Neil Patel
Consulting Lessons from the Frontline

Annie Cushing
Take Credit Where Credit’s Due

Bill Slawski
Future Search

Wil Reynolds
How to Get Unstuck!

Kate Morris
Languages and Countries

Pete Meyers
Do-It-Yourself Data-Driven Content

John Doherty
Creating Executive Support for Marketing Initiatives

Eppie Vojt
Scaling Outreach (without looking like an idiot)

Rand Fishkin
Behavioral Psychology and Inbound Marketing

Julianne Staino is an SEO Analyst at Distilled NYC. She loves learning new SEO techniques and creative approaches to link building.

Market Research Best Practices

DO: Create a road map with specific deadlines and deliverables. I would argue that content marketing is almost more about managing expectations than anything else in the beginning. When you’re first getting started, it can be easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of market research and drag out the process — which inevitably always pisses upper management off. To ensure everyone is on the same page before beginning, create a road map outlining exactly what you will do and how you will do it. Deadlines also ensure focus and encourage everyone to stay on task. This is especially important if you had to convince your boss to even consider content marketing in the first place.

DON’T: Try to speed through this phase because of pressure by management. Forget to manage expectations? Chances are you are already getting pressured to speed up. Or, you might even still be in the convincing stages and feeling the pressure to deliver in a few weeks. Market research takes a lot of work and cannot be rushed. Especially during the persona development phase, you’ll likely be interviewing customers and coordinating a ton of different schedules (typically during working hours!), which can slow the process down. There is no way you can rush this without looking like an overbearing quack.

DO: Get creative during persona development. There are a ton of data gold mines out there that can lend a helping hand to persona development. Some include:

• Customer surveys
• Customer interviews and focus groups
• Customer service department interviews
• External market research reports
• Blogger interviews and reader surveys
• Brand affinity research
• Mechanical Turk surveys
• Live help chat logs
• Big data and other analytics

DON’T: Half-ass research and tell your boss it is “complete”. Overhead pressure causes many to panic and haphazardly throw together a deliverable. This research will lay the foundation of your forthcoming strategy — a strategy that could end up significantly improving overall sales. Do you really want to chance the success of your whole content marketing division on something so early on like market research? Take the time now and you will have the necessary building blocks for sound strategy development. Remember, front loading the work creates an efficiency flywheel for the future.

DO: Ensure statistical significance and sound research methodology. Not all surveys are created equally. Similarly, you need to equate for statistical variation in any data you collect. Ignore this step and you could be basing your strategy on false or skewed information.

DON’T: Ship something without BETA testing and/or review. Whenever market research deliverables are user-facing (like surveys or interviews), never send anything to a big group of them without testing it on a few users. This BETA test can ensure you don’t blow your chances of data collection because there was a reporting error, or something didn’t make sense to most users.

DO: Conduct a technical audit. If you’re reading this blog, chances are the majority of your content will be hosted on your website. You need to ensure your website is technically sound and optimized before adding content. This will make sure you don’t have to go back and fix things later on, and worse lose any search equity because of a missed 301 or duplicate content. It’s best to lay the foundation for easily adding content sooner rather than later.

DON’T: Skip the content audit. I’ll be frank: A content gap analysis is not fun. You’re sifting through tons of pages and evaluating them both quantitatively and qualitatively. However, doing this analysis can give your content marketing initiatives much-needed direction. You can determine areas for improvement and know exactly where you are missing opportunities. Plus, this can oftentimes highlight technical issues you might have missed during the technical audit.

Processes and Governance Best Practices

DO: Look to traditional publishing organizational charts for inspiration. Newspapers and magazines have been producing content for a long time. Look to them for inspiration on how to organize your content-producing workflow to ensure there are clear roles and responsibilities. Too many chefs in the kitchen can bog down the process. Similarly, an unclear process can result in confusion and internal conflict.

DON’T: Start creating content until all teams are on the same page. Too often content production is siloed and hoarded among each team. There shouldn’t be multiple teams in your organization producing content on their own. The best process would be for all content to go through one process to ensure continuity and a consistent user experience. Having these discussions internally, especially early on, will ensure that the content on your site doesn’t get messy.

DO: Know your company’s “legal style”. The internet is a cesspool of plagiarism and copyright infringement. This leaves many opportunities for a marketer to unknowingly break the law. However, every company takes a different approach to risk adversity. Some are more lax, with a “policy” of just linking to the original source. Others don’t even want you linking out to external websites. Knowing your company’s stance will ensure you don’t run into roadblocks with compliance, or cause internal conflict during editorial review.

DON’T: Risk a lawsuit. Besides knowing your company’s legal style, common sense goes a long way when it comes to avoiding legal woes. While there are many ways a marketer can break the law unknowingly, reading up and incorporating a clear-cut policy among your content producers should help you avoid legal trouble down the road.

Editorial and Execution Best Practices

DO: Create editorial standards. Clearly defined writer guidelines is necessary to ensure consistency in voice and structure across your content. A written document ensures there are no “I-didn’t-know” moments among your team. Also, it allows for scalability in training, and saves your content marketing program if a new manager takes over.

DON’T: Have different standards across different teams. Remember, you are aiming for consistency in your content. Different teams working off different guidelines (or some not using them at all!) can truly affect how visitors perceive your content.

DO: Get creative with content formats and topics. Content is exciting! It can take many forms and doesn’t need to be just long-form essays. Play around with formatting (within the bounds of your editorial guidelines), medias, styles, and so forth. Just because you have editorial standards doesn’t mean you can’t make a few videos one month and an interactive tool the next.

DON’T: Go rogue and forget your personas, keywords, and funnel. Don’t let creativity derail you from your mission — to create content that will drive revenue. If you start forgetting about personas, not targeting keywords, or forget to map your content production efforts to the funnel, you could turn your content marketing program into a hobby rather than a business function.

