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Reblogged 2 years ago from www.outreachmama.comPosted by David-Mihm
To all Moz Local fans in the UK, I’m excited to announce that your wait is over. As the sun rises “across the pond” this morning, Moz Local is officially live in the United Kingdom!
As many of you know, we released the US version of Moz Local in March 2014. After 12 months of terrific growth in the US, and a boatload of technical improvements and feature releases–especially for Enterprise customers–we released the Check Listing feature for a limited set of partner search engines and directories in the UK in April of this year.
Over 20,000 of you have checked your listings (or your clients’ listings) in the last 3-1/2 months. Those lookups have helped us refine and improve the background technology immensely (more on that below). We’ve been just as eager to release the fully-featured product as you’ve been to use it, and the technical pieces have finally fallen into place for us to do so.
The concept is the same as the US version of Moz Local: show you how accurately and completely your business is listed on the most important local search platforms and directories, and optimize and perfect as many of those business listings as we can on your behalf.
For customers specifically looking for you, accurate business listings are obviously important. For customers who might not know about you yet, they’re also among the most important factors for ranking in local searches on Google. Basically, the more times Google sees your name, address, phone, and website listed the same way on quality local websites, the more trust they have in your business, and the higher you’re likely to rank.
Moz Local is designed to help on both these fronts.
To use the product, you simply need to type a name and postcode at moz.com/local. We’ll then show you a list of the closest matching listings we found. We prioritize verified listing information that we find on Google or Facebook, and selecting one of those verified listings means we’ll be able to distribute it on your behalf.
Clicking on a result brings you to a full details report for that listing. We’ll show you how accurate and complete your listings are now, and where they could be after using our product.
Clicking the tabs beneath the Listing Score graphic will show you some of the incompletions and inconsistencies that publishing your listing with Moz Local will address.
For customers with hundreds or thousands of locations, bulk upload is also available using a modified version of your data from Google My Business–feel free to e-mail enterpriselocal@moz.com for more details.
We’ve prioritized the most important commercial sites in the UK local search ecosystem, and made them the centerpieces of Moz Local. We’ll update your data directly on globally-important players Factual and Foursquare, and the UK-specific players CentralIndex, Thomson Local, and the Scoot network–which includes key directories like TouchLocal, The Independent, The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Scotsman, and Wales Online.
We’ll be adding two more major destinations shortly, and for those of you who sign up before that time, your listings will be automatically distributed to the additional destinations when the integrations are complete.
The cost per listing is £84/year, which includes distribution to the sites mentioned above with unlimited updates throughout the year, monitoring of your progress over time, geographically- focused reporting, and the ability to find and close duplicate listings right from your Moz Local dashboard–all the great upgrades that my colleague Noam Chitayat blogged about here.
Well, as I mentioned just a couple paragraphs ago, we’ve got two additional destinations to which we’ll be sending your data in very short order. Once those integrations are complete, we’ll be just a few weeks away from releasing our biggest set of features since we launched. I look forward to sharing more about these features at BrightonSEO at the end of the summer!
For those of you around the world in Canada, Australia, and other countries, we know there’s plenty of demand for Moz Local overseas, and we’re working as quickly as we can to build additional relationships abroad. And to our friends in the UK, please let us know how we can continue to make the product even better!
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Posted by Isla_McKetta
Quick note: This article is meant to apply to teams of all sizes, from the sole proprietor who spends all night writing their copy (because they’re doing business during the day) to the copy team who occupies an entire floor and produces thousands of pieces of content per week. So if you run into a section that you feel requires more resources than you can devote just now, that’s okay. Bookmark it and revisit when you can, or scale the step down to a more appropriate size for your team. We believe all the information here is important, but that does not mean you have to do everything right now.
If you thought ideation was fun, get ready for content creation. Sure, we’ve all written some things before, but the creation phase of content marketing is where you get to watch that beloved idea start to take shape.
Before you start creating, though, you want to get (at least a little) organized, and an editorial calendar is the perfect first step.
Creativity and organization are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they can feed each other. A solid schedule gives you and your writers the time and space to be wild and creative. If you’re just starting out, this document may be sparse, but it’s no less important. Starting early with your editorial calendar also saves you from creating content willy-nilly and then finding out months later that no one ever finished that pesky (but crucial) “About” page.
There’s no wrong way to set up your editorial calendar, as long as it’s meeting your needs. Remember that an editorial calendar is a living document, and it will need to change as a hot topic comes up or an author drops out.
There are a lot of different types of documents that pass for editorial calendars. You get to pick the one that’s right for your team. The simplest version is a straight-up calendar with post titles written out on each day. You could even use a wall calendar and a Sharpie.
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Title |
The Five Colors of Oscar Fashion | 12 Fabrics We’re Watching for Fall | Is Charmeuse the New Corduroy? | Hot Right Now: Matching Your Handbag to Your Hatpin | Tea-length and Other Fab Vocab You Need to Know |
Author | Ellie | James | Marta | Laila | Alex |
Teams who are balancing content for different brands at agencies or other more complex content environments will want to add categories, author information, content type, social promo, and more to their calendars.
Truly complex editorial calendars are more like hybrid content creation/editorial calendars, where each of the steps to create and publish the content are indicated and someone has planned for how long all of that takes. These can be very helpful if the content you’re responsible for crosses a lot of teams and can take a long time to complete. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Excel or a Google Doc, as long as the people who need the calendar can easily access it. Gantt charts can be excellent for this. Here’s a favorite template for creating a Gantt chart in Google Docs (and they only get more sophisticated).
Complex calendars can encompass everything from ideation through writing, legal review, and publishing. You might even add content localization if your empire spans more than one continent to make sure you have the currency, date formatting, and even slang right.
Governance outlines who is taking responsibility for your content. Who evaluates your content performance? What about freshness? Who decides to update (or kill) an older post? Who designs and optimizes workflows for your team or chooses and manages your CMS?
