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Tag Archives: best people

How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs)

Posted on June 5, 2015 by jeffriseo

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

Content is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Whether it be content for links, conversion, education, search or any number of things. In this post I want to focus on one area—content that drives awareness of your brand.

One tangible way to measure awareness is by looking at new visitors that a piece of content attracts which is pretty easy (although not always perfect) using something like Google Analytics. There are other measures that can influence new visitors that I’m going to talk about as well:

  • Social shares
  • Links

Both of these can send traffic to your website, although I wouldn’t assume that they correlate exactly. This should explain why.

Nonetheless, chances are that if you’re creating a piece of content that is designed to create awareness, links and social shares are likely to be high up the list of objectives, just below traffic.

But where do you start? What content idea will work best?

If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend you take a look at this deck from Mark Johnstone who is one of the best people I know when it comes to explaining what makes a good idea. Follow it with this post from Hannah Smith just last week on Moz on creative content research.

In this post, I want to explain one of the processes that we use at Aira to generate content ideas for clients. It’s not the only thing we do, but it gives us a massive push in the right direction, even in industries that may be tagged as “boring” or hard to understand. The reason for this is that we gather as much information as we can on what has already worked in a particular industry. We use an awesome tool called Buzzsumo to help with this, and I’m going to show you three core things:

  1. How to use the Buzzsumo tool (free and paid versions)
  2. How to hack together a Google Doc to automate some of the work for you and pull in additional metrics
  3. How to scale it up and create a tool that does the hard lifting and adds in other magic too

This is exactly the process that we’ve gone through at Aira. We started using the Buzzsumo tool as it was intended, then I wanted to get a bit more from it so I played with the API, then we saw the potential and built a proper tool that scales and pulls in other data. Each time we do a content strategy for a client, we tweak the process and usually add something new. So this is a work in progress but even right now it is working well.

The process is very data-driven and we don’t try to hide the fact that we’re learning from what others have done. The fact is that there is a wealth of data out there ready to be used to inform our decision making and the choices we make—so we should use it.

If you’re already familiar with Buzzsumo, feel free to skip to the section on using the API to see what else you can do with it.

The goals of content profiling

Before diving into Buzzsumo itself, I want to be really clear on what we’re trying to achieve through this process. It can be a long process (more on speeding it up later) and you can go down a few rabbit holes before getting the insight or takeaway that you’re looking for. So keep the following in mind as you step through this.

Overarching goal: Gather as much information and data as possible to feed into your brainstorming / content ideation process. So rather than just starting with a blank slate, you have lots of research behind you which can make your ideas a little bit better and allow you to make more informed choices.

This goal is important to remember because this process won’t magically give you fully formed content ideas, but it will feed into that heavily and lead to better content ideas and crucially, probably make you ditch some ideas that may not be so good!

There are a few secondary goals that help set the context for what we’re doing:

  • Learn what is working well in your industry
  • Learn what your competitors are doing well
  • Learn what social networks are best for you to target

Keep these in mind as you go through this process.

Using Buzzsumo for content profiling

To make this post more useful and easier to follow, let’s imagine we’re working with a client in the travel space and we’ve been tasked with coming up with content ideas for them. They are looking to get in front of their primary audience which is mid to high-end travellers.

Now let’s use Buzzsumo to try and see what is working in terms of content in this space that may appeal to this target audience.

There are two main ways for us to use Buzzsumo to find this information:

  1. Keyword based search
  2. Domain based search

We tend to use both types of search but it’s worth mentioning that occasionally, domain based searches are limited because client competitors may not be doing that much in terms of content creation—so there isn’t much for Buzzsumo to find! This is usually the exception though and even smaller websites have done some content at one point or another.

Keyword-based research using Buzzsumo

Let’s start by looking at a few keyword-based searches.

One thing we need to be aware of at this point is the difference between commercial keywords and content-driven keywords. Our travel client may be targeting keywords such as:

  • luxury holidays
  • last minute luxury holidays
  • luxury honeymoon destinations

Putting these into Buzzsumo will return some results, but the usefulness of them will not be as good as using content driven keywords such as:

  • luxury travel guide
  • best honeymoon destinations
  • guide to getting married abroad

These keywords are non-commercial in nature and therefore, the results we get back from Buzzsumo will be for content created using these keywords and not product / service pages that list holidays. Overall, Buzzsumo does a pretty good job of filtering out pages that are 100% focused on selling products / services, but a few do slip through sometimes.

You can search Buzzsumo using quotation marks if you want to narrow down results a bit, but we’ll start off broad with the following search:

I’ve also selected “Past Year” from the left hand side so that I stand a good chance of getting a good set of results with lots of data.

Here are what the results look like:

buzzsumo keyword search results

We can see the results ordered by total number of shares, then broken down by each of the large social networks too. You can dive into each result to view backlinks to that content and Twitter accounts that have shared that content too:

view sharers on buzzsumo

If you’re using the free version of Buzzsumo, then you can continue to run searches like this and doing a deep dive into pieces of content that catch your eye. Over time, you will start to notice trends and be able to take some actions based on what you see. Here are a few that we find most useful.

Seeing which domains appear the most

After only a few searches, you will start to notice domains appearing over and over again for your keywords. Just in the one screenshot above, we can see that A Luxury Travel Blog appears twice in the top few results. The first thing you should do is make a note of this domain so you can use it to do deeper research a little later.

Secondly, the important point here is that this domain clearly has a decent size audience because of the way it is consistently getting good amounts of social shares across multiple posts. This means that this domain could be a good one for you to take a closer look at and try to build a relationship / run a campaign with them.

Uncovering influencers who you can reach out to

After a few searches and deep dives, you will also see patterns in who appears the most when you click on “View Sharers” button. You should make a note of these people and again, start looking for ways to engage with them because you know they’re relevant to your niche and they are open to sharing content that you’re able to create.

Find the common themes / topics of content

The final thing that we tend to try and pick up on is the themes of the content titles too. After several searches, you will start to see what typically appears in the top results for your set of keywords.

Once you’ve done all of this, you should have a few things in your notes:

  • Ideas on what content themes perform best – you can use these to start your own ideation and brainstorming.
  • A list of domains that tend to get lots of shares – you can do a deeper dive on their content (see next section) and look to build relationships with them to help you promote your future content
  • A list of influencers on Twitter who tend to share relevant content – you can try to contact these people and see if they’d be open to sharing the content you create too

Now let’s move from a keyword-based search to a domain-based one.