Analysis Best Practices

DO: Clearly define goals before any content is produced. Why would you create content as a business without knowing why? Defining goals and ensuring they are measurable is the first step to any content marketing program. And really, the overarching goal should always be to make money. Oftentimes there are stepping stones to getting there, such as by generating leads or even just building traffic to your website, but knowing this end goal, clearly defining how you will determine if it’s achieved, and identifying secondary goals needed to reach it will ensure your content always serves a business purpose.

DON’T: Forget to identify goals for each piece of content produce. Ideally, your editorial calendar will have a column that says “goals” to ensure that every piece of content created is targeting a business goal. These goals can be anything from “improve rankings for X term” to “earn 40 new Pinterest followers”. The key is to ensure all your content producers are thinking of the bigger picture and laser focused on improving your business.

DO: Use current performance as a benchmark for future comparison. How can you measure improvement if you don’t know how you are currently performing? Mine your analytics and pinpoint metrics for benchmarking. This will help you determine the value and ROI of your content marketing initiatives.

DON’T: Forget to ensure all goals can be tracked and measured. Ensure any tracking mechanisms are in place before launching content so you can measure it’s success when the campaign is over. For example, if you want to measure direct conversions off a piece of content, ensure your analytics can fulfill that need.

DO: Conduct a regular content inventory. This is part conducting another content gap analysis for all new content, but also part taking this time as an opportunity to draw insights from past content performance. For example, while evaluating the last six months of content, you may discover that your audience really responds to video, but don’t tend to engage much with list posts. These kind of insights can be valuable to future content development.

DON’T: Forget content marketing is for more than just lead generation. As search marketers, we tend to be laser focused on lead generation and bringing in new business. However, there is a lot of opportunity in repeat business, and content marketing can be used to build community and customer retention. Focusing your content marketing strategy on that “stay” portion of the conversion funnel is totally acceptable, and may result in more consistent business than new customers.

Takeaway

Clearly defining how your company views content marketing as a philosophy is only part of the battle. When it gets time to execution, best practices are what will ensure your content marketing outputs are leveraged to their full potential.

What do you think? Are there any points above you agree or disagree with? Any I missed? Would love to hear from you in the comments!

Adria Saracino is the Head of Outreach at Distilled. When not managing a team of bad ass Outreach hustlers, training, or developing content and outreach strategies, you can find her writing about style on her fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.

Working my way through The Lean Startup got me asking, why would Distilled ask me to read this and how does it apply to SEO?

What Is The Lean Startup?

The Lean Startup is a book written by Eric Ries based upon pioneering methods of product and business development used in companies around the world such as Kodak, Toyota, Dropbox  and Eric Ries’ own company IMVU.

The Lean Startup talks about entrepreneurship, being productive in an unconventional way and ultimately generating a successful business.

After reading through The Lean Startup, I decided to take some of its principles and see if they are being applied here at  Distilled, and where in the world of SEO they could work.

The Power of Small Batches

Working in small batches is a great way to increase productivity and avoid problems further down the chain of production. It creates an environment where problems can be discovered early and no further progress can happen until a solution has been found.

The Lean Startup demonstrates the power of small batches in an experiment where one hundred envelopes are stuffed with letters. Each envelope needs to be addressed, stamped, filled with a letter and sealed. There are two ways to go about this;

1. Fold all the letters,  then address all the envelopes, then  stamp the envelopes, put all the letters in the envelopes, and then finally seal all the envelopes.
2. Fully completing each envelope before moving onto the next one (single-piece flow)

This second method is the counter-intuitive way of completing the process. Our natural instinct is to complete the process using method one, with the belief we will become more efficient because we expect to improve at a simple task we repeat over and over. However when working with bulk our intuition doesn’t account for the extra time required to sort, stack and move around the large piles we work with.  In the experiment the counter-intuitive way was actually quicker, and not just in this test, but also in many further case studies.

One of the final stages of this process was to put the letter in the envelopes. But what if at this point we discover the envelopes are too small? We would have just wasted a vast amount time putting addresses and stamps on one hundred envelopes. With a single-piece flow we would of discovered this problem after the very first one!

Use Small Batches Instead Of Bulk

One of the main problems we can encounter as SEO’s is being stuck in a production line. Waiting for one person to sign off a previous piece of work, whilst waiting for drawings to arrive from designers or data from researchers only for it to all land on our desk at once. This creates periods of high and low productivity, opposed to a steady work flow.

For example I have a client who owns bluewidgets.com and they want to build a localised landing page for all of the cities where they sell blue widgets.

The content list consists of the top 200 cities to buy blue widgets, which is outsourced to be written. A brief is produced and along with the city list, sent to the writers. A couple of weeks later my inbox is overflowing with 200 city descriptions each around 400 – 500 words each. Upon closer inspection I discover the writers interpretation of my brief is way off the mark. It may be that the initial brief wasn’t clear enough, but it still leaves a huge quantity of editing to be done.

So how could this problem of been avoided? This is where single-piece flow comes into practice. Reflecting on the previous envelope task it will appear this method may take more time and effort, but as we have already learnt the whole process will actually become more efficient.

Initially send the writer a much smaller batch, maybe even just a single article. Once this article is complete it is returned and edited. Feedback regarding this article is then sent back to the writer so it can be implemented on the next article.

Even though this system may become more time dependant early on, each time this cycle is competed it will fix minor errors, making them much less likely to be repeated in the next article. Overall this will increase the speed at which content can be produced, edited and signed off due to less errors being made, as the result of a more efficient system.

Minimum Viable Product for SEO’s

A minimum viable product helps to start the learning process as quickly as possible by putting assumptions to test. Instead of investing huge amounts of time developing a product, features or campaigns, only to put it out there and find there is no demand, we can roll out a much simpler version and get real customer feedback in a much shorter time frame thus avoiding the potential waste which may occur.