All these individual concerns fall into two overarching components to governance: daily maintenance and overall strategy. In the long run it helps if one person has oversight of the whole process, but the smaller steps can easily be split among many team members. Read this to take your governance to the next level.
The scale of your writing enterprise doesn’t have to be limited to the number of authors you have on your team. It’s also important to consider the possibility of working with freelancers and guest authors. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of outsourced versus in-house talent.
In-house authors |
Guest authors and freelancers |
|
Responsible to |
You |
Themselves |
Paid by |
You (as part of their salary) |
You (on a per-piece basis) |
Subject matter expertise |
Broad but shallow |
Deep but narrow |
Capacity for extra work |
As you wish |
Show me the Benjamins |
Turnaround time |
On a dime |
Varies |
Communication investment |
Less |
More |
Devoted audience |
Smaller |
Potentially huge |
From that table, it might look like in-house authors have a lot more advantages. That’s somewhat true, but do not underestimate the value of occasionally working with a true industry expert who has name recognition and a huge following. Whichever route you take (and there are plenty of hybrid options), it’s always okay to ask that the writers you are working with be professional about communication, payment, and deadlines. In some industries, guest writers will write for links. Consider yourself lucky if that’s true. Remember, though, that the final paycheck can be great leverage for getting a writer to do exactly what you need them to (such as making their deadlines).
So those are some things you need to have in place before you create content. Now’s the fun part: getting started. One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that new and exciting tools crop up every day to help make our jobs easier and more efficient. Here are a few of our favorites.
You can always use Excel or a Google Doc to set up your editorial calendar, but we really like Trello for the ability to gather a lot of information in one card and then drag and drop it into place. Once there are actual dates attached to your content, you might be happier with something like a Google Calendar.
If you need a quick fix for ideation, turn your keywords into wacky ideas with Portent’s Title Maker. You probably won’t want to write to the exact title you’re given (although “True Facts about Justin Bieber’s Love of Pickles” does sound pretty fascinating…), but it’s a good way to get loose and look at your topic from a new angle.
Once you’ve got that idea solidified, find out what your audience thinks about it by gathering information with Survey Monkey or your favorite survey tool. Or, use Storify to listen to what people are saying about your topic across a wide variety of platforms. You can also use Storify to save those references and turn them into a piece of content or an illustration for one. Don’t forget that a simple social ask can also do wonders.
Content doesn’t have to be all about the words. Screencasts, Google+ Hangouts, and presentations are all interesting ways to approach content. Remember that not everyone’s a reader. Some of your audience will be more interested in visual or interactive content. Make something for everyone.
Don’t forget to make your content pretty. It’s not that hard to find free stock images online (just make sure you aren’t violating someone’s copyright). We like Morgue File, Free Images, and Flickr’s Creative Commons. If you aren’t into stock images and don’t have access to in-house graphic design, it’s still relatively easy to add images to your content. Pull a screenshot with Skitch or dress up an existing image with Pixlr. You can also use something like Canva to create custom graphics.
Don’t stop with static graphics, though. There are so many tools out there to help you create gifs, quizzes and polls, maps, and even interactive timelines. Dream it, then search for it. Chances are whatever you’re thinking of is doable.
Less is more. That’s not an excuse to pare your blog down to one post per month (check out our publishing cadence experiment), but it is an important reminder that if you’re writing “How to Properly Install a Toilet Seat” two days after publishing “Toilet Seat Installation for Dummies,” you might want to rethink your strategy.
The thing is, and I’m going to use another cliché here to drive home the point, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Potential customers are roving the Internet right now looking for exactly what you’re selling. And if what they find is an only somewhat informative article stuffed with keywords and awful spelling and grammar mistakes… well, you don’t want that. Oh, and search engines think it’s spammy too…
We’re not copyright lawyers, so we can’t give you the ins and outs on all the technicalities. What we can tell you (and you already know this) is that it’s not okay to steal someone else’s work. You wouldn’t want them to do it to you. This includes images. So whenever you can, make your own images or find images that you can either purchase the rights to (stock imagery) or license under Creative Commons.
It’s usually okay to quote short portions of text, as long as you attribute the original source (and a link is nice). In general, titles and ideas can’t be copyrighted (though they might be trademarked or patented). When in doubt, asking for permission is smart.
That said, part of the fun of the Internet is the remixing culture which includes using things like memes and gifs. Just know that if you go that route, there is a certain amount of risk involved.
Your content needs to go through at least one editing cycle by someone other than the original author. There are two types of editing, developmental (which looks at the underlying structure of a piece that happens earlier in the writing cycle) and copy editing (which makes sure all the words are there and spelled right in the final draft).
If you have a very small team or are in a rush (and are working with writers that have some skill), you can often skip the developmental editing phase. But know that an investment in that close read of an early draft is often beneficial to the piece and to the writer’s overall growth.
Many content teams peer-edit work, which can be great. Other organizations prefer to run their work by a dedicated editor. There’s no wrong answer, as long as the work gets edited.
The good news is that search engines are doing their best to get closer and closer to understanding and processing natural language. So good writing (including the natural use of synonyms rather than repeating those keywords over and over and…) will take you a long way towards SEO mastery.
For that reason (and because it’s easy to get trapped in keyword thinking and veer into keyword stuffing), it’s often nice to think of your SEO check as a further edit of the post rather than something you should think about as you’re writing.
But there are still a few things you can do to help cover those SEO bets. Once you have that draft, do a pass for SEO to make sure you’ve covered the following:
Writing (assuming you’re the one doing the writing) can require a lot of energy—especially if you want to do it well. The best way to find time to write is to break each project down into little tasks. For example, writing a blog post actually breaks down into these steps (though not always in this order):
So if you only have random chunks of time, set aside 15-30 minutes one day (when your research is complete) to write a really great outline. Then find an hour the next to fill that outline in. After an additional hour the following day, (unless you’re dealing with a research-heavy post) you should have a solid draft by the end of day three.