Domain-based research with Buzzsumo

In the same way that you can run keywords through Buzzsumo, you can also run domains through it and find the most shared content on that domain. This is really useful when you want to do a deeper dive into domains that kept appearing in your keyword research, as well as taking a closer look at competitors to see if they are doing anything you can learn from.

One thing to note here is that sometimes you won’t get a great set of results back from Buzzsumo. This tends to happen in smaller niches or on particularly new domains where Buzzsumo may not yet have enough data to be useful.

Remember earlier that A Luxury Travel Blog kept appearing on our keyword searches? We can now take a closer look at them with a simple search:

buzzsumo domain search

The results look similar to a keyword search but as you can see, the results are limited to this domain:

buzzsumo domain results

Again, we can take a deeper dive and see what’s working for this particular domain. Just a glance at these top four results alone give me two insights:

  1. Posts that appear list focused / have a number of items on them appear to do well with the top three all being lists
  2. The same author has written the top two posts, which means we can take a deeper look at what she is writing and try to work out why this is

We can take a closer look at her content by clicking on her name:

author on buzzsumo

We can then do a bit of digging and try to find trends and insights that may help us when coming up with our own ideas. It may also turn out that she has a big social following which makes her someone you may want to engage with.

All of the above is available using the free version of Buzzsumo, which is great. The paid version lets you go a bit further in a few ways though, and given that pricing currently starts at $79 per month, I think it’s a reasonable cost and achievable for most people. So I want to talk about what you can do with the paid version too. Later, we’ll go a step beyond this and look at what you can do with the paid API as well.

Deep-dive content keyword analysis

When you run a standard keyword search like we did above, you need to keep an eye open for results that seem very useful, relevant, and have lots of results. When you find this, you can use Buzzsumo to do a bit deeper into this keyword and give you all sorts of useful data about the content produced around that keyword.

You can do this by using the Content Analysis report:

buzzsumo content analysis

You run a keyword search as normal and Buzzsumo takes a little longer than usual because it’s generating a much bigger report which includes a number of things. I won’t go into detail on every single one here, but I will give you my favourite sections.

Average social shares by network

average shares by network

This tells us which networks typically generate the most social shares for content that mentions “luxury travel guide.” For most B2C industries, the split between networks above is pretty normal, whereas you tend to see a much higher number for LinkedIn when it comes to B2B industries.

The interesting thing here, though, is not so much the split of shares between networks—most of us could guess that Facebook and Twitter would drive the most shares. What is interesting is the average number of shares because this can really help us get a sense of what is achievable with this particular type of content.

In the case above, we can see that, on average, a piece of content mentioning “luxury travel guide” gets about 40 Facebook likes and about 30 tweets. If your client or your boss is expecting 100,000 of each from your new piece of content, you can show them this data and it can help set their expectations a bit. The fact is that many pieces of content don’t get more than a few dozen social shares, but we only see and remember the ones that get hundreds of thousands and that is where our expectation is set.

Average shares by content length

average shares by content length

This one doesn’t really drive massive insights, but I want to include it because it can be a great one for driving home a point. The point being that you can’t just throw up a few hundred words of content and expect it to fly. It can happen, but for most of us, we need to invest time and resources into content creation, and long-form writing and guides can lead to lots of social shares.

Whether people read articles that they share on social is another story, but that’s for another day. The message here is that typically, content that is more in-depth and detailed will get more social shares. I’ve seen the odd exception when doing research for clients, but generally I’ll see the graph above over and over again.

Most shared domains

most shared domains by network

I really like this section of the analysis because it effectively becomes my outreach target list. Buzzsumo is telling me that when it comes to my target keywords, these are the domains that usually get the most shares. Therefore, these are exactly the domains where I want my client to be featured in some form or another. What Buzzsumo is doing here is a bit like what Richard Baxter talks about in this post on outreach where you are trying to be super targeted and not just going after random link targets.

Average shares by content type

average shares by content type

Total honesty here—this one can be a bit hit and miss. Generally, the more broad the keyword, the better results you get in this graph. The example above isn’t bad, but isn’t great either. What Buzzsumo is doing here is analyzing the articles that it’s crawled and trying to work out what type of content it is. In this example, they’ve been able to figure out what there are “How to” style articles, lists and videos related to luxury travel and it has given me the average social shares for each.

To give you a better example, here is a recent search I ran for another Aira client, I can’t tell you the exact keyword but this was the result:

average shares by content type detail

As you can see, there are far more content types and this gives us a good idea of what types of content can perform well. The interesting thing for this particular client was the disproportionate number of LinkedIn shares for “How to” articles which informed our research and gave us a path to go down to find out what was happening. We were able to take a closer look at this content and use this to make recommendations to the client.

There are other bits of data available in this deep dive report but typically, these are the ones I find most useful.

Deep-dive domain analysis

Just like with a basic search, you can switch out your keyword and put in a domain instead and ask Buzzsumo to do deeper analysis on it. Let’s take a closer look at Lonely Planet and see what data we can get that may help with content ideas for our travel client.

We get the same set of core graphs that I’ve mentioned above, but the takeaways and actions can be a little different when performing domain research. Particularly if you’re running a competitor through it.

average shares by network

The graph above shows us that Lonely Planet is driving a disproportionately high number of social shares through Facebook compared with any other platform. It would probably be wise for us to take a closer look at their Facebook page and see exactly what they are doing.

An additional graph from Buzzsumo which I didn’t mention above is this one:

average shares by topic

This is another one that can be hit and miss, but in this case, it is pretty useful because it gives us a rough idea of what topics drive the most social shares. There are a couple in there which aren’t very useful such as “travel”, “planet” and “us”. But the rest can help inform our ideation going forward and give us angles to research a bit further.

What is interesting about the graph above is the disproportionate number of shares on Pinterest that content focused on Italy gets, it gives us a route to go down to learn more and perhaps get some insights into our content process.

You can do this kind of analysis for competitors, too, and see what content is getting the most social shares, as well as what social networks are working best for them. At Aira, we were able to show one client how well Facebook was working for a number of their competitors which led them to hire a social media person into their team who could focus on this channel and grow the brand presence with their target audience.

All of the reports above can help you with the process of coming up with content ideas, whether you use the free or paid version of Buzzsumo, you’ll be able to get good insights and learn from competitors / the general industry to see what has worked before and feed it into your ideation.

Taking it a step further: Using the Buzzsumo API

Spoiler alert: If you have a Buzzsumo API key, just make a copy of this spreadsheet, input your key and all of the stuff below will magically work.