Not too long ago Distilled produced a piece of content for Simply Business titled Simply Business Step-by-step Guide to your Social Media Success. This is a great example of the type of content we as SEO’s can produce on the ideals of a MVP.

If we rigidly stuck to the principles of a MVP perhaps our original starting point could of been to perform a smoke test. Quite simply the idea of smoke test is to find out whether users would be interested in the product or not.  To begin learning at the earliest possible opportunity we could’ve begun by asking a group of small businesses, “Would you like a guide explaining the best way to run your companies social media?” This can be a really useful method of getting feedback on assumptions you may of made regarding your product before investing further time, effort and money. However the feedback could have been as straight forward as “no”. But would this of stopped us building the guide?

It’s really important that when building a MVP it has a chance of gaining traction. When giving their feedback small businesses would of had no idea about the depth of this piece of content, therefore completely misinterpreted our intentions by making their own assumptions about the type of product we were going to produce.

Build Measure Learn

The Guide to your Social Media Success was the MVP for a potential series of these types of products. Distilled kept the product leaning towards being an MVP by not investing the time in producing the content within the guide itself to answer business’s questions. Instead we built a list of really great content we thought business’s should be looking at to accomplish social media success, and produced a guide that aimed to be user friendly and remove the hassle of businesses having to do the research themselves.

The feedback gained from this piece was then used to learn how to make future content even better. First of all from the data gathered we learnt people actually wanted this information. Second of all, from the comments and feedback they gave Simply Business we discovered people and businesses found it useful.

This allowed Simply Business to make the decision to move forward with the amount of time and resources they allocate to producing more of this type of content. Building on top of the original MVP concept, they are now producing guides that feature their own videos made from scratch like its Guide to WordPress for Small Businesses.

A MVP can become a great way for SEOs to receive feedback on the hypothesis we make extremely quickly. So in this case Distilled thought there was potentially a demand for a social media guide. By using the foundations of a MVP we can start to cut down on wasted efforts and use the feedback we gain to aid us in shaping our future campaigns. This feedback will give us nudges towards where we should perhaps pivot (explained further down) in the future.

Be A Toddler, Ask Why… a lot!

Back at LinkLove 2012, Will Critchlow gave a talk titled Mediocre To Great (view the whole video over on Distilled U). He touched upon a principle that features in The Lean Startup and we put into practice when focusing on any piece of work called “The Five Whys”.

This is how Will explains the Five Whys,

This is the idea that in order to fix root causes of things, when something goes wrong you should ask why five times, a bit like a toddler. Our outreach campaign isn’t really working. Why? Nobody’s responding to our emails. Why? Because the content we’re talking about is on a spammy-sounding commercial domain. Why? Eventually you get to the root cause, you fix that, and everything goes a lot better. That’s the idea.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean “why” has to be asked five times, sometimes three or four can be sufficient to get you going in the right direction and discovering some solid root problems.

The core idea of the Five Whys is to “tie investments directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms”.

The Lean Startup discusses how using the Five Whys encouraged IMVU to build an employee training program. Imagine they had just started to receive complaints about a new product;

1. A new release disables a feature for customers – Why? A particular server failed
2. Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way
3. Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer didn’t know how to use it properly
4. Why didn’t he know? Because he was never trained
5. Why wasn’t he trained? Because his manager doesn’t believe in training new engineers because he and his team are too busy

What began as a purely technical fault, turned into human error which was caused by the root problem, a lack of training. IMVU could have very simply just fixed the initial error and moved on. However the next time this engineer makes an update the same problem could occur again. By finding the root cause of the problem we can begin to prevent the same errors happening time and time again.

Remember its Five Whys, Not Five Blames

When asking the Five Whys, normally something hasn’t quite gone to plan and the results weren’t as expected. People have invested their time and effort into this project and all with good intentions. This can make them naturally defensive and try to deflect blame to another department or another reason.

A tactic to avoid falling into this trap is to ensuring everyone affected by the problem is in the room when analysing the root cause. This may be difficult as we all have extremely busy schedules but it’s important because the person who is out of the room could easily be targeted as a scapegoat. When blame does inevitably arise it’s important for the most senior members of the room to repeat the mantra;

If a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.”

Remember the aim of this process is to get to the root of a problem and not pin the blame on any individual or department. Its about developing a system that will prevent the same mistake happening again and not putting yourself or the client in that position again.

The purpose for using the Five Whys as an SEO may not strictly be limited to just finding root causes and solutions. It can be a great planning aid when stepping out on any project, whether it be a blog article, outreach, or something on a larger scale. Asking Five Whys can be a great way to justify and validate your future decisions.

To Pivot or Persevere?

The final point I want to touch upon is when working on a campaign, at what point do you say, “this just isn’t working”? What if just around the corner is the reward for all the previous effort, or what if that reward never comes?

Eric Ries sums up coming to this decision by making the following statement, “if we’re not moving the drivers of our business model, we’re not making progress. That becomes a sure sign that it’s time to pivot”

As SEO’s we are fortunate enough to be surrounded by a huge amount of data and analytics which can be gathered at an extremely high rate. We can physically see if that needle is moving. This allows us to make informed decisions, noticing any positive or negative effects from early on and take the necessary pivots to adjust our strategy to cater for the demands of users, Google and our clients.

The key thing is not to leap from one vision to something completely different. This would just generate more waste. Instead use the knowledge you have gained from previous efforts and instead of disposing of it, make a pivot and use that information to fuel future products and strategies.

We have been doing these pivots (perhaps unconsciously) for a long time. We are constantly having to take pivots forced upon us by the changes Google make to their algorithms. Gone are the days of article spinning and directory submissions. We have had to change our strategies instead now focusing on getting ourselves and our clients to produce quality content, making the internet a place full of pages people actually want!