The magic of working this way is that you engage your brain and then give it time to work in the background while you accomplish other tasks. Hemingway used to stop mid-sentence at the end of his writing days for the same reason.
Once you have that draft nailed, the rest of the steps are relatively easy (even the headline, which often takes longer to write than any other sentence, is easier after you’ve immersed yourself in the post over a few days).
Every designer and developer is a little different, so we can’t give you any blanket cure-alls for inter-departmental workarounds (aka “smashing silos”). But here are some suggestions to help you convey your vision while capitalizing on the expertise of your coworkers to make your content truly excellent.
From the initial brainstorm to general questions about how to work together, asking your team members what they think and prefer can go a long way. Communicate all the details you have (especially the unspoken expectations) and then listen.
If your designer tells you up front that your color scheme is years out of date, you’re saving time. And if your developer tells you that the interactive version of that timeline will require four times the resources, you have the info you need to fight for more budget (or reassess the project).
Things change in the design and development process. If you have interim check-ins already set up with everyone who’s working on the project, you’ll avoid the potential for nasty surprises at the end. Like finding out that no one has experience working with that hot new coding language you just read about and they’re trying to do a workaround that isn’t working.
Your job isn’t done when you hand over the copy to your designer or developer. Not only might they need help rewriting some of your text so that it fits in certain areas, they will also need you to proofread the final version. Accidents happen in the copy-and-paste process and there’s nothing sadder than a really beautiful (and expensive) piece of content that wraps up with a typo:
Conflict isn’t fun, but sometimes it’s necessary. The more people involved in your content, the more watered down the original idea can get and the more roadblocks and conflicting ideas you’ll run into. Some of that is very useful. But sometimes you’ll get pulled off track. Always remember who owns the final product (this may not be you) and be ready to stand up for the idea if it’s starting to get off track.
We’re confident this list will set you on the right path to creating some really awesome content, but is there more you’d like to know? Ask us your questions in the comments.
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Posted by Trevor-Klein
Content marketers hear regularly about how quality is far more important than quantity. You can publish a thousand blog posts in a year, but if only three of them are truly noteworthy, valuable, and share-worthy content—what Rand would call 10x content—then you’ve wasted quite a bit of time.
Here at Moz, we’ve published blog posts on a daily cadence since before almost any of us can remember. If you didn’t already know, Moz began as SEOmoz in 2004, and was little more than a blog where Rand fostered one of the earliest SEO communities. He offered a bit more background in a recent interview with Contently:
“It’s a habit that we’ve had since 2004, when I started the blog. It’s one of those things where I was writing every night. I think one of the big reasons that that worked so well in the pre-social-media era was because the Moz comments and the Moz blogs were like the Twitter or Facebook for our little communities.”
We’ve taken occasional days off for major holidays when we knew the traffic volume wouldn’t be there, but the guiding philosophy was that we published every day because that’s what our audience expected. If we stepped back from that schedule, we’d lose our street cred, our reliability, and a sizeable chunk of our audience, not to mention the opportunities for increased traffic.
It’s now quite easy to have those discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, and other networks, making our old approach an outdated philosophy that was based more on fear of the unknown and a misguided assumption than on actual data.
This May and June, we decided to change that. We’re raising the bar, and we want to show you why.
It started with a tweet:
This week, Hubspot published 49 unique blogposts (or ~10/weekday). I wonder if they’ve tested various quantities and found that to be ideal?
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 9, 2015
The ensuing discussion piqued the interest of Joe Chernov and Ginny Soskey at HubSpot, as they wondered what effects it might have to publish more or less frequently. We decided to collaborate on a pair of experiments to find out.
The experiments were simple: Set a benchmark of two “normal” weeks, then adjust the publishing volumes on each blog to (roughly) half the normal cadence for two weeks and double the normal cadence for two weeks.
One thing we should note from the get-go: We were always sure that Whiteboard Friday would continue to be a weekly tradition, so we didn’t alter the publishing schedule for those. This experiment altered the schedule from Monday-Thursday.
We closely monitored our blog traffic and engagement metrics, as well as subscriptions to our emailed blog newsletter. HubSpot ran their experiment first, allowing Moz to learn a few lessons from their experience before starting our own.
The results from HubSpot’s experiment were also published today; make sure you take a look.
We had several central questions going into this experiment, and hypotheses for how each one would come out. There are six parts, and they’re laid out below as follows:
Important note: We know this is non-scientific. These results are intended to be directional, not definitive, and our takeaways—while they represent our best attempts at progress—are by no means perfect. We want this to be an ongoing discussion, so please chime in with your ideas in the comments!
Publishing fewer posts each week will lead to a significant decrease in overall traffic to the blog. Publishing more posts each week will lead to a significant increase in overall traffic to the blog. These changes will be proportional to the decrease/increase in publishing volume.
Let’s get the high-level overview before we dive into details. Traffic on the Moz Blog can obviously vary quite a bit depending on the content, but all things considered, it’s remarkably steady. Here are total daily unique pageviews to all pages on the blog so far in 2015:
Spikes and dips here and there, but we’re able to pull a pretty good benchmark from that data. Here’s what that benchmark looks like:
Average weekday uniques: |
38,620 |
Average weekly uniques: |
227,450 |
Now, here’s the traffic from the four weeks leading up to the reduced/increased publishing frequency, as well as the two weeks at half-cadence and the two weeks at double-cadence (I’ve also included a line for the average of 38,620):
There’s a bit of a difference. You can tell the traffic during half-cadence weeks was a little lower, and the traffic during double-cadence weeks appears a little higher. I’d take the numbers highlighted above in green over the ones in red any day of the week, but those curves show far smaller variation than we’d anticipated.