We used the above process a few times at Aira and it works well, but we wanted something a bit more powerful and quicker. It can take a while to run these reports, especially if you have lots of keywords and domains to check. I had a quick look at the Buzzsumo API and saw that it used JSON which is something I’d worked with before in Google Docs, so I decided to try to hack something together that could eventually be developed into a tool—if it worked.

For me, as a non-developer, that was a big if!

I wasn’t looking to create anything fancy or scalable though, I just wanted to build something that worked and could be used as a prototype for building a “proper” tool—more on that below or you can jump ahead.

I did start off with a few simple things in my mind though—the problems I was trying to solve by using the API and not just using the app itself. Given that some development time is needed to build this tool, I need to have good reasons to invest the time. For me, I had a few good reasons:

  • I wanted to run the tool for lots and lots of keywords and lots of lots of domains at the same time. Buzzsumo can do this, but you still have to type in the advanced search query. I just wanted to copy and paste keywords / domains into a single field and hit go! This is even more important to us because of the way we gather keywords and domains which is covered in the next point.
  • We use an internal tool based around the SEMrush API to gather keywords from client competitors and it would be super cool and quick to pass the output from this tool straight into the Buzzsumo API.
  • We have another tool that tells us who a client’s true organic search competitors are, and similar to the previous point, it would be super useful to pass these competitors straight into Buzzsumo for processes and to give us lots of cool data about their content.
  • We wanted to add in additional metrics that Buzzsumo doesn’t give us for each URL such as Moz metrics, Majestic metrics and sentiment / demographic analysis
  • Buzzsumo doesn’t give you “live” numbers when it comes to social shares, so if we used the API, we could integrate with the Shared Count API to recrawl the URLs and get fresher social numbers.

These reasons were enough for me to explore the API a bit and see if it could help solve these problems.

For those of you who actually know what you’re doing when it comes to coding / APIs, etc., please don’t scrutinise my work too much! I’m what you’d call a copy and paste coder and I’m sure there are cleaner / more efficient ways to do what I’ve done. Remember that the point here is to build a prototype that could be scaled into a full tool.

You will need an API key from Buzzsumo to do any of this work and it comes with their agency plan which isn’t super cheap, but is very cost effective for agencies who are doing lots of this kind of research.

Let’s start with the basics of the Buzzsumo API and what you can get from it.

There are five main ways of getting data out of Buzzsumo:

  1. Top content – returns the most popular content for your chosen domain or keyword
  2. Top influencers – returns influencers for the topic of your choice
  3. Article sharers – returns a sample of people who shared a specific article on Twitter within the first few days of it being published
  4. Links shared – returns a list of links shared by an influencer of your choice
  5. Average shares – returns the average number of shares for content published in the last six months from a particular domain

We’re going to focus on the first one for “Top Content” as this follows on nicely from the steps I’ve already outlined above. I’ll talk about the other options for the API in another post 🙂

You can view the documentation for the Top Content section of the API here. The request API looks like this:

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padding: 1em;
border: 1px solid #ddd;
border-radius: 3px;
background: #f8f8f8;
font-family: Menlo, Monaco, Consolas, monospace;
font-size: 14px;
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word-wrap: break-word;
white-space: pre;
}

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

Let’s break this down and see what is happening.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This is the URL we need to access to API and the bit at the end tells Buzzsumo which of the five types of API we want to access and the format we want the data to be returned in.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This should feel familiar to you because it matches the options you get in the Buzzsumo App:

content types in buzzsumo

Changing this section of the string allows us to focus our research if we want to. So if we only wanted to see results where Buzzsumo has classified a piece of content as an infographic or a video, the string would look like this:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?infographic,video&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

Generally, we tend to not change this bit of the string as we want as many results back from Buzzsumo as possible.

The next part of the API call is this bit:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This is where we define the domain or keyword that we want to run research for. Obviously this will change for each search you do based on what you need.

Next up in the call, we have:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This simply tells Buzzsumo how to order the results. By default, this will be set to total and the results will be ordered by the total number of social shares that a piece of content has. If you’d prefer the results to be ordered by something else, you can switch out for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

Next in the call is:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This tells Buzzsumo how far (in days) we want to go back to get data. We typically set this to 360 which is the maximum amount of time you can go back.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This tells Buzzsumo what page of results to start at, with 0 being the first page.

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE

This is where you set your unique API key which allows you to run these requests.

Integrating with Google

Now that we know what the API request looks like and what we can play with, let’s look at how to pull this into Google Sheets.

Fortunately (for non-coders like me) there is a cool function in Google Sheets called =importjson. It’s similar in many ways to =importxml which you may have read about before.

This function doesn’t work out of the box, unfortunately, you have to go through a couple of simple steps to install a script first, but it’s really easy and well explained in this blog post on Medium.

Once you’ve done that, you can start by performing a simple API call using the structure I’ve shown you above.

Simply paste the following into a cell in your Google Sheet:

=ImportJSON(“http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com&result_type=total&num_days=7&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE”)

After a few seconds, you’ll see something like this appear:

google doc for buzzsumo api

Yay! Data! It’s amazing when stuff just works.

Once you’ve pulled the data in for your chosen domains or keywords, you can do whatever you want with them. At a basic level, you can simply build an API call for each of the domains and pull the results into different tabs in your Google Sheet. So you’d end up with tabs that look something like this:

tab labels for data analysis

From here, you can use the built in Google charts to visualise the numbers you find and compare competitors to each other.

What is more interesting, is running a single API call and getting data back for several competitors or keywords at once. To do this, you simply use an advanced search in your API call. Continuing with the same example above, we’d edit our API call so that it says this:

=ImportJSON(“http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?article,infographic,video,guest_post,giveaway,interview&q=lonelyplanet.com OR wanderlust.co.uk OR cntraveller.com&result_type=total&num_days=360&page=0&api_key=API_KEY_HERE”)

The results now look like this:

updated google doc for buzzsumo api analysis

What can we take from this?

Well, Lonely Planet is kicking ass because they own 19/20 of the most shared articles. The only exception is Wanderlust who appear in position 9.

We can also take all of the content titles and put them into a word cloud tool such as Wordle and get something like this:

travel site keyword word cloud

You’ll need to remove a few keywords such as the brands and common words that you’d expect, but the output can give you a good overview of the content themes being pushed out by your chosen domains or keywords.

But remember one of the problems I was trying to solve? I wanted to be able to drop in a list of keywords and competitors and have Buzzsumo fetch the data, rather than having to type it all in manually in the app.