I genuinely think we can all be more productive and guide our clients to becoming more productive by applying even just one of these methods. What do you think?

Have you tried being “Leaner”  already and what results did you get?

Images Courtesy of http://lean.st/

Thanks to risk-averse leaders in competing companies, all of your best ideas will inevitably be copied. Some of these clones won’t be pretty (cough Bing cough cough), and others will beat you at your own game. If you launch a successful marketing campaign, find an effective link building method, or design a revolutionary product that people love, you can expect shameless imitation by many of your competitors with varying degrees of success.

Organizations lacking agility, innovation, and tolerance for risk will wait for you to do the hard work for them. If your ideas work they’ll follow behind and in many cases replicate your success. How can you stay ahead when the very things that put you ahead begin to be commonplace?

Your marketing campaigns will be copied.

Remember this guy?

Of course you do. How about these guys? No?

These videos, along with a handful of terrible ads too bad to show here, are embarrassingly similar to the Old Spice commercials. Edge shave gel is trying so hard to be Old Spice that I almost feel bad for them. Almost. This is not an isolated incident. Car commercials could basically swap out their logos and no one could tell the difference; I can still hardly tell the difference between jewelry sellers’ commercials.

Your product will be copied.

Just ask Apple. And for the record I use an Android phone. Nothing propels a marketing campaign forward like a revolutionary product, but not even that can last forever.

Your SEO and link building methods will be copied.

We’ve seen mimicry happen in SEO quite a lot. It takes a ton of effort and expertise to devise an effective strategy that will result in client returns. At the same time, it’s now easier than ever pull up a list of competitors, look for their top pages and best links, and proceed to copy everything that worked.

Let us not forget our long history of copying blogging strategies, link networks, infographics, and now guest blogging for links alone. Mindlessly trying to out-guest-blog the competition through generic posts might work to some extent, just like the Edge commercial probably sold a little more shaving gel. It just won’t scale or build a brand like an innovative strategy, or even a well-designed branded guest posting campaign.

Competitors will often let the market leader guide them through the darkness hoping to learn successes. Even if they fail, they’re going to fill the channel with so much noise that your effectiveness plateaus and then plummets. You may even lose your share of voice on your own idea as competitors win with deeper pockets, better pricing, or superior execution.

We’ve seen the innovate-copy cycle repeated endlessly in content marketing. Several companies have risen to new prominence through well-designed and well-executed content marketing strategies. Now here come the content marketing copycats, who I wrote about last time. How can you ever hope to stay ahead?

Organizations and processes are incredibly difficult to copy

The iPhone might be relatively easy to copy, but it’s a lot harder to copy the process that produced the iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. before anyone else was close. When I began consulting, I was under the mistaken assumption that winning is something that only needs to happen once – that I could somehow compete with a single winning strategy or tactic. I’ve since come to realize that those pretty blue lines that go up and to the right have less to do with really good ideas and more to do with the people and processes behind them.

In order to get ahead and stay ahead, the only answer is a process of constant innovation and smart risk-taking. Let’s look at some common search marketing problems we face whether we’re in-house, part of an agency, or freelancing.

Example: marketing content is not attracting attention

A lack of interest often looks like the problem, boring content might look like the cause, and the ostensible solution might seem to be something like, “Make content more surprising. Everything you write about is obvious stuff everyone knows. Also, use a video or two and stop using crappy stock photos.”

The real root of the problem is a lot more difficult to approach and unravel. It could be that the writers don’t know how to create surprising content. It’s very possible that managers, editors, or overly-aggressive compliance personnel are very picky about how their brand is represented, making it impossible for content creators to do anything with  a shred of personality. Perhaps content creators just don’t have the resources they need.

The good news is that when we discover and solve these underlying problems we’re suddenly able to create innovative content on a regular basis. Content creators will go forward with the freedom to innovate rather than copying a past formula that probably worked at some point and feels safe. If we measure the right goals, they’ll also learn what works and help the organization adapt and grow over time.

Search and content practices are sustainable competitive advantages

It’s tempting for a highly-analytical person to look at a failed marketing initiative like a mechanic would look at a car: “Oh, here’s your problem right here. Your graphic design is absolutely horrible, and your outreach was awful. Do X, Y, and Z next time.” Truly improving marketing as a consultant or an internal agent of change is more like working with the driver to solve future problems. It requires a lot more cooperation and understanding, but it’s ultimately the only sustainable route to change. We cannot gain or maintain a lead in search marketing with a single idea or tactic. Staying ahead requires that we find a way to help everyone involved innovate, take risks, and then do it all over again.

Carson Ward is a consultant with Distilled. You can talk with him on Twitter or on the ever-popular Google+.

So which is better; the data or the personas and which one should you be using? In this video, we talk you through how using both can help you figure out who your audience is as well as what content you should be creating for them.

You can read the full transcript for this video, below.

What do you think is important when considering your demographic? How do you appeal to your consumers through your content? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

DistilledLive Seattle | Big data vs personas for content planning transcript:

Alyssa: Hi. Welcome to Distilled Live. I’m Alyssa.

Kyra: And I’m Kyra.

Alyssa: We both work on the outreach team here at Distilled. Today we’re going to be talking about why you need both big data and personas when creating your content marketing strategy.

Before we go into both the big data and the personas, we need to talk about the why behind it. Basically the reason why it’s so important to use both of these together is because your brand can’t be everything to everyone. So figuring out who your audience is, what really motivates their purchasing behavior, the patterns that they use in purchasing is really going to help you to figure out who you should be targeting and also what you should be creating for that audience.

Kyra: Like Alyssa said, there’s been a lot of talk about big data versus personas and which one is better and which one you should use. But we think it’s really important to consider using both because big data, as we’ll talk about in a little bit, provides a ton of information on your audience and your consumers and their demographics, and their behavior, and their online purchase history and all of that good stuff.