Here’s a look at weekly numbers:
That makes the dip a little clearer, but it’s hard to tell from that chart whether the loss in traffic is anything to be worried about.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into the two testing periods and see if we can’t pick apart something more interesting. You might notice from the above daily charts that the blog traffic follows a regular weekly pattern. It peaks on Tuesday and falls gradually throughout the rest of the week. That’s characteristic of our audience, which finds less and less time to read the blog as the week goes on. We wanted to take that variability into account when looking at each day during the testing period, and the following chart does just that.
It plots the traffic during the tests as a percent deviation from the average traffic on any given day of the week. So, the four Tuesdays that passed during the test are compared to our average Tuesday traffic, the four Wednesdays to the average Wednesday, and so on. Let’s take a look:
This is a more noteworthy difference. Dropping the publishing volume to half our normal cadence resulted in, on average, a 5.6% drop in unique pageviews from those daily averages.
That actually makes perfect sense when it’s put in context. Somewhere around 10-15% of our blog traffic comes from the most recent week’s worth of posts (the rest is to older posts). If we publish half as many posts in a given week, there are half as many new pages to view, so we might expect half as many unique pageviews to those newer posts.
That’s pageviews, though. What about sessions? Are fewer people visiting the blog in the first place due to our reduced publishing volume? Let’s find out:
That’s a bit more palatable. We lost 2.9% of our sessions that included visits to the blog during a two-week period when we cut our publishing volume in half. That’s close enough that, for a non-scientific study, we can pretty well call it negligible. The shift could easily have been caused by the particular pieces of content we published, not by the schedule on which we published them.
Another interesting thing to note about the chart showing deviations from daily averages: Doubling the publishing volume did, on average, absolutely nothing to the number of unique pageviews. The average increase in uniques from daily averages during the double-cadence period is just a bit over 3%. That suggests relative saturation; people don’t have time to invest in reading more than one Moz Blog post each day. (I’m not surprised; I barely have time to read more than one Moz Blog post each day!) 😉
It also emphasizes something we’ve known all along: Content marketing is a form of flywheel marketing. It takes quite a while to get it up to speed, but once it’s spinning, its massive inertia means that it isn’t easily affected by relatively small changes. It’ll keep going even if you step back and just watch for a short while.
The amount of total on-page engagement, in the form of thumbs up and comments on posts, will remain somewhat static, since people only have so much time. Reducing the blog frequency will cause engagement to approach saturation, and increasing the blog frequency will spread engagement more thinly.
Moz’s primary two engagement metrics are built into each page on our blog: thumbs up and comments. This one played out more or less to our expectations.
We can get a good sense for engagement with these posts by looking at our internal 1Metric data. We’ve iterated on this metric since we talked about it in this post, but the basic concept is still the same—it’s a two-digit score calculated from several “ingredients,” including metrics for traffic, on-page engagement, and social engagement.
Here’s a peek at the data for the two testing periods, with the double-cadence period highlighted in green, and the half-cadence period highlighted in red.
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text-align:center;
}
#engagement-table td {
text-align:center;
font-size:14pt;
font-weight:bold;
}
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background-color: #ffbfbf;
}
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background-color: #c9ffc9;
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Publish Date | Post Title | 1Metric Score | Unique Pageviews |
---|---|---|---|
25-Jun | How Google May Use Searcher, Usage, & Clickstream Behavior to Impact Rankings – Whiteboard Friday | 81 | 12,315 |
25-Jun | How to Rid Your Website of Six Common Google Analytics Headaches | 56 | 7,445 |
25-Jun | How to Build Links in Person | 36 | 5,045 |
24-Jun | What to See, Do, and More at MozCon 2015 in Seattle | 9 | 2,585 |
24-Jun | The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics | 80 | 15,152 |
23-Jun | Why ccTLDs Should Not Be an Automatic Choice for International Websites | 11 | 2,259 |
23-Jun | Brainstorm and Execute Killer Content Ideas Your Audience Will Love | 38 | 5,365 |
22-Jun | The Alleged $7.5 Billion Fraud in Online Advertising | 85 | 44,212 |
19-Jun | How to Estimate the Total Volume and Value of Keywords in a Given Market or Niche – Whiteboard Friday | 78 | 15,258 |
18-Jun | The Colossus Update: Waking The Giant | 62 | 14,687 |
17-Jun | New Features in OSE’s Spam Score & the Mozscape API | 10 | 1,901 |
17-Jun | How to Align Your Entire Company with Your Marketing Strategy | 44 | 7,312 |
16-Jun | Dissecting and Surviving Google’s Local Snack Pack Results | 15 | 2,663 |
15-Jun | Can You Rank in Google Without Links? New Data Says Slim Chance | 81 | 15,909 |
15-Jun | Study: 300 Google Sitelinks Search Boxes – Triggers and Trip-Ups Analyzed | 23 | 3,207 |
14-Jun | How to Choose a PPC Agency | 14 | 2,947 |
12-Jun | Why We Can’t Do Keyword Research Like It’s 2010 – Whiteboard Friday | 90 | 22,010 |
11-Jun | Eliminate Duplicate Content in Faceted Navigation with Ajax/JSON/JQuery | 38 | 5,753 |
9-Jun | 5 Spreadsheet Tips for Manual Link Audits | 50 | 6,331 |
5-Jun | Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? – Whiteboard Friday | 79 | 15,225 |
3-Jun | How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs) | 50 | 10,486 |
1-Jun | Misuses of 4 Google Analytics Metrics Debunked | 51 | 9,847 |
The 1Metric scores for the half-cadence period (in red) average almost 60, suggesting those posts performed better overall than those during the double-cadence period, which averaged a 1Metric score of 45. We know the traffic was lower during the half-cadence weeks, which suggests engagement must have been significantly higher to result in those scores, and vice-versa for the double-cadence weeks.