I managed to get to the point where I could do this:

integrated google doc for analysis

The eagle-eyed among you will notice there are a few hidden rows in this screenshot. I’ll unhide them in the next screenshot so that I can show you what is going on and how you’d replicate what I’ve done above.

Remember I showed you how to build the API call above? I’m using Google Sheets below to build an API call and am simply using the =concatenate function to do so. In the following screenshot, I’ve used this function to concatenate my list of domains and keywords into the standard format for a Buzzsumo advanced search:

concatenated cells

From here, I can use concatenate to build my API call. Cell A13 simply concatenates A8, A9 and A10. I’m know there are more technically efficient ways to do this using scripts, but as I said, I’m not a developer and I’m just trying to prove a concept here as quickly as I can.

building buzzsumo api call in google docs

My output is a list of the top 20 results from Buzzsumo, ordered by total shares from all three domains and two keywords. I can take this data and run whatever analysis I want on it to find what content seems to perform best in terms of social shares and feed this into my content ideation process.

Adding in live social shares

One of the goals of using the Buzzsumo API rather than the web interface was to pull in up to date social share numbers for each URL we find. Unfortunately, Buzzsumo gives us social data that isn’t always up to date. They fetch social data for each URL at different intervals and generally update older URLs less than new ones.

Luckily, pulling social share data into Google Sheets is really easy.

All you need is a free API key from Shared Count and the script from this blog post on Render Positive. Make a copy of the Google Sheet from Render Positive, then follow these steps.

1) Go to Tools > Script Editor

create a form

2) Click on this option:

sharedcount script

3) Make a copy of the script:

code for sharedcount script

4) Go back to your own sheet and click Tools > Script Editor

script editor

5) Click File > New > Script file

script file

6) Paste in the script you just copied and save the script

pasted script

7) Finally, you’ll need to edit this cell reference to the cell where you plan on pasting your API key from Shared Count:

cell reference for API

That’s it!

Now if you want to use the script, you just need to enter the following in the cell of your choice along with the cell reference for the URL you want social shares for. Here are the five that Buzzsumo use:

=SharedCountTwitter(A1)

=SharedCountFBTotal(A1)

=SharedCountLinkedIn(A1)

=SharedCountPinterest(A1)

=SharedCountGPlus(A1)

You’ll end up with something like this:

sharer count

Or, you can of course just make a copy of this spreadsheet and everything is already set up for you!

So after all of this, I ended up with a Google sheet that did the job for me and solved most of my problems with using the Buzzsumo web interface. After a couple of successful client projects using this process, we decided to build out a more powerful and scalable version of the tool. The additional bonus being that it was less likely to break than my cobbled together Google sheet!

Building out your own tool using Buzzsumo

Importing data into Google sheets is one thing, but it only takes us so far and doesn’t tend to scale particularly well. To overcome that we have the option of building our own piece of software that uses the principles I’ve mentioned above to move things to the next level.

In this example our programming language of choice is PHP. As above, there are a few options that you pass into the API (including they keyword or domain, page number, number of days and your API key) so the overall principle is the same. Here’s what we do:

Firstly, we build the Buzzsumo API call and save the URL into a variable:

http://api.buzzsumo.com/search/articles.json?q=’.$url_or_keyword.’&result_type=total&page=’.$z.’&num_days=’.$numdays.’&api_key=’.BUZZSUMO_API_KEY;

We then use that to grab the data and store it in another variable:

$json = file_get_contents($buzzsumo_url);

Finally, we take that data and translate it:

$response = json_decode($json);

Moving on from there, we take the response and pull out the data for each URL:

foreach($results as $result) {
// Get the URL & number of social shares, and then save them into a database
}

The important bit there is that we save each of the results into a database because that means we can take a massive data set for numerous domains and keywords and then look for trends.

To show what can be done we took an example set of 7 sites that we’re going to run through our profiler. The process, and results, can be seen in the video below. This is just a quick example of what can be done, with some time and imagination, you can do a lot with the Buzzsumo API and mash it up with other APIs to get a really cool data set.

As you can see, within a couple of minutes we can look at the top content for each of our chosen sites, as well as see which networks are most effective for them. We’ve also built in an export function that easily allows us to drop the data into Excel and do a manual analysis of the results. You may have also spotted that we’ve added in Moz and Majestic data which allows us to do analysis along the line of what Buzzsumo recently did in this post.

That’s about it! In summary, the standard version of Buzzsumo can help you get great insights to feed into your content ideas and strategy. If you have the time and you’re working across lots of clients, it’s definitely worth taking a look at the paid version and making use of the API if you (like us) wanted to mash up the data with other APIs.

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Building Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Posted on February 25, 2015 by jeffriseo

Posted by MorganChessman

Building marketing strategies for small businesses is one of my favorite things. In my first marketing role, I worked in the marketing department for a small company before moving on to Distilled, where I’ve been lucky enough to continue working with small businesses that have enormous potential. Despite the various industries, locales, and personalities, one of the prevailing similarities between them is that small businesses often don’t position their company or use the web as effectively as they could. While this is partially due to the time and resource crunch small business owners feel, it’s also because, beyond building a website, they don’t know where to begin. 

It doesn’t have to be so overwhelming though. I’ll walk you through the preliminary steps I take my small business clients through.

1. Define the brand

A number of the small companies I’ve worked with didn’t have a brand. That’s not to say that they didn’t have a name, a website, and a logo. It’s that they didn’t stand for something. 

For example, what comes to mind when you think of Apple? Innovative and well-designed products? Exactly. So many small businesses are built from an individual wanting to work for themselves or because they see an opportunity to improve on an existing product. They figure, build the website and they will come. 

But it’s not that way. You need a brand. As we’ve seen throughout history, the companies that have staying power have a brand, something that differentiates them from their competitors, something that people connect with and, coupled with good products and customer service, something that keeps people coming back.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Well that’s all fine and good, Morgan, but I don’t know how you go about building a brand.” That’s fine. There are people who make careers out of building brands you could contact, market research surveys you could pass out, and focus groups you could run, but, realistically, small businesses don’t usually have the financial resources to invest in these strategies. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a brand though; you’ll just have to run a lightweight brand building exercise which goes something like this:

1. Think about your origin story

Ask yourself: “Why did I start this company? What am I proud of?” Oftentimes what drove you to start your own company and how it’s reflected in your business practices is what makes you unique.

2. Talk to your customers

Ask your customers: “What do you like about our company? What don’t you like? Why did you choose us over our competitors? What are your pain points?” When you listen to customers talk about your business, you’ll have a better understanding of the aspects of your company that resonate with people and what should be reflected in your brand messaging.

