post reveals the sweat, blood, and tears involved in a startup founder’s life.

Yet, Kevin Ready, a contributor at Forbes.com, thinks that the hard startup life is good. Technology helps you overcome some hurdles. The Internet makes it easy to hire people (either full-time or on contractual basis), and the availability of affordable tools make it easier to launch a startup today.

However, if you quit whining, embrace the startup life, and do it right, you make history.

Lesson: Too many business owners and marketers think that you have to “make time” for content marketing.

Correction: Drop everything else (except running your business) and go all out at content marketing. Quit whining that it takes a humongous effort, time, money and energy to develop great content, to get good content published as guest blogs, to work on social media, to create videos, and to publish all other sorts of content.

Content marketing – when you do it right – has phenomenal payoffs.

The Value is in Speed, Not Money

Tanya Prive of Forbes gave some convincing reasons why startups succeed, some of which were speed, efficiency, and the rush a startup works with.

Startups also succeed because they provide value while keeping the pace of work fast and efficient. Startups, however, don’t succeed because a VC firm funds them. They don’t succeed just because they have capital.

In fact, most startups don’t even have access to any sort of capital from sources such as banks and VC firms. That’s why it’s not surprising so many of them now turn to crowd-funding options such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Lesson: Traditional marketing spoiled us into thinking that if we had access to cash and an unending stream of funds, we could market and promote our way to success.

All you had to do was to buy media space and bomb the market with as much advertising as your money could buy.

Today, consumers don’t trust traditional advertising much. Instead, they trust their own social networks and their preferred sources of advice online (blogs and publications). Content marketing is all about making the right information available to seed consumers’ hunger for information.

As a brand, you need credibility, trust, social proof, and commercial love. Content marketing has to achieve all of that and not to fill up the Internet with more trash.

To achieve speed and to provide value with content marketing, you have to make a splash, no matter what your current state of available resources is like. Danny Iny of Firepole marketing did just that with his super-powered guest blogging campaigns targeted major blogs. All he had was to use his skill in writing and a burning desire with a willingness to put in the work to get his guest blogs out. His outreach success led him to develop a popular report called Engagement from Scratch.

Content marketing is an overall endeavor to get the word out, to generate trust, to marshal goodwill and to amass social proof. It’s the key to what is now known as Inbound Marketing.

Your content marketing defines you. It makes you money. It tells the world who you are and why you are in business. It convinces, persuades, inspires, and informs.

How do you approach content marketing? How important is it for your business? Which of the lessons do you think you can pick up and run with?

Author’s Bio: Tracy Vides is a content creator and marketer, who loves to blog about subjects as diverse as fashion, technology, and finance. She’s always raring to have a discussion on startups and entrepreneurship. Say “Hi” to her on Twitter @TracyVides. You can also find her on G+ at gplus.to/TracyVides.

What Google Added To The Link Schemes Document Found In Webmaster Tools

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By Matthew Schmoldt

Recently, Google updated the “Link schemes” informational document found in Webmaster Tools. The change was easy to miss. There were no large scale announcements.

Unlike a Wikipedia document, there is no easy way to see what was changed. Thankfully, the Internet has the wayback machine for such matters. The tool shows that two records have been kept this year for the page in question. One archive is from June 28th, the other is from August 5th.

As you can see, there seem to be significant changes. The June 28th version of the link schemes page had an opening paragraph that explained why external links were important and why Google uses them as a key influencer in search results. Now the document begins with a stern warning:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”

To many, this paragraph is not only troubling but troublingly ambiguous. You will notice the use of the word “intended” in the paragraph. How does Google determine if a link is intended to manipulate PageRank? In the second sentence, is Google saying any link building efforts will be considered manipulation?

On July 10th, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, was interviewed and said the following:

“No, not all link building is bad. The philosophy that we’ve always had is if you make something that’s compelling then it would be much easier to get people to write about it and to link to it.”

Does the July 10th interview with Matt Cutts answer the questions of the August update to the link schemes document? My guess is, yes. Google seems to be preparing to take the webspam fight to the next level and has updated their official link schemes document with a hardcore and broad stance.

In the same interview, Matt Cutts said:

“I would concentrate on the stuff that people write, the utility that people find in it, and the amount of times that people link to it. All of those are ways that implicitly measure how relevant or important somebody is to someone else.

Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover that, and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

It is clear to me, that link building is quite appropriate and still legal. But, shift from thinking about link building to the idea of link earning. High quality links from high authority links should be the target. These sorts of links are earned and not built with a few clicks of the mouse.

What else was changed in the link schemes document?

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

The above paragraph seems to be fairly black and white. Google doesn’t want people to sell links for money or for products. But, what If you sign up for a Chamber of Commerce and pay a fee. Have you just purchased a link from their site? Should you request a nofollow of your link just in case?

Matt Cutts has said that you should only pursue a link if it is something you would have built or pursued if SEO did not exist.

Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking

The use of excessive and exclusively are ambiguous and troubling in this new entry in the document. It is impossible to know where the line is with this rule. But, remember, Google wants you to do things naturally. They want you to do things that make logical sense. If you are a flower shop, it makes sense to have a linking relationship with the local chocolate shop. It may make sense to link to the local cookie shop, to the local wedding dress store, etc.

Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links

The ambiguous word here is “large-scale.” To me, I refer back to my rule of link earning and not link building. If the link is too easy to get, it’s probably not the kind of link that is desirable. Removing the easy to get links removes most of the ability to create a large-scale link building operation. The hard links take time to get. Also remember, Google is targeting keyword-rich anchor links and not generic links in articles.

Using automated programs or services to create links to your site

This seems to be the one area where Google was decisive. Do not use automated means to build backlinks. If you are tempted to use automated programs, don’t. Google is constantly indexing the Internet and can detect a sudden and unnatural increase in backlinks.

Author’s Bio: Matthew Schmoldt is an Internet marketer who has been published at Yahoo and Moz. He has four years of SEO and social media experience. He is the owner of Cool Things To Buy Inc. His website features amazing gadgets other neat stuff.

Don’t Sweat the Page Views

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By Michelle Rebecca

Yes, today’s online business leaders have it hard. There’s a ton of competition and a lot of complexity involved in dealing with certain kinds of market realities. It’s hard to monetize a web project the way that businesses monetize other kinds of investments and campaigns.

However, some of those who are promoting a business and its products or services online can get too wrapped up in various kinds of technical fixes for these issues, and may tend to disregard the bigger picture. Meanwhile, big companies like Google are trying to promote big-picture thinking that adds to the general quality of the Internet.

Effective Online Management and User Interest

Even though online business owners know that Google has made a raft of changes to its algorithms, punishing content mills and other generic SEO sites, many of those managing web projects are still obsessed with the idea that they can manipulate page rankings through metrics like keyword placement metadata and back linking.

Busy managers who want results without coordination simply plug page view analytics into automated job managers that they think will force outsourced marketing or content people to spit out the magic formula for growth. What these businesses are neglecting is the idea that natural interest is derived naturally from creating actual benefits for Web viewers.

Preserving Traditional Practices… and Branching Out

It’s not that businesses need to disregard all of their analytics or drop all of the market research. Targeted content and user analysis has its place. But beyond just micro-managing technical results, web project managers who free up content producers to explore new avenues connected to “the meat space” (the off-line world) can see a lot of improvement in their return on investment.

Time and time again, online entrepreneurs who take risks have seen their sites blossom as the consumer audience for a particular industry starts to read more, link more, and share more of what they have to offer. This generates web results in a system with longevity, where yesterday’s linking and page optimizing created quick floods of web traffic that taper off when Web viewers understand they have simply been directed by a search term.

Web project managers who understand all of these new dynamics often source projects differently. Instead of getting a low dollar bid for a few landing pages or some generic high-volume domain SERP optimization, they hire industry professionals and qualified freelance journalists to create actual content that explores the flesh and blood realities of an industry and offers readers material from the real world rather than rehashed phrasing from a Google analytics result.

That can drive a lot more vitality and power into a web campaign than anything dreamed up in an SEO laboratory.

Author’s Bio: Michelle is a blogger and freelancer. She’s written about almost every topic under the sun, and loves constantly learning about new subjects and industries while she’s writing. In her spare time she enjoys spending time outdoors with her dogs. Check out her blog, SocialWeLove, and follow her on Google+.

Smarter Shoppers: How to Convert on New Buyer Behavior

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By Darren Creasey

Online marketing is an industry that is acutely aware of buyer behaviors and patterns; in fact, many trends in digital marketing are driven by this awareness. The Internet is a positive feedback loop- it has changed the way consumers research, shop, and buy, which in turn shapes how marketers use the web to market to buyers. Do you know how the Internet influences buyer behavior, and how to capitalize on that information? Read on to find out.

1. Shoppers are smarter

One of the best features of the Internet is the accessibility to learning resources that it provides. This is true of product information as well as academic knowledge. Consumers are now taking advantage of this wealth of online resources to learn more about the products and services they are interested in: what their options are, the key differences from each competitor, and what price levels to expect. This smart shopper means that they have an element control over the sales process – they no longer need to wait for your sales presentation to learn the details about your solutions. Instead, you need to be prepared for dealing with a middle of the funnel customer, with knowledge of the product and specific questions, earlier in the buying cycle.

2. Buyers want you to help make them smarter

While a more informed customer might sound like a tough sale at first, it’s important to look at the positives of the situation. A well informed, inquisitive customer will place a lot more value and trust in your brand if you help contribute to their knowledge. Content marketing is a great tool to use here – by publishing information that helps consumers understand your industry, your products, and their options, you are not only demonstrating value to the buyer, but also strengthening your own position as a reputable, knowledgeable company.

3. Consumers are listening online

But buyers aren’t just going to take your word for it. Social media, forums, and other third party online communities help potential customers hear from real users, and can help sway their decisions one way or the other. You should be actively monitoring and engaging in these conversations; you need to know what people are saying about your company, and you need to be ready to jump into a conversation when a question is asked – this is a great opportunity to help educate the customer.

Your turn: how have you changed your strategy to deal with the new, more informed consumer?

Author’s Bio: This article was written by Darren Creasey to inform people about the advantages of online marketing. He believes that through internet marketing techniques, companies can achieve a greater level of success.