Taking a look at our on-page engagement metrics, we see that play out quite clearly:
The number of thumbs up and comments stayed relatively level during the half-cadence period, and fell sharply when there were twice as many posts as usual.
We’re incredibly lucky to have such an actively engaged community at Moz. The conversations that regularly happen in the comments—65 of them, on average—are easily one of my favorite parts of our site. We definitely have a “core” subset of our community that regularly takes the time to join in those discussions, and while the right post will tempt a far greater number of people to chime in, you can easily see patterns in the users who spend time in the comments. Those users, of course, only have a limited amount of time.
This is reflected in the data. When we published half as many posts, they still had time to comment on every one they wanted, so the number of comments left didn’t diminish. Then, when we published twice the number of posts we normally do, they didn’t spend twice as much time leaving comments; they were just pickier about which posts they commented on. The number of comments on each post stayed roughly the same.
The same goes for the thumbs.
The Moz Blog is available via an email subscription through FeedPress, linked to from a few different places on the site:
We wondered, what would happen to those subscriptions during the half-cadence period?
With fewer opportunities to impress people with the quality of the blog’s content and earn a spot in their inboxes, subscriptions to the blog posts will drop significantly during the half-cadence period.
As it turns out, there was minimal (if any) effect on email subscriptions. Check out the numbers for both periods below:
Here’s a view that’s a bit easier to digest, similar to the one for traffic in part 1 of this post. This shows daily deviations from the average number of new email subscriptions we get (about 34/day):
On the whole, this is a very uninteresting (and for that reason interesting!) result. Our subscription rate showed no noteworthy fluctuations during either of the two testing periods.
These numbers are based on the total number of subscribers, and with half as many emails going out during the half-cadence period, we can fairly confidently say that (since the total subscriber rate didn’t change) we didn’t get a decrease in unsubscribes during the half-cadence week, as we’d have seen an increase in the subscription rate. That’s a good sign: If people were fatigued by our rate of new emails already, we’d likely see a reduction in that fatigue during the half-cadence weeks, leading to less churn. No such reduction happened, so we’re comfortable continuing to send daily emails.
One important note is that we don’t send multiple emails each day, so during the double-cadence period we were sending daily digests of multiple posts. (Were we to send more than one each day, we might have expected a significant rise in unsubscribes. That’s something HubSpot was better able to track in their version of this experiment.)
This was another primary concern of ours: If we skipped days on the editorial calendar, and didn’t publish a new post, would our community cry foul? Would we be failing to meet the expectations we’d developed among our readers?
Having multiple days with no new post published in a relatively short period of time will lead to disappointment and outcry among the readership, which has grown to expect a new post every day.
While we didn’t proactively ask our community if they noticed, we were watching social traffic specifically for word of there not being a blog post on one or more of the days we skipped during the half-cadence period. We figured we’d find a bunch of “hey, what gives?” Our community team is great at monitoring social media for mentions—even those that don’t specifically ping us with @Moz—and this is what we found:
A single post.
I guess @Moz is looking into only posting 3 blogs a week. It’s the most depressing A/B test I’ve ever come across.
— Ben Starling (@BeenStarling) June 4, 2015
That’s really it. Other than this one tweet—one that elicited a heartfelt “Awww!” from Roger—there wasn’t a single peep from anyone. Crickets. This hypothesis couldn’t be more busted.
We asked in our most recent reader survey how often people generally read the Moz Blog, and 17% of readers reported that they read it every day.
Even if we assume some statistical variance and that some of those responses were slight exaggerations of the truth (survey data is never squishy, right?), that’s still a sizeable number of people who—in theory—should have noticed we weren’t publishing as much as we usually do. And yet, only one person had a reaction strong enough that they posted their thoughts in a place we could find them.
This is a far more subjective hypothesis—we can’t even measure the results beyond our own opinions—but we found it quite interesting nonetheless.
If we post fewer times per week, we’ll have more time and be better able to focus on the quality of the posts we do publish. If we publish more frequently, the quality of each post will suffer.
As nice an idea as this was, it turned out to be a bit backwards. Publishing fewer posts did leave us with more time, but we didn’t end up using it to dive deeper into revisions of other posts or come up with additional feedback for our scheduled authors. The Moz Blog is written largely by authors outside our own company, and even though we had more time we could have used to recommend edits, the authors didn’t have any more time than they otherwise would have, and it wouldn’t have been fair for us to ask them for it anyway.
What we did do is spend more time on bigger, more innovative projects, and ended the two half-cadence weeks feeling significantly more productive.
We also noticed that part of the stress of an editorial calendar comes from the fact that an artificial schedule exists in the first place. Even with the reduction in volume, we felt significant pressure when a scheduled post wasn’t quite where we wanted it to be by the time it was supposed to be finished.
Because we ended up spending our time elsewhere, our experiment didn’t focus nearly as much on the comprehensiveness of the posts as the HubSpot experiment did. It ended up just being about volume and maintaining the quality bar for all the posts we published, regardless of their frequency.
Our productivity gains, though, made us begin to think even more carefully about where we were spending our time.
With some basic data clearly showing us that a day without a blog post isn’t the calamity we feared it may be, we’ve decided it’s time to raise the bar.
When a post that’s scheduled to be published on our blog just isn’t quite where we think it ought to be, we’ll no longer rush it through the editing process simply because of an artificial deadline. When a post falls through (that’s just the life of an editorial calendar), we’ll no longer scramble to find an option that’s “good enough” to fill the spot. If we don’t have a great replacement, we’ll simply take the day off.
It’s got us thinking hard about posts that provide truly great value—those 10x pieces of content that Rand mentioned in his Whiteboard Friday. Take a look at the traffic for Dr. Pete‘s post on title tags since it was published in March of 2014:
See all those tiny bumps of long-tail traffic? The post still consistently sees 3-4,000 uniques every week, and has just crossed over 300,000 all-time. That’s somewhere between 60-100x a post we’d call just fine.