3. Do competitor research

Take a look at your competitors’ websites. Ask yourself: “What are they doing well? What aren’t they doing well? How do they talk about their company?” You’re looking for holes in your industry, a way to make your company different than your competitors.

4. Compile all information and develop a brand

Once you’ve researched your origin story, competitors’ tactics, and customer sentiment, it’s time to start building a brand. What from your origin story and customer conversations stood out and got you excited? How can you talk about those things in a way your competitors haven’t? Once you have that figured out, you have a brand position.
Let’s make this final step more concrete with an example. I worked with a tech consulting and recruiting firm that had a history of success in the immediate area, but was looking to attract people from the greater region as well as gain new client companies. In order to stand out from the other technical consulting firms and get people excited about working for them, we knew that they had to have more than a website that stated they were a consulting firm. They were going to have to develop a brand. We ran through the steps above with the following takeaways:
  • Origin Story: The owner started the company because he liked working with really competent developers, and realized that the best way to ensure he did so was to start his own company.
  • Customer Research: Customers preferred going with this particular company because the quality of work was always so high. People liked working for this company because there was always a lot of challenging work.
  • Competitor Research: The rest of the companies weren’t run by people with technical backgrounds. This company was, though, and as a result was able to do more rigorous testing and find the best people.
The main theme here was that the company only hired the best (origin story), because they had the technical chops to know who the best were (competitor research), which meant that this company’s employees did exceptional work (customer research), which in turn made sure they landed challenging contracts (customer research). 
Due to this insight, we positioned the company as the elite option, heavily citing the fact that only 4% of people could pass the technical interview—to work for this company was to work with the best and that to hire them was to have the best working for you. This resonated well with both target audiences, and they saw a heightened brand awareness with both potential recruits and clients.

2. Review the website content and language

Although most small businesses have websites, it’s necessary for owners to take a step back and review the website through the eyes of a consumer. Too often people assume that website visitors have a certain level of company knowledge, or that they speak the same jargon. That’s not always the case. For example, the aforementioned tech company originally wrote so vaguely about their services using insider jargon that neither target audience understood the company’s mission. Once the text was rewritten with specific consumers in mind, people started coming to the owner and saying “Now that you’ve redone your website, I finally understand what your company is about.” In order to not find yourself in that position, ask yourself:

1. Does the website have the information my target audience needs?

A company website is useless if it doesn’t have the information your target audience needs. On the most basic level, this should include what your company does, in-depth product or service information, prices associated with your services, and contact information.
It’s actually astonishing how often companies, both large and small, don’t do this.
Just the other day, I was looking at marketing software and even now I couldn’t tell you what their product does. If they had taken a step back and assumed that people didn’t know what their company did, their website would be more effective and they’d likely increase leads.

2. Am I using the language my target audience would use?

Oftentimes, we get so wrapped up in our industry that we forget that others, especially customers, don’t necessarily use the same terms as us. By using terms that are different from those of your target audience, your organic traffic will suffer and your website won’t be nearly as effective. When you talk to your customers during the branding exercise, see what terms they use. Use keyword research to validate your findings and use this language on the website.

Remember that your brand position is at the heart of this language and content. You want to talk about your core competencies in a language that’s accessible, but through the lens of what makes you different. The tech consulting firm I worked with, for example, rewrote their text so that there were pages dedicated to both their recruiting and consulting services. Both of those pages used the terms that those specific audiences would use, spoke in depth as to what these services were, and did so by concentrating on the ‘elite’ factor in a way that appealed to both sides. The content and language need to be there for your audience, but use the defining aspects of your brand to spice it up.

3. Develop overarching marketing strategy

So at this point, you have a website that reflects your brand and differentiates you from your competitors. I’m going to assume that your website is already
optimized for search engines and that you have a good user experience. You’re done, right? Yes and no. You could be done if you’re not relying on online to be a huge source of business. If you are counting on online, it’s time to start working on your overarching online marketing strategy.

This is the part that tends to feel the most overwhelming for small businesses. With so many different avenues out there, it can be stressful knowing what to pursue. My first piece of advice? Don’t pursue them all. It’s okay not to. You’re a small business owner with limited resources, so only go with the ones that will have the biggest ROI.
So how do you know which ones are worth your time?

Content strategy

In the online marketing world, content is king. Google wants you to deliver value to your site visitors and unique content is one way of going about this. Building a content strategy isn’t easy though. You don’t want to write the same thing that everyone else in your industry is writing about. There’s no unique value in that, and because your site likely isn’t strong from a domain authority perspective (yet!), you’ll usually find it difficult to rank against the big sites who are writing the same content. 

Instead, you’ll need to take stances on issues or solve your clients’ unique problems, giving them a reason to keep coming back to your site. If you can do this, great, but don’t just write content for the sake of it. If you’re a small ice cream shop for example, it’s going to be difficult to write content that’s on-brand and relevant to your audience. In this case, focus on other marketing strategies.

Paid

Doing paid, whether search, display, or social, can be really effective if done correctly. The downside? It can take a lot of time and money to monitor and improve on your campaigns. Highly competitive terms can have extremely high cost-per-click (CPC) rates, and the cost-per-action (CPA) is usually even higher. For example, terms in the insurance industry can have CPCs of $50 in a search environment. 
In order to be as cost efficient with this strategy, you’ll have to constantly monitor your campaigns and see what is working well and what isn’t. Even though it can eat through your time and money, it’s a good option for people who aren’t showing up in SERPs or driving traffic from other avenues.

Social

Social can be a really effective way of engaging consumers and building brand loyalty, but I normally only suggest starting a social strategy once a company has built out their brand and website. You’re going to need unique content, images, or deals in order to have a social marketing strategy. It’s often easier to start in other areas and build a catalog of resources before you launch into social.
Once you have content to share, decide which social platforms best fit your company’s mission. For example, LinkedIn and Twitter are usually better for B2B while Facebook is better for B2C. Just like you don’t have to chase every marketing strategy, you don’t have to have a social campaign for every platform. Concentrate on the one or two that will best reach your audience. Make sure the content you’re sharing will do well on that platform. For Facebook and Pinterest, you’ll need image based content while Twitter and LinkedIn will be best for article-based content or quick updates.

Email

Email marketing isn’t an effective method of gaining new customers, but is a great avenue for businesses trying to increase retention or brand loyalty. If this is your goal, make sure your emails contain value. For example, you open email from your doctor’s office reminding you about an appointment or from a local ice cream shop that offers discounts because these emails contain value. When people open these emails, their lives get easier or they’re given something that gives them tangible value. It’s vital that your email marketing communications do the same whether it be content or deals.