Personas make that big data make sense. It’s more personable. It puts a human face to it. It’s a lot easier to start with that. We think it’s really important to consider using both in your content strategy.

I’m going to start by talking about some of the advantages of big data. We’ll start by defining what big data is. It’s actually kind of difficult to define because there’s not a clear definition. It pops up in everything from the science world to academics and all that good stuff.

Big data marketing is basically all the information consumers have online. It’s everything from their Facebook likes to their address and their travel history, their Internet usage, their purchase history. Tons of information. More than you could ever want or need on your consumers.

One of the great examples of a company using this to their advantage is Amazon. They’ve really pioneered using big data in a concrete way. A great example of them using it is in their customer service. I read an example the other day of a woman who called about a problem on her Kindle. She went to Amazon’s customer service page and typed in her cell phone number, and they gave her a call. The call lasted five minutes, and they got the problem fixed.

She was super happy about it because, when she called, Amazon had all of her data right there. They had her purchase history and her address and her phone number and all her information. They didn’t have to mess around with putting her on hold while they pull everything up. It’s very streamline. It’s a very efficient process. She ended up being a happy customer.

One of the areas you can use this in terms of marketing is personalization. Amazon, again, does a great job of this. If you’re online searching textbooks on social work, it’ll come up with other recommendations and different books you can read that are in the same category, things you might be interested in. I’m sure you’ve all seen that on Amazon. It’s fabulous marketing.

The other day I was looking for shoes, and it comes up with three more pairs I might like and sure enough, I’m probably going to buy them. It’s a great, great thing.

There’s also a lot of problems with big data as well, especially when people use just big data.

Alyssa: One of the big problems with big data is for a lot of people it’s really overwhelming to just have a bunch of numbers to look at. You have all these numbers. You have all this information, but how do you use that to really create content?

One of the problems with it is that even though it personalizes it, it still lacks that human component that explains why people are looking at this. What is motivating their purchase behavior? So that’s one of the problems with big data. It makes it easy, but it’s still lacking that humanness that makes it easy for us to create content.

Kyra: Right. It’s also a lot of times just, like Alyssa was saying, incredibly overwhelming. One thing that we’ve seen a lot is companies don’t know how to use their big data. They look at it and expect to find gold nuggets in this massive amount of information, but it doesn’t really work like that. You’re not just going to find valuable information if you don’t know what you’re looking for. You have to be able to ask the right questions to gain the right insights.

A lot of times big data is actually really ineffective. Another way that it’s misused is companies don’t really have a designated person or they only have one designated person to sort through that data. It’s just bottlenecked at that one person, and it’s not shared effectively. It’s not really presented in a way that makes sense.

Alyssa: One way to actually present it in a way that does make sense is actually creating personas, which is the other side of the camp. Like you said, what questions should we be asking, and who should we be targeting? Like I said, personas are basically fictional characters that you create for your business. For example, let’s say that you have an outlet mall. A persona for that could be a mom in her mid 20s with two kids, not a lot of money to spend, so she wants to get the most bang for her buck as far as buying her kid’s clothing.

Another example of a persona for that business could be the young business woman who needs to look professional, but doesn’t have a lot of money to spend. Basically, these are both customers that you’re trying to target, but you are going to approach them in different ways. You’re using the personalization of it by creating these personas, by asking questions and figuring out who these people are, why they’re drawn to your company, what brings them in the door, what motivates them, what inspires them to purchase these things. 

By using that information, we can start to figure out, “Okay, this is the content we need that will speak to these people.” It really just adds that kind of personal human flavor to all the big numbers and just really gives us people that we can focus on.

Kyra: There are also problems to personas, just like there is with big data. One of the problems is that before big data, personas weren’t really backed up by numbers. They were just sort of imagined. Especially if you’re not interviewing customers face to face to get more information from them, if you’re just creating personas, it’s really sometimes hit or miss. You don’t really know if that information is accurate, if those behaviors really are driven by those motivators, and it can be unhelpful in that way.

Alyssa: It can be overwhelming too because you have to spend a lot more time developing the personas. Like I said, it’s about asking enough people and knowing what questions to ask to get the right kind of information that you’ll use to build the personas. I feel like a lot of people back away from it because they’re like, “Oh, we don’t have time for that.” But investing the time now to discovering and creating these personas is really just going to help your level of success in the future.

Kyra: Like we have talked about, both personas and big data have great advantages, but they also both have disadvantages. We think that personas are often, we’ve talked a little bit about they’re a great place to start. They’re a more human personalized space. If you’re starting with a content strategy, sometimes it’s good to start with personas because it’s a little bit easier to understand what a single mom with toddlers shopping at an outlet mall might want as opposed to when you’re looking at all that demographic information it’s a little overwhelming.

Alyssa: Just numbers.

Kyra:  Right. It’s really overwhelming. We think personas are a really great place to start. Again, you need big data to back up that behavior, to justify that persona. We think it’s a great thing to use both. It’s everything in moderation. It’s not great to use just big data, and it’s not great to use just personas. You really need both combined to come up with a content strategy that’s going to not only get at your consumer’s behavior and demographics, but also their wants, needs, desires, and motivators. So we use them both.

Alyssa: We definitely, like I said, leverage both to your advantage to create the most effective content marketing strategy for your business.

Kyra:               This is Distilled Live. Again, I’m Kyra.

Alyssa:            I’m Alyssa. Thanks for watching.

It is now clear, however, that the upcoming BlueglassX conference in LA (scheduled for the 21st and 22nd May) is not happening.

I imagine that some people may be able to get refunds for ticket purchases via their credit card companies, but I also imagine there are others who are going to be left out of pocket. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help out those people.