60-100x.
Now, there’s just no way we can make every post garner that kind of traffic, but we can certainly take steps in that direction. If we published half as many posts, but they all performed more than twice as well, that’s a net win for us even despite the fact that the better posts will generally continue bringing traffic for a while to come.
Does this mean you’ll see fewer posts from Moz going forward? No. We might skip a day now and then, but rest assured that if we do, it’ll just be because we didn’t want to ask for your time until we thought we had something that was really worth it. =)
I’d love to hear what you all have to say in the comments, whether about methodology, takeaways, or suggestions for the future.
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It is entirely possible that sites and or pages or the web can suddenly seem to lose Trust Flow and/or Citation Flow. If you do not yet understand these metrics, then you might first like to watch this short video on Understanding Flow Metrics. [If you are looking at this near the date of publishing,…
The post 10 Reasons you might lose Trust Flow or Citation Flow appeared first on Majestic Blog.
Reblogged 4 years ago from blog.majestic.comIt is entirely possible that sites and or pages or the web can suddenly seem to lose Trust Flow and/or Citation Flow. If you do not yet understand these metrics, then you might first like to watch this short video on Understanding Flow Metrics. [If you are looking at this near the date of publishing,…
The post 10 Reasons you might lose Trust Flow or Citation Flow appeared first on Majestic Blog.
Reblogged 4 years ago from blog.majestic.comPosted by Hannah_Smith
Most frequently, the content we create at Distilled is designed to attract press coverage, social shares, and exposure (and links) on sites our clients’ target audience reads. That’s a tall order.
Over the years we’ve had our hits and misses, and through this we’ve recognised the value of learning about what makes a piece of content successful. Coming up with a great idea is difficult, and it can be tough to figure out where to begin. Today, rather than leaping headlong into brainstorming sessions, we start with creative content research.
Creative content research enables you to answer the questions:
“What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?”
From this, you’ll then have a clearer view on what might be successful for your client.
A few years ago this required quite an amount of work to figure out. Today, happily, it’s much quicker and easier. In this post I’ll share the process and tools we use.
I think that the value in this sort of activity lies in a couple of directions:
a) You can learn a lot by deconstructing the success of others…
I’ve been taking stuff apart to try to figure out how it works for about as long as I can remember, so applying this process to content research felt pretty natural to me. Perhaps more importantly though, I think that deconstructing content is actually easier when it isn’t your own. You’re not involved, invested, or in love with the piece so viewing it objectively and learning from it is much easier.
b) Your research will give you a clear overview of the competitive landscape…
As soon as a company elects to start creating content, they gain a whole raft of new competitors. In addition to their commercial competitors (i.e. those who offer similar products or services), the company also gains content competitors. For example, if you’re a sports betting company and plan to create content related to the sports events that you’re offering betting markets on; then you’re competing not just with other betting companies, but every other publisher who creates content about these events. That means major news outlets, sports news site, fan sites, etc. To make matters even more complicated, it’s likely that you’ll actually be seeking coverage from those same content competitors. As such, you need to understand what’s already being created in the space before creating content of your own.
c) You’re giving yourself the data to create a more compelling pitch…
At some point you’re going to need to pitch your ideas to your client (or your boss if you’re working in-house). At Distilled, we’ve found that getting ideas signed off can be really tough. Ultimately, a great idea is worthless if we can’t persuade our client to give us the green light. This research can be used to make a more compelling case to your client and get those ideas signed off. (Incidentally, if getting ideas signed off is proving to be an issue you might find this framework for pitching creative ideas useful).
Good ideas start with a good brief, however it can be tough to pin clients down to get answers to a long list of questions.
As a minimum you’ll need to know the following:
Now you have your brief, it’s time to begin your research.
Given that we’re looking to uncover “what websites are publishing and what’s being shared,” It won’t surprise you to learn that I pay particular attention to pieces of content and the coverage they receive. For each piece that I think is interesting I’ll note down the following:
Whilst I’m doing this I’ll also make a note of specific sites I see being frequently shared (I tend to check these out separately later on), any interesting bits of research (particularly if I think there might be an opportunity to do something different with the data), interesting threads on forums etc.
When it comes to kicking off your research, you can start wherever you like, but I’d recommend that you cover off each of the areas below:
Whilst this activity might not uncover specific pieces of successful content, it’s a great way of getting a clearer understanding of your target audience, and getting a handle on the sites they read and the topics which interest them.
If you’ve a list of sites you know your target audience read, and/or you know your client wants to get coverage on, there are a bunch of ways you can uncover interesting content:
Both Buzzsumo and ahrefs are paid tools, but both offer free trials. If you need to explore the most shared content without using a paid tool, there are other alternatives. Check out Social Crawlytics which will crawl domains and return social share data, or alternatively, you can crawl a site (or section of a site) and then run the URLs through SharedCount‘s bulk upload feature.
When searching by topic, I find it best to begin with a broad search and then drill down into more specific areas. For example, if I had a client in the financial services space, I’d start out looking at a broad topic like “money” rather than shooting straight to topics like loans or credit cards.
As mentioned above, both Buzzsumo and ahrefs allow you to search for the most shared content by topic and both offer advanced search options.
There are also several sites I like to look at for inspiration. Whilst these sites don’t give you a great steer on whether or not a particular piece of content was actually successful, with a little digging you can quickly find the original source and pull link and social share data:
By this point you’ve (hopefully) got a long list of content examples. Whilst this is a great start, effectively what you’ve got here is just data, now you need to convert this to insight.
Remember, we’re trying to answer the questions: “What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?”
Ordinarily as I go through the creative content research process, I start to see patterns or themes emerge. For example, across a variety of topics areas you’ll see that the most shared content tends to be news. Whilst this is good to know, it’s not necessarily something that’s going to be particularly actionable. You’ll need to dig a little deeper—what else (aside from news) is given coverage? Can you split those things into categories or themes?