Local

If you’re a small business using the Internet to drive traffic to your store, I absolutely believe you should be invested in local. While there’s the initial time investment to get it set up, there’s a minimal time investment needed to keep it up-to-date.

Promotions

At Distilled, we have a whole team responsible for reaching out to bloggers and publications in order to get our clients and their content featured in the right places. Their work not only helps build brand awareness but, when our clients’ work is covered and linked to, also has the added SEO benefit of natural links and, in turn, a stronger site.
Most small businesses don’t have the resources for this kind of promotion, but if you want your brand and organic traffic to grow, it’s vital that you partake in a variation of this. Instead of scoping out bloggers and target publications like the New York Times though, start small. Build relationships with other businesses in your area or be active in industry specific forums. Building those relationships and positioning yourself as a thought leader will help your business as well as your own name grow which can then result in brand awareness and links. For small businesses, it’s important to network even in a way that isn’t necessarily ‘online first.’

Small Business Branding advice

There’s a lot that goes into marketing for any size company, but it can be particularly overwhelming for small businesses which have limited time and resources. It’ll be a lot of work, no doubt about it, but will feel a little more manageable, even for one-person teams, if you take it one step at a time.

Start by figuring out what makes your company different and communicating that. In my experience, this alone will put you ahead of many of your small business counterparts. Then it’s time to think about your customers’ needs and how you’ll address them. Having content that’s valuable to your customers and their problems, content they’ll actually want to consume, is a huge part of the battle.
Now that you’ve got the content, decide which marketing strategies will be most likely to help you reach your target audience. Just remember that you don’t have to overextend yourself and use every possible marketing channel to do this. So: Brand. Language. Content. Share. You’ve got this.
Tell me about your small business branding adventures in the comments below!

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Ways to Proactively Welcome Women Into Online Marketing

Posted on September 18, 2014 by jeffriseo

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

A lot of my life’s work has been focused on increasing the visibility of women and other minorities in male-dominated professional fields. I’m not here to give you an intersectional Feminism 101 lesson or explain to you that institutional sexism is indeed alive and systemically present in online marketing. Instead, in the spirit of the Moz blog, I want to give you tips and tricks to make our corner of the world more welcoming to women. Several of these tips can also easily be adjusted and applied to other groups of marginalized people. Some can really just be applied broadly to life. According to our 2013 industry survey, 28.3% of online marketers are women, and at MozCon 2014, 31% of the audience self-identified as female (up 11% from 2013). We’ve been here for a while.

If this post gets your bristles up and you’re ready to yell at me in the comments, I ask you to 
check out the many resources at the bottom to help build the basics to better understanding the “whys” and realizing “yes, this is a thing.”

In order to be better marketers and better people, we need to open ourselves up to the experiences of others, particularly to the voices of people whose backgrounds are different than ours. But because of how our cultural biases work, we often must actively and consciously work at creating more welcoming environments. It sucks to think we’re any less than awesome, and even when we consider ourselves non-prejudiced, our behavior can still support systems of sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and more.

Let’s dive in and shake up the industry!


Never assume someone’s gender, especially in online communications. If you’re in doubt, either ask or use a gender-neutral pronoun.

If we had a nickel for every time the all-female-identified community team was emailed or Facebook messaged as “Dear Sirs” because we work for a SaaS technology company, we’d be rolling in nickels Scrooge McDuck-style.

Nothing can instill
imposter syndrome or make someone personally upset like being misgendered. Human culture is so sensitive to displays of gender and identification of gender that a misplaced “sir” or “ma’am” can be incredibly insulting. If the person being misgendered is genderqueer or transgendered, they may be even more sensitive due to the vulnerability of displaying to the world who they are as opposed to who society thinks they should be.

If you’re ever communicating with someone whose gender you’re unsure of, it’s better to ask than to use an errant pronoun. So rip out that “Dear Sir” and replace it instead with “To Whom It May Concern,” or better yet, something more specifically personal. Dump the he, she, or s/he and just use an epicene “they.” If emailing my team, try “Hi, awesome community team…” You’ll probably see better success with your request by not starting out on the wrong foot.


Girls vs. women: Refer to groups of adults with words that imply adulthood, especially in professional settings.

Perhaps one of my top offenses as a professional woman: being labeled as a girl or seeing another woman or group of women labeled as such. The worst is when it’s the “men and the girls” or “the guys and the girls.” Stop infantilizing women!

Again, this elicits imposter syndrome and also makes women appear inferior, as children have more to learn than adults. So please stop referring to us as girls and conjuring up images of pink, pigtails, and Barbie dolls. We’re professionals and grown-ups.

The girls are gushing... tweet

The tweet above was sent out by a company I’ve worked with and expected more from. The webinar was with two women I’ve also worked with and are some of the sharpest, smartest minds out there in our industry. They were talking about online marketing, and it was completely inappropriate for the company hosting the webinar to refer to them as “girls.” (Neither of these women worked or have worked for said company in the past.)

And before anyone mentions the phenomena of the term “geek girls,” let me take a moment to address it. I know there are many organizations that are working hard to bring the achievements of women in all forms of geekdom, including tech, and inviting more women to join that call themselves “geek girls” or have some variation in their name. This is fine. This is their group’s choice for self-identification, branding, and rolls-off-the-tongue alliteration. However, you would never say “All the girls going to Geek Girl dinners…” They’re adult women.


It’s not appropriate to have value judgments about the way a person looks in a professional setting.

Unfortunately, because women are too often seen as objects instead of people, those objects are given value judgements on their appearances. Women shouldn’t be treated like you’re picking out the best sofa for your living room. It doesn’t matter how cute you may think a woman in the industry is, she likely doesn’t want to hear it or doesn’t care.

Constantly judging women based on our appearances damages self-esteem. It entrenches stereotypes about beauty having been a woman’s most important asset
since she was a little girl. It also puts women who don’t fit up to traditional Western beauty standards—maybe they’re plus-sized, women of color, genderqueer, etc.—at a disadvantage to gaining the professional attention of anyone. Think twice before commenting to a woman how beautiful she is. Or, conversely, how unattractive. (Same goes for men, by the way.)

At the end of the day, what matters most is brainpower, so let’s actually act like it.

Hillary Clinton is asked about who designs her clothing, and she asks if men ever get that question.
When I think of highly successful women, who are constantly judged on their attractiveness, Hillary Clinton’s a powerful example. Do we pay the same attention to current US Secretary of State John Kerry’s pantsuits?