We have a conference scheduled in Boston at almost the same time as BlueglassX was planned – ours is the 20th and 21st May (Searchlove Boston). If you had bought a ticket to the cancelled BlueglassX, can be in Boston instead of LA and are going to be left out of pocket by the cancellation, I’d like to invite you to Searchlove Boston free of charge.

Just forward me your Blueglass payment confirmation (will.critchlow@distilled.net) and I’ll send you information on how to register for our event. You can see all the details of our conference here.

I realise that it’s on the “wrong” coast for those of you based out west. We are in the early stages of planning an event on the west coast later in the year – if you can’t make it to Boston, you should still drop me an email and I’ll see what I can do with a discount for that one later in the year.

Answering some anticipated questions

Why are you doing this?

In short, because I can. I’ve seen lots of uncertainty and a significant number of people apparently out of pocket. Our conference has relatively fixed costs and space to take a few more people so there’s little downside. Obviously there’s a chance that by being nice to these people they may pay to come to other conferences we run in the future, but no-one’s under any obligation to do so.

I charged back my ticket purchase – can I still take up this offer?

Honestly, it’s going to be impossible for me to know but I’d rather you didn’t – if you’re not out of pocket, you can put that cash back towards buying a ticket to our event (drop me a line before you do and we’ll see if we can reward your honesty!).

Do the Blueglass guys know you’re doing this?

Yes. See Greg’s post.

What’s the situation with Blueglass UK and EMEA?

I’m not the right person to ask, but as far as I’m aware, Blueglass UK and Blueglass EMEA are separate companies that continue to run independently of the financial troubles in the US.

Will Critchlow : Will founded Distilled with Duncan in 2005. Since then, he has consulted with some of the world’s largest organisations and most famous websites, spoken at most major industry events and regularly appeared in local and national press.

When I declared an English major in college, my mom said it was a great choice, “because people will always need good writers.”

I was pleasantly surprised to find that true upon graduating college, but I was also pretty surprised to find out why people need good writers: because they can’t actually write themselves.

It’s actually a little scary to see how many business professionals can’t write effectively, but what’s even scarier is when those people, who know nothing about copywriting, insist on writing their own website copy.

If you’re involved in building or maintaining a website, you need to know something about copy writing for two reasons:

1. I realize I’m shooting myself in the foot a bit here, but hiring copywriters is expensive and you’ll save a load of cash if you can do your own writing for your website (although, I wouldn’t recommend the DIY route for large sites).

2. If you do hire copywriters, you need to have a working knowledge of writing from which to evaluate their work. If a copywriter asks you for direction or input, you need to be able to effectively give feedback.

That said, writing is a hard-earned skill; it takes time and practice, so don’t expect to become a writing whiz easily. But if you’re sitting down to write out some website copy or are asked for input from your copywriters, keep the following in mind.

Start with the Research

Ultimately, your website is designed to get people to take action (a.k.a. your goal conversion), whether that’s a purchase, sign-up, download,etc. Your website copy plays a huge part in getting your viewers to convert, and thus needs to be highly effective and targeted.

To get people to take your desired action, you need to figure out what causes your customers to act and what turns them away, so you can capitalize on their motivators and avoid their discouragers. More simply put, figure out why your customers buy your product (or whatever your goal conversion is), what would make them buy it again, and what would make them never buy it  (seems pretty obvious, right?).

By finding out this information, you can make sure your copywriting reflects your customers’ wants and needs, and you can make sure your writing matches the language your customers use.

The most effective way to find out what motivates and discourages your customers is to ask them. In-depth customer interviews are a great way to get to the bottom of your customers language, desires, wants, needs, etc. Start with this list of interview questions and adapt it as need be.

1. What’s your name, age, and job description? (gives you a surprising amount of information that will help you develop a demographic profile for your customers)

2. How do you use our product and what problem does it solve for you? (provides information on why your customers use your product/what motivates them to use it and allows them to describe it to you in their own words)

3. What features were most attractive to you when you bought this product? (this gives you information on what motivated your customers to buy this product and what they’re attracted to. This is also gives you ammo for your product descriptions)

4. What features didn’t you like about this product? (provides you with information about what discourages your customers)

5. Where did you get information about this product before buying (customer reviews, family, friends, etc.)? (This lets you know where your customers turn to for information and who their influencers are)

6. What other products were you considering before you purchased this one? (lets you know which of your competitors you need to examine)

This list should just serve as a starting point, but once we’ve interviewed a decent sized pool of customers, you’ll start to see recurring themes.

You should be able to use customer answers to get a feel for what pushes your customers to convert and what holds them back. Obviously, you should showcase features many of your customers are attracted to, and try to fix the problems customers encountered with your products.

You should also begin to get a feel for the language your customers use. This is hugely important to take note of, because your customers will feel your brand is more personable if you use language on your website that they use themselves.

Take special note of the adjectives your customers use to describe their problems and the features of your products, this way you can describe your potential customers’ problem and accurately provide a solution.

You should also take note of any differing terminology; for example, if you sell laundry baskets, do your customers call your products laundry baskets? Or do they call them something else, like wash baskets? You don’t want to immediately alienate your customers by using language they don’t use.

Nail Down a Unique Selling Proposition and Use it in Your Copy

Let’s be honest here, your brand isn’t going to redefine the wheel. Unless you have a revolutionary/brand new product, your product is probably one of several options consumers have.

Your web copy needs to carefully present your product, because if you try to sell your just your product, you’re going to be selling the product of your competitors too. You need to have a unique selling proposition (USP), something that differentiates you from your competitors (and I’m really hoping you know who your competitors are).

Let’s break down the basic components of a USP:

1. Define the Problem: After analyzing your research, identify the problems your customers have. What are their common frustrations? How do they want those problems to be fixed?