This is tough to explain in the abstract, so let me give you an example. We’d identified a set of music sites (e.g. Rolling Stone, NME, CoS, Stereogum, Pitchfork) as target publishers for a client.
Here’s a summary of what I concluded following my research:
The most-shared content on these music publications is news: album launches, new singles, videos of performances etc. As such, if we can work a news hook into whatever we create, this could positively influence our chances of gaining coverage.
Aside from news, the content which gains traction tends to fall into one of the following categories:
Earlier in this post I mentioned that it can be particularly tough to create content which attracts coverage and shares if clients feel strongly that they want to do something directly related to their product or service. The example I gave at the outset was a client who sold insurance and was really keen to create something about insurance. You’re now in a great position to win an argument with data, as thanks to your research you’ll be able to cite several pieces of insurance-related content which have struggled to gain traction. But it’s not all bad news as you’ll also be able to cite other topics which are relevant to the client’s target audience and stand a better chance of gaining coverage and shares.
There are potential pitfalls when it comes to creative content research in that it’s easy to leap to erroneous conclusions. Here’s some things to watch out for:
Make sure you’re identifying outliers…
When seeking out successful pieces of content you need to be certain that what you’re looking at is actually an outlier. For example, the average post on BuzzFeed gets over 30k social shares. As such, that post you found with just 10k shares is not an outlier. It’s done significantly worse than average. It’s therefore not the best post to be holding up as a fabulous example of what to create to get shares.
Don’t get distracted by formats…
Pay more attention to the idea than the format. For example, the folks at Mashable, kindly covered an infographic about Instagram which we created for a client. However, the takeaway here is not that Instagram infographics get coverage on Mashable. Mashable didn’t cover this because we created an infographic. They covered the piece because it told a story in a compelling and unusual way.
You probably shouldn’t create a listicle…
This point is related to the point above. In my experience, unless you’re a publisher with a huge, engaged social following, that listicle of yours is unlikely to gain traction. Listicles on huge publisher sites get shares, listicles on client sites typically don’t. This is doubly important if you’re also seeking coverage, as listicles on clients sites don’t typically get links or coverage on other sites.
At Distilled, we typically take a creative brief and complete creative content research and then move into the ideation process. A summary of the research is included within the creative brief, and this, along with a copy of the full creative content research is shared with the team.
The research acts as inspiration and direction and is particularly useful in terms of identifying potential topics to explore but doesn’t mean team members don’t still do further research of their own.
This process by no means acts as a silver bullet, but it definitely helps us come up with ideas.
Thanks for sticking with me to the end!
I’d love to hear more about your creative content research processes and any tips you have for finding inspirational content. Do let me know via the comments.
Image credits: Research, typing, audience, inspiration, kitteh.
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Posted by KelseyLibert
In October 2013, Fractl published a study on viral emotions on the Harvard Business Review. The research was picked up by several high-authority publishers, catapulted our brand’s authority, increased our brand awareness, and drove dozens of qualified leads. To our expectation, we proved that our client-facing, research-driven content marketing strategy could have the same long-term impact on our own brand. Then, we were off to the races.
In early 2014, we launched a survey of more than
500 top-tier publishers. Then, we released a study analyzing 2.6 billion social shares. By November 2014, we joined forces with influencer marketing tool BuzzStream. To date, we’ve launched more than 10 industry research–driven marketing campaigns, earning more than 180 pickups and 45,000 social shares.
The bottom-line impact? Fractl’s
referral traffic grew 6,718%, its total site traffic grew 4,396%, and its contact list grew 1,900%.
Of course, this strategy wasn’t launched without lessons along the way; here is what I learned:
Content marketing can be leveraged in every stage of the buying cycle.
The biggest mistake most marketers make is choosing a single idea that is too narrow and therefore limits their reach. The second mistake marketers make is thinking that a single campaign will be the silver bullet that increases every KPI they’re tracking. The third mistake they make is not developing a diverse content strategy that educates consumers in different stages of the buying cycle.
The best content marketing strategies focus on developing a long-term strategy for both on-site and off-site content with a diverse content calendar that includes a variety of campaigns to target every stage of the buying cycle:
When we first launched our co-branded strategy with BuzzStream, their tool was widely known as an
influencer marketing CRM. Naturally, the team wanted to focus on ideas that would help educate their user base in influencer marketing tactics. Thus, the following campaigns were born:
These narrow-scope ideas spoke to a highly targeted audience, allowing us to secure pickups on authoritative niche marketing blogs. However, by focusing on a narrow idea (e.g. pitching publishers), we also limited our ability to reach larger top-tier publishers who prefer to cover digital marketing as a whole (e.g. content creation and consumption).
By limiting our outreach to niche industry blogs, we also limited our ability to reach c-suite executives who were not yet aware of the benefits of influencer marketing and likely read the larger sites (e.g. Adweek) that spoke to the strategies they’re currently using (e.g. traditional PR).
In January 2015, we revamped our co-branded strategy to speak to a larger audience:
In doing so, we further developed our content calendar by creating
conversion-driven on-site content while simultaneously leveraging our large-scope awareness campaigns to speak to a broad audience of marketers. After we had enough data to go off of, we reevaluated our co-branded marketing mix and came up with the following options for our content calendar:
Several months into our partnership, we found that our optional content mix was Option 1, which allowed us to:
Your content mix may be different depending on the KPIs you’re hoping to achieve and how aggressive you want to be with your marketing.
PRO TIP: If you’re a new brand looking for significant growth, develop an aggressive viral content strategy like Rehabs.com. If you’re an established brand looking to grow loyalty and engagement, develop awareness campaigns, conversion campaigns, and an on-site content strategy like eBay.com.
Now that you understand the importance of a diverse content strategy, how do you develop campaigns that earn highly coveted top-tier pickups? You give publishers what they want. When we surveyed 500 top-tier publishers, we found a whopping 39% want campaigns that feature exclusive research.