For more things not to say to women in a professional setting, I highly suggest reading
Ruth Burr’s Things You Think Aren’t Sexist, But Really Are.


Follow more women on social media.

Particularly on social media that’s public and open like Twitter. With networks like Facebook, many women I know actually don’t “friend” people they have met face-to-face or actually consider friends for safety reasons. Sadly, on networks such as Twitter and even the female-dominated Pinterest,
men are followed at higher rates than women.

In a perfect world, content on social networks would be shared based entirely on merit. We’d only share the funniest tweet, the cutest cat photo, the most insightful post on Google Analytics, or the best hack we learned today. The best people and brands would have millions of followers. We’d have no internal biases.

But the truth is that as the world gets smaller, in that we’re more connected, and as technology serves “smarter” content, we’re only going to see people more like ourselves.
Eli Pariser called this the “filter bubble.” And while he particularly noted the consequences of this in politics and being attuned to world events, this also applies to the experiences of people who are not like you demographically.

For example, over the Memorial Day weekend this past May, Google released a Penguin update. My Twitter stream was full of Penguin talk by male-identified SEOs. What were the women talking about that weekend? #yesallwomen. I couldn’t help but wonder if male SEOs, who followed other SEOs primarily, which is a male-dominated industry, even saw the hashtag actively in their streams? Did they know how big the #yesallwomen hashtag was until they saw news stories? I hope for the best, but realistically think about the bubble.

“The internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” — Eli Pariser

So how do we see the world we need to see? How do we work to essentially outsmart these built-in features? On Twitter, it’s actually pretty easy to find and follow people who aren’t like you.

Twitter’s own analytics and our own
Followerwonk will break down the gender of who follows you and whom you follow. Here are some breakdowns of my own Twitter account and those of my fellow Twitter-loving Mozzers, including the genders of the people we follow:

Mozzer Twitter followers gender breakdown

Here’s Twitter’s own analytics on the gender breakdown of who follows me (which I think speaks volumes about our industry as “SEO” is the top interest of people following me):

Gender breakdown of my Twitter followers according to Twitter Analytics

It’s worth noting that Twitter has categorized every account as either male or female. This is problematic because some accounts are companies, not people, and it discounts people who do not identify with either gender or are somewhere in the middle.
Twitter’s using a mix of self-reported demographics (what Followerwonk picked up), name categorization of gender, and natural language processing to look for gender signifiers. My recommendation for Twitter: join Facebook in giving people more gender options and toss those companies out.

Recently, our own Rand Fishkin took a close examination of his followers and those he followed back, in a concerted effort to follow more women on Twitter. Rand was pretty shocked to learn how many more male followers he had than female, and he was perhaps more shocked about my followers, given that my Twitter bio identifies me as a feminist and I tweet more about social justice than online marketing.

Rand wants to have a more gender balanced Twitter following

In addition to following more women, look at the gender balance of people you retweet and whose voices you’re helping amplify.
Twee-Q analyzes your last 100 tweets and shows the gender balance who you’ve been retweeting. Entrepreneur Anil Dash talked about how he spent a year only retweeting women. Even if you don’t follow Dash’s footsteps, it’s pretty eye opening to see just who you’re retweeting.

My twee-q score
I swear I did not stage this equal RTing result. Usually, I skew toward more women than men.


Create inclusive community guidelines or a code of conduct for your site, blog, forums, reviews, social media, events, etc.

As a community manager, I’m a little obsessed with keeping the virtual living room free of hatred, especially on sites directly owned by a brand. I love, for example, that the comments on the Moz Blog are actually valuable to read, unlike almost every other site out there.

It’s hard to backpedal and bring order to your community; we all watched YouTube integrate G+ and Huffington Post hire an army of comment moderators. But most of us aren’t managing a community with millions of incoming comments and forum posts. Community guidelines or a code of conduct give you more room to be explicit about expectations for behavior on your properties.

For example, Moz works in the SEO space. So while it’s not very
TAGFEE to put a spammy link in a comment, it saves argument time that it’s actually outlined in our community etiquette. While not directly tied to stopping discrimination, you can easily see how parallels in explicitly outlining what kinds of speech your brand won’t tolerate. “Be excellent to each other” can just bring on too many arguments from the person you’re moderating.

The allowance of hate-fueled user-generated content sends a signal loud and clear to women, minorities, and allies just what your brand is about, and this feeling is only amplified when we all meet face-to-face.

This year at MozCon, we implemented a
Code of Conduct. For those that don’t know, in the events space, there’s been an increasing awareness of harassment at conferences. One way organizers are combating it and making attendees safer is by explicitly laying out a policy against this behavior and how event organizers will respond to said bad behavior. Again, this should be solvable simply by saying “be TAGFEE”—or whatever other motto your brand chooses—but unfortunately, this is not the case.

Some of you have speculated about what happened to make the MozCon committee decide we needed a code of conduct.
We created the code to be proactive. This is just one more way to improve our conference and be welcoming to marketers of all stripes.


MozCon 2014 attendees having breakfast before the show.


Make your brand voice and design guides inclusive instead of exclusive.

Many people make employment choices, not to mention purchase decisions, based on “culture.” Culture is a nebulous idea, and while it’s formed by the combination of how people in your company act and brand perception, you can start out on the right foot. Culture’s not a top-down dictate, but the signals come from both directions, and a strong brand voice and design guide can help company communication on what’s implicitly acceptable and what’s not.

Most of us work for brands that are gender-neutral. We don’t cater to an exclusively female-identified or male-identified audience. However, we tend to adopt cultural tones that identify our band as a specific gender, and furthermore our industry as exclusive, instead of inclusive.

You’re probably thinking about how Moz’s own Roger Mozbot uses the male pronoun. While Roger’s name and his use of the male pronoun will likely never change, those of us who work on Roger as a mascot strive to make him as gender neutral as possible. He doesn’t use specific masculine language, and despite many requests from our community, he doesn’t have a love interest. Roger’s first love is SEO, after all. He’s beloved by all our community members, not just the male-identified ones.

Not all companies think about these nuances. For example, why is banking portrayed as a masculine industry? Why does it need to support stereotypes that women are bad with money, math, and the financial market? Doesn’t every adult need a bank account, retirement savings, and access to their money? Does the marketing-bias only reflect the hiring bias?

JPMorgan and Chase's hiring page
Who’s getting interviewed here? Who looks most like a banker? Who should apply here?