2. Explain the Unique Benefit You Offer: What benefit do you offer that no one else does? We aren’t talking about products here, we’re talking about solutions. Once you’ve identified the problems your customers encounter in your research, brainstorm ways your brand fixes them. How can you fix your customers’ problems in a way that other brands can’t?

Take a look at these awesome brands who have really interesting USPs for inspiration.

• Nerd Fitness

There are countless food and fitness blogs out there (some which I really appreciate), but a lot of them sound really, really similar. Nerd Fitness stands out (and is one of my favorites), because it caters to a very niche market: self-proclaimed nerds who love being healthy. This site totally embraces both the nerdy and the fitness, which sets them apart from a lot of the really meathead-ish blogs out there. Plus, Game of Thrones + cooking = win.

• Tiny Buddha

Like fitness sites, lifestyle advice sites are hugely popular, and they all sort of blend together. What sets Tiny Buddha apart is this, “simple wisdom for complex lives.” The USP here is simple, easy to understand, uncomplicated advice and wisdom for hugely complex lives.

• Zappos

How many shoes and clothing companies are out there? A ton. And Zappos doesn’t carry a unique line of shoes; they carry name brands that department stores and Amazon carry. So what makes Zappos successful and sets them apart? They have free shipping, free return shipping (and you can return items for up to a year from the purchase date), and fabulous customer service. Their USP isn’t their products, it’s their service.

Turn your USP into Copy by Using it in a Value Proposition

Once you’ve nailed down your website’s USP, you need to make sure your website copy reinforces it.

One of the best ways to incorporate your USP into your site copy is through a value proposition, which is a statement on your website that explains the value and benefit customers can expect to get from your product.

Peep Laja, a conversion optimization expert, suggests writing your value proposition like this:

• Headline: What is the end-benefit you’re offering? This is your main attention-grabber; this is also where you should talk about the second aspect of your USP (the unique benefit). Remember, a headline is only one sentence.

• Sub-headline/2-3 sentence paragraph: This should be a specific explanation of what you do and what problem you fix (which is the first component of your USP).

• 3 bullet points: List the key benefits or features of your product. Remember, these should be benefits your customers told you about in your research–you should use the language your customers used to describe your product’s benefits.

• Visual: Images communicate much faster than words and will attract customers.

As Peep Laja points out in his article, Square has a fantastic value proposition, and it’s one of my personal favorites.

As you can see, the copy on Square’s website follows the value proposition “formula” really well, but beyond that, the copy positions the USP strongly. The problem Square solves is small business not being able to accept credit cards (as seen in the headline). The unique benefit Square offers is simplicity, as seen in the bullet points and sub-heading.

Takeaways:

• Use your hard-earned research to formulate a USP

• Turn your USP into concrete website copy by incorporating it into your value proposition, which will allow you to differentiate your brand from your competitors.

Write Like a Human

One of the cardinal rules of on-page copywriting (and marketing in general) is do not alienate your consumers. The second you starting writing like a robot or an advertisement, your customers will leave your site.

Make sure your customers read your writing by following these two guidelines:

1. Write like your customers do

The best way to make sure you’re writing in a way that relates to your customers is to pay attention to how your customers talk and write. What’s their verbal personality? Are they informal, upbeat, and enthusiastic? Or are they more laid back, inclusive, and funny?

2. Avoid industry jargon

Avoid industry jargon and technical terms, because they will instantly alienate your customers (unless your customers are an advanced niche group that uses jargon regularly). Write like you would talk to someone, so don’t say things like “inbound marketing funnel” or “click through rate.”

Mind Your Grammar

It pains me that I have to say this, but it’s seriously necessary: always use proper grammar and spelling! No matter what. No excuses. If you can’t use proper grammar for the sake of grammar lovers like me, then consider the fact that spelling mistakes cost millions in lost online sales.

In addition to using the correct grammar and spelling, you should also do the following:

• Keep your copy clean and concise: After you’ve finished writing, take a break from it. Then come back to it and read it out loud. This will help you identify problem sections and overly wordy areas. Normally, you can cut your original draft down by at least 30 percent. It’s important to keep your web copy concise and easy to understand since web readers scan instead of read.

• Use active voice: Unfortunately, this piece of advice can be a little trickier to catch, but is really important as passive voice makes for weaker writing.

Active voice is when the subject of your sentence is doing the action in your sentence; for example, “James eats Cheetos” is active because the subject, James, is doing the action, which is eating. Passive voice is when the subject of the sentence is not the thing doing the action: “The Cheetos are being eaten by James.” Here are a few more examples for reference:

• Passive: The birthday candles were blown out by Ben.

• Active: Ben blew out the birthday candles.

• Passive: We have had six new hires arrive at the office.

• Active: Six new hires arrived at the office.

Stay Consumer Focused

If your customers wanted to hear all about you, they would look at your advertising. But since they aren’t doing that, you should assume your customers actually want to hear more about themselves than you (don’t we all?).

Keep your web copy completely consumer focused. The easiest way to start doing this is to use “you.” Instead of saying “we processed your order,” start with “you” and say “your order was processed.”

Beyond reframing your sentences to be “you” centered, make sure your copy is also benefit-centered. For example, instead of just saying “this cleaner will make your shower tiles water resistance,” take a benefit-centered approach by writing “this cleaner will allow you to clean your shower less by making your tiles water resistant.” By taking the second approach, you are clearly identifying the benefit to consumers (which is really all we care about as consumers, right?)

Takeaways

You can’t become a rockstar copywriter in one sitting; it takes time and practice, but you can start the process by starting with the following tips:

• Start with research

• Nail Down a Unique Selling Proposition and Use it in Your Copy (preferably in your value proposition)

• Write like a real person

• Use proper grammar, spelling, and active voice

• Keep your writing consumer focused

There’s no perfect formula to writing, because every audience is different. Ultimately, you need to write, test, and revise continually.