In the beginning of our co-branded strategy, we cast a wide net of ideas that centered around heavy research, data curation, and knowledge curation. As new campaigns launched, we tracked their performance by the number of pickups, domain authority, and social shares. Three months into production, we were able to analyze our results and continue to refine our strategy.
The pie chart on the right shows all of our campaigns divided into a category of heavy research, data curation, and knowledge curation. The chart on the left sorts all of our campaigns based on performance by social engagement, which has a high correlation to links. Lo and behold, our publisher survey results rung true: The level of success of our co-branded campaigns had a high correlation with heavy research–based ideas.
Takeaways
So, now that we know publishers and audiences want more research, how do we give it to them?
In our publisher survey, writers wanted to see more data-driven articles, infographics, and mixed-media pieces, followed closely by data visualizations, images, videos, and interactive maps. What did publishers want the least of? Press releases, interactive projects, quizzes, flipbooks, widgets, and badges.
While articles might do well with qualitative results, most of the other top-ranked content formats require a type of data visualization that is most valuable when it features quantifiable results.
PRO TIP: Before you begin campaign production, base your ideation on the specific publishers you want your campaigns to be published on. Find out what resonates with those publishers using tools like Buzzsumo, and then pitch those ideas to those editors before you ever develop your campaign. Having publisher buy-in early on in the process guarantees a placement for your campaign, and it allows you to work with the publisher to give them exactly what they want. What better way to build a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship?
Now, before you run off to generate campaign ideas, it’s important to leverage certain tools to evaluate topic engagement on the sites you want to target. Some of my favorite tools include:
When it comes to developing primary research, a survey can be one of the easiest and quickest ways to garner new data.
Crowdflower.com, SurveyMonkey.com, and Amazon Mechanical Turk are some of the most popular survey tools for developing your primary research. Average survey payments range from 20–50 cents, based on the length of the survey. Always time yourself taking the survey, and then try offering 5 cents per minute.
PRO TIP: An authoritative sample size is no less than 300 respondents, though most top-tier sites prefer a sample size greater than 1,000 respondents. Submit surveys to reddit.com/r/hitsworthturkingfor for additional hits.
If you’re running a survey, the majority of your questions should have responses based on a scale, versus straight “yes/no” answers. This allows you to curate more data to analyze and achieve a more accurate response.
If you want to go the route of data curation, there are dozens of public and paid APIs that allow you to unearth data in your field. Some of our favorite data sources include:
Think outside the box when coming up with your data visualizations; static infographics are quickly becoming saturated. Try a new format, like any of these examples I pulled from Fractl’s portfolio:
Now that you’ve finalized your perfect research-based campaign, how else can you optimize it to increase your core metrics?
When we launched our first marketing campaign, we didn’t have a formal strategy for capturing our engagement and converting it in our sales funnel. While we’d get a mention for Fractl in all of our write-ups, we weren’t offering any incentive for people to actually visit our website.
PRO TIP: Read our content marketing strategy guide to learn how to use SEO and content to increase your customers.
See what I did there?
Creating a white paper, eBook, list, or any other gated asset that adds value to your original research creates an incentive for people to go back to your website and continue engaging with your brand. By gating the asset, you enable your team to capture the contact’s information and further nurture them in your sales funnel.
If you’re conducting research, a best practice is to save at least a quarter of your findings to be featured in your gated asset. Make it explicit in your guest posts that there is more information for people to learn about if they click through. For example, below you’ll see the call to action in our
Contently post, which led to the gated asset for our research on 2.6 billion shares.
While you should include a call to action for your gated asset in the intro text, you should also include it on all of your graphic assets that could potentially be further syndicated without proper attribution.
Word of caution: By putting your content behind a gate, you’re asking your audience to trust you with their personal information. If you betray a users trust, the damage to your brand can be severe and lasting.
Be smart about how you use gated content and what you collect:
As you set up your landing pages, another thing you need to consider is
optimizing the permalink structure for Google rankings. Matt Cutts says it’s best to use 3–5 words in the slug of your permalink, for example:
Since your word count is limited, you’ll want to cut any superfluous words such as “and.” Don’t forget to do some
keyword research to determine which 3–5 words you should use based on traffic data. Obviously you want to go after the words that have the largest traffic, but also evaluate for long-tail opportunities.
While our coverage on the Harvard Business Review built our authority, the website’s visit-to-contact-conversion ratio hovered at a low 9%. Meanwhile, targeted industry sites converted at an average rate of 25-45%, with some gold stars in the 60-90% range.
PRO TIP: While top-tier pickups expand your brand’s reach and build its authority, niche marketing blogs have a higher contact conversion ratio since their audience is already primed with the benefits of content marketing.
So, how do you ensure that your publisher pickups drive brand awareness
and convert leads? You develop audience personas.
Audience personas are a characterization of your businesses ideal customer. Creating these personas forces you to consider what your customers value, what they hope to achieve, what they fear, and much more. By putting yourself in the shoes of your prospects, you can begin to get a sense for where they get their news and which blogs they might read—allowing you to improve your pitch targeting for brand awareness and conversions.
Most people recommend creating
3-5 audience personas, which should outline an individual’s:
You can start to create these personas by:
Once you have a list of your customer personas, you can begin evaluating where these people might hang out online. Use
Buzzsumo’s influencer tool to search for people in similar job functions to your audience personas. Then, use the “view links shared” option to get a sense of where your personas might be hanging out, too:
PRO TIP: Don’t limit yourself by only developing personas for your ideal client. Developing personas for unqualified leads allows you to determine which people and publishers you want to avoid, as well.
If you want to increase your traffic, leads, and conversions, content marketing is one of the easiest, fastest, and most cost-effective methods to organically earn your core metrics. What other tips do you have for leveraging content marketing for sales?
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