Brands who do live in a sphere where they can say 80%+ of their audience comes from a particular gender should also pay attention. If none of your competitors are going after that other ~20% of audience share, you have a market opportunity. At the very least, small tweaks to your voice—like using that epicene “they”—or adding a pop color not commonly associated with your industry’s dominant gender can make you the friendly, go-to brand for those who feel like outsiders in your niche.

ExOfficio shows actual customers fishing, not just models in the clothing.

Outdoor and travel clothing brand
ExOfficio is known for their fishing clothing. Fishing is considered a male market, but they do a great job making the same fishing clothing for women too. Sure, they might add in different styling and colors and offer some variations geared toward women’s fashion, but their imagery and their core offering of fishing clothing doesn’t shout out that these are women fishing.

Let’s also look at a cautionary tale of what can happen when brands try to be more inclusive toward women: the pinkification of the market.

While yes, this is marketed toward girls, not women, this fishing set nicely illustrates pinkification. Turning it pink and labeling it with Barbie somehow makes it “for girls.” But what really makes me upset is the language. Behold the “Purse” of fishing, which contains the exact same actual equipment as the Spider-Man one marketed toward boys.

While this may seem a bit consumer-focused, the products you put out the world and the marketing behind them reflect directly if someone can see themselves working at your brand. When I first heard Apple announce the iPad, my gut reaction was to ask if there was a single woman working on the Apple marketing/product team. Because to me,
this MAD TV sketch about the then-newly released iPad (possibly NSFW) said all the things I was thinking.

Conversely, if your employees know this matters, when something bothers them, they’ll likely bring it up. Recently at Moz, our team worked hard on new customer personas. At the end of the day, four were chosen as Moz’s current target market and the rest put on hold as future markets. While the personas were gender-balanced overall, it so happened that three of the four current customer personas were male. Because of Moz’s culture, multiple people approached the persona team questioning this. The team then pivoted to change the names to be gender neutral selections and edit the accompanying art and descriptive text to reflect this.


Publishing an image of your company, what’s the gender balance?

While we’re thinking about how your brand looks to potential employees, what images are out there of your company? Are they only men? Is there only one type of woman?

Recruiting at Moz

Unfortunately, this main image on our recruiting page presents Moz as looking for a certain type of employee: a young, fit, white professional, preferably with light-colored hair. This doesn’t reflect the actual makeup of Moz, especially at 140+ people. But what if this was the only image? What would a potential employee or recruit who didn’t fit that image think?

This can be particularly challenging for small businesses. You also don’t want your employees to feel tokenized for their gender identity or minority status. Perhaps it’s time to think more about what a photo means to applicants.
BarkBox had 30 employees in early 2014, and here’s their simple, yet more welcoming recruiting image:

BarkBox's recruiting image

It only takes a little extra effort to go a long way.


Include women in interviews, quotes, and other articles and events touting industry experts.

There’s simply no excuse for an article or an event full of industry experts and to not have the final lineup include a single woman. While there’s no “magical number” to achieve diversity, it’s simply bad practice when a lineup features only men. If you seriously can’t think of a single woman expert in your field, you’re doing something wrong.

There’s
a strong correlation between seeing yourself demographically and dreaming that you could do that job too. We all need inspiration and heroes to look up to and aspire to be like. And great marketers, we come from all kinds of backgrounds and make this industry a better place because of that.

If you’re a white man asked to speak as an industry expert, it’s time to ask who else is being featured or speaking. Turn down engagements that only have male voices. Ask more of authors and conference runners. If you’re the author or event curator, reach out to someone in the industry who’s opinion you respect for ideas of experts you’re not thinking of. I’ll gladly send you my binders full of women marketing experts.

SMX East 2014 speaker lineup
A sample of the speakers at SMX East 2014


When you witness sexist behavior, say something.

I saved this tip for last because it is one of the most powerful. Simply not keeping quiet and speaking up can change the world. We all have to work together.

“People will not listen unless you are an old, white man, so I’m an old white man, and I will use that to help people who need it.” — Sir Patrick Stewart

Unfortunately when women call people out on sexist behavior, it’s not as powerful as men saying the same thing. Same goes for a black person calling a white person out on racist behavior, etc. And when a woman calls a man out, she’s making a “political” statement and suffers real consequences in her life. Despite laws in many countries against these things, complaints of any kind can lead to economic consequences of losing jobs or clients and to safety concerns about harassment both online and offline.

A recent study actually showed that whistle-blowing or any kind of confrontation wasn’t even necessary for economic consequences. Women and people of color who promoted other women and people of color and/or valued diversity in the workplace received lower performance reviews than white men who did the same.

Male-identified friends, if you see someone or a company doing these things, please help and speak up. Please stand up for those who are doing this hard work and please be aware of your own biases.


More resources…


Basic resources:

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
The Male Privilege Checklist by Barry Deutsch
30+ Examples of Heterosexual Privilege in the US by Sam Killermann
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi
The Problem When Sexism Just Sounds So Darn Friendly… by Melanie Tannenbaum
Derailing For Dummies
Aamer Rahman from
Fear of a Brown Planet on “Reverse Racism”
8 Things White People Really Need to Understand About Race by James Utt
An open letter to privileged people who play devil’s advocate by Juliana Britto
Yes, All Men: Every Man Needs to Understand Internalized Misogyny and Male Violence by Tom Hawking
Roll up, roll up, to see a man talking about feminism. What could possibly go wrong? by Robert Webb


SEO, tech, and startup specific resources:

Not all men. Not all industries. But nearly always men in my industry by Martin Belam
Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet by Amanda Hess
Women as Entertainment in the SEO Industry by Jane Copland
The Problem with ‘Brogrammers’: Why is Silicon Valley so stubbornly white and male? by Rebecca Burns
Meritocracy [in Tech] is Almost as Real as this Unicorn by Tara Hunt
Death by a thousand cuts: the reality of being a woman in tech by Meg Kierstead
In Tech Marketing Jobs, Women’s Successes Are Rarely Recognized by Laura Sydell
Eve wasn’t invited: Integrating women into the Apple community by Brianna Wu


Further resources:

On being an ally and being called out on your privilege by Andrew David Thaler
TEDxWomen Talk from Anita Sarkeesian about
Online Harassment & Cyber Mobs
Dissent Unheard Of, real and economic impact of speaking out by Ashe Dryden
Dos and Don’ts To Combat Online Sexism by Leigh Alexander
In Which We Teach You How To Be A Woman In Any Boys’ Club by Molly Lambert
The Confidence Gap by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
“Raving Amazons”: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media by I’Nasah Crockett
Visibility Conundrums of Being Queer by Erica McGillivray

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