How to Create, Curate, and Promote Great Content
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Transcript of How to Create, Curate, and Promote Great Content
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UNCON F E R ENC E
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How to Create, Curate, & Promote Great Content
UNCONF E R ENC E
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And some stuff about pandas and quality raters
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What Do I Know About Content?
Involved with search industry since 1997
Previously managed several thousand domains with several million indexed pages
Most importantly, I know within a vacuum great content by itself means nothing
Have played both sides of the coin, creating software for autogen content as well as hiring in-house staff for premium portals
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Joe SinkwitzCRO, CopyPress
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What is GREAT Content?
It must serve a specific purpose
Content can come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and formats
Beautiful by my definition is something that is useful to the desired end user
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Product Page Copy
Blog Posts
Infographics
Video
Interactive
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Product Page Copy
Great content needs to be unique
Most big retailers use the same manufacturer feeds – only one of them will win online; Amazon
MACY’S PRODUCT COPY >>
EXAMPLE
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Blog Posts
Great written copy can cover KW holes in most content marketing strategies
Long-format, well-researched content engages users, attracting links better than {automated|overseas|intern-level} content
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INFOLIFIC >>
EXAMPLE
Useless, thin content is panda fodder
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Infographics
Best use is in taking a complex subject and simplifying through imagery
It HAS to be unique; there’s a lot of crap floating around where the same theme and concept is overplayed
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ORSYP >>
EXAMPLE
A great infographic is digestible, educational, and entertaining
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Video
Multi-purpose medium where you can actually tell a story to a captive audience
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BESTLIFEQUOTE.COM >>
EXAMPLE
Sales pitch? Education? Pure entertainment? You can get all three
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Interactive
The current King of user engagement
Interactive is also just so awesome right now with HTML5
Very difficult for someone to scrape and replicate; publications need to link to the resource vs copy/paste without attribution
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NBA DRAFT BOARD >>
EXAMPLE
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Fark.comHumorous, intentionally and unintentionally viral stories
Vibrant community that continually sources material
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Curating Great ContentE X A M P L E
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Tripadvisor.comIt isn’t just a hotel. For our Hawaii trip we used the curation of experiences and entire trips to plan which hotel, restaurants, and activities to undertake
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Curating Great ContentE X A M P L E
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Curating Great ContentE X A M P L E
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If your content is at all image based, run like hell to get started – your coupon friends in the audience can tell you how much money is to be made here
Every topic is doable!
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Google+
Too soon?
Curating Marginal Content
For…Google employees and those wanting to talk to Google employees
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Vine.co
Curating Great ContentE X A M P L E
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Only a few seconds per video, but powerful follower base
Humor wins here, but fantastic for branding
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HE-MAN IS GETTING GREAT
BRANDING FROM THIS
HANDSOME FELLOW >>
EXAMPLE
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Hey Strategists
When deciding to make great content will it be
to live on your site or specifically to get ‘curated’
by a specific community?
The best pieces attempt to work on multiple
levels, satisfying both user needs onsite and
piquing interest from curators
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Panda Time
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Quick evolution of Panda from the eyes of a practioner; how I got out of the first wave (and into penguin) and how I’ve gotten out of subsequent waves
Things to do to mitigate Panda risk
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Making That Great Content {Smarter|Better|More Useful}
In a word, visibility that results in action
There’s lots of ways to drive traffic, which
I’ll delve into
Dave loves native…and Italian meatballs
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Organic outreach & relationship building
Yes, buying openly advertised links still can work, but the time horizon before getting slapped is increasingly shrinking
Systematically building long-term relationships devised to share great content, especially when the relationship drives traffic, will stand the test of time
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Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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PPC
Other similar toll roads
Similar to native, PPC style campaigns devised to drive traffic can result in an increase in brand queries + secondary organic links, when properly managed
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Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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Display Networks
Similar to native, display ads targeted to user-specific demographics can yield brand exposure + sales
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Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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Social promotion
Facebook Ads, Sponsored Tweets, Stumbles
Low-intent, high volume traffic that has its place if CPM focused
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Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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Traditional PR
PR is going to merge with SEO as organic outreach shifts back from being technically oriented to biz dev oriented
Getting placement in Time or Washington Post is hard to undervalue
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Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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Offline
TV
Dead Trees
Radio
These mediums are still gigantic and though typically requiring larger spends, some content is ideal to be placed here
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Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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Email and email listbuilding
Overlooked far too often by big publishers that don’t know how to interact with their audience
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Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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Think product placement embedded on TV shows
I view it as fancy terminology for advertising that matches content to the context in which a user is using a site
The goal is less ad blindness and more interaction. The ad is designed to be useful/entertainment, hence higher CTR!
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Native: Promoting Content E X A M P L E
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How Does the Combo Work?
Great content needs eyeballs to matter+
By sourcing the right mix of native traffic, advertisers can get:+
Higher incidence of branded search queries, boosting authority signal
More qualified traffic than the stumbleupons and reddits of the world
Search benefit of secondary organic links
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Let’s see an example already!
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The impact of great content + native: +
92 links, ALL organic, as of April 29th
33,000+ unique pageviews and going
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Another Example!
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{ Result } Page 1 for the topic question discussed
Hub-concept client that used
static IG and connections to
gain in the organics
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MOAR Examples!
{ Result } Page 1 for many retail interview queries
Client needed topically
relevant post + social
sharing to spread story
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Google Quality Raters
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There’s a Difference
Guys like Kaspar Szymanski & Fili Wiese != manual raters
[both former spam team members] – the “real” employees
will take time to look at URLs in depth if prompted
Actual quality raters are generally part-time employees
from an outsourced company at best, or overseas ESL
just trying to cram through to meet numbers at worst
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«Why is that at worst?
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Quality Rater Stats
The average time spent by actual manual raters on a
page that is flagged in the spam queue is ~20 seconds
Over the evolution of the guidelines, raters were even
instructed to mark helpful hotel affiliates as spam
When I employed a person that was simultaneously a
quality rater, I watched the process...Does it look like
a thin affiliate site? Is it obvious spam? Is it obviously
keyword stuffed? Are there obvious cloaks in play?
Porn? Broken images?
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What happened to the helpful hotel affiliate?
Scrape, vilify, replace – I call Knowledge Graph the Great Scrape
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Next Came Doorways
Doorway penalties are particularly annoying for
affiliate and small business sites because think back to
the ~20 second evaluation. If you had a real, legitimate
business and the rater felt the design was weak on a
gut reaction, the expansion of the definition of what a
doorway way now encompassed you
I had plenty of these nasties
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And Today We EAT
EXPERTISETopical expert evaluation
AUTHORITATIVENESSThe idiots actually look at BBB if you want to manipulate it
TRUSTWORTHINESSYMYL
Yes, we did eat...and will eat again, but what I mean is
E-A-T per the most recently leaked quality guidelines
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E A T
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You Have 20 Seconds
Is the design fresh and professional? Trigger their emotional appeal towards it being authoritative by default
Are you slathering ads everywhere or are you focused? There is a fine line between revenue-per-user and MFA/doorway/appy-with-manual-penalty
Is the written content well structured, grammatically correct, and spell-checked? Simple to do to get past a spot-checker
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How can you take advantage of this knowledge?
If you only have in-house design/development talent you can commission someone to help with native and other forms of promotion
If you only have native and promotion skills you can commission someone to help you with design/development talent
If you have neither, you can work with an outreach company and a design shop
Or, you know…CopyPress for any and all of the above
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Joe Sinkwitz@CygnusSEO