Kyra Kuik is the Content Coordinator for Distilled's Seattle office. You can follow Kyra on Twitter

If you have already registered to attend, great! We look forward to seeing you there. If not – read on; here’s 5 reasons why you don’t want to miss this year’s Boston conference…

1. The speakers - I know I’m a little biased but it seems that the line-up at SearchLove gets better and better each year. But what does that mean for you? Well, we all know how difficult it can be to keep up with all the latest advancements in our ever-changing industry, so instead of reading every blog post out there and dedicating evenings to after-hours research, we’ve rounded up the industries experts to do the hard work for you! Check out the full line up here. These speakers have been chosen not only for their incredible knowledge, but also for their killer presentation skills and willingness to share their latest tips with you.

2. Intimate experience – We know that other conferences may be bigger but you know how the saying goes…good things come in small packages, right? Well, I think the same can be said of our conferences. We keep the numbers low so that you have every opportunity to really get to know your fellow delegates and the speakers themselves.

With such an intimate environment, the speakers feel much more confident in revealing their latest research and the industry secrets they wouldn’t share elsewhere. Don’t just take my word for it though. Here’s what one of our delegates had to say about last year’s conference:

“SearchLove made me feel as if I was invited to look over the shoulder of successful search marketers and see how they build their business. I came away with so many insider tips, hacks and strategies, it’s ridiculous!” 

3. Party time! It’s not all about the speakers though. If you’re anything like us, sometimes you just want two days out of the office to recharge. Seeing and speaking to others in your industry can sometimes be the thing that gets you feeling passionate about your work again. This is why we like to encourage networking at SearchLove. You’ll find ample opportunities throughout the two days to get to know your peers; from the morning and afternoon coffee breaks to the lunch time topic tables (sitting with your peers to discuss an industry-related topic and getting their thoughts).

But it’s the Monday night networking party where you can really let your hair down.

4. Time to recharge – Leave your spending money at home, we’ve got the refreshments covered! Over the course of the two days, we will provide you with breakfast, lunch, coffee and snacks. Plus, at the Monday evening networking party, we even throw in a couple of free drinks to make the networking as fun and easy as possible. There may also be a party game or two to keep you entertained and to help out with introductions if you’re attending on your own.

5. Last but certainly not least, there’s the VIP dinner. If you’ve attended one of our conferences before, you’ll know all about the added benefits you get from attending this exclusive evening event. Taking place the night before the conference, the dinner is an intimate evening where around 20 VIP’s will pay an additional $300 to spend the evening in the company of our 18 expert speakers. Not only will you get the chance to ask them all of your burning SEO questions, this is also the perfect opportunity to get to know them on a more personal level also. There’s only 7 spaces left to this year’s dinner, so if you’re interested, sign up now!

And lastly, just for fun, here’s a more personal look at what the speakers get up to in their spare time!

Hope you can join us in Boston on 20^th & 21^st May! Tickets are just $799 / $1099 for the VIP package. If you have any questions, feel free to drop myself or Lynsey a line on events@distilled.net.

Lauren

P.S. Mackenzie Fogelson, one of our new speakers, wants your input into her session – take this quick survey to help her tailor her talk to suit you!

Lauren Brady is the Events Coordinator for our search conferences in the UK and US, based out of the London office. Favourite part of her job? Organising the after-parties and seeing the delegates enjoying them.

Typically, my suggestion is to noindex these pages so you don’t have low quality pages creating problems for you.

This can be a wasted opportunity though. Category pages could be great landing pages if:

• You use consistent categorization for your posts
• You add unique content to your pages
• Don’t display snippets from posts
• Make it easier for users to find posts

Some themes such as Thesis support this, but the majority do not. I wanted to make it easy for everyone to add content to their category pages and have created a plugin to do so: WP Custom Category Pages Plugin.

This plugin will help you by:

• Making it super easy to add unique content
• Enabling you to give each category a custom headline/H1 tag
• Allowing you to optimize your page title
• Removing duplicate content from your category pages
• Reducing the amount of pagination, and increasing the amount of link equity passed to pages

Below is a screenshot of the category page editor:

A few things to note:

The plugin is a work in progress–think of it like a minimum viable product. It’s not perfect, but at this point, I think the benefits are significant enough to release it.

Note: The title tag doesn’t work with themes that aren’t properly coded. Further, sidebars aren’t currently shown as they tended to display poorly with many themes. If the community likes the plugin and wants to get behind it, I’ll work on adding these elements into the plugin.

I’d love it if you could give it a spin, let me know what you think.

Official Plugin Page | WP Download Page

Geoff Kenyon is an SEO Consultant in the Seattle office and is determined to find the best burrito in Seattle. Outside of work he spends his time playing ice hockey, building igloos and eating maple syrup.

This may well have been the last LinkLove but here at Distilled we were set to make this the best one yet and the quality of speaker sessions [not to mention, line of mid conference refreshments and activities; Scaletrix, anyone?] were certainly testament to that.

Whether you want to earn buy-in with the right kinds of metrics from Rand Fishkin, build training sets with Ian Lurie or simply, want to relive the whole conference experience again; all of the LinkLove 2013 conference video footage is now available over on the store page.

That’s not to say we are bowing out of the live sphere though, oh no! There’s still time to come and join us at SearchLove Boston in a few weeks time where we’ll be joined with this stellar line up of speakers.

Plus, if you fancy taking a look at all of our HD video footage, you can now stream over 80 hours of HD content with a paid DistilledU account. For more information on the training platform, head over to the DistilledU page or if you want to upgrade to full, unlimited access, you can do that here.

Finally, if you’d like to receive more video content direct to your inbox, you can sign up for our free monthly video email now and you can enjoy a curated selection of our conference footage. Head over here to find out more.

Enjoy!