A lot of attention right now is given to the technical tasks associated with structuring and presenting content in a way that allows the search engines to index your content effectively.  This sort of activity involves tasks commonly associated with Search Engine Optimization.  Activities like content silo’ing, meta-tagging, keyword placement, XML site map submitting, cross linking, A/B and multivariate testing, etc, are some of the tactics involved in a broader strategy for ensuring your content is optimized for search engine indexing.  If your content is well indexed by the search engines, then the people out there searching for something related to your content will hopefully find you before they find someone else.  The irony obviously, is that in this stage you have to appease the bot to get to the humans.  You need to know how the bot “thinks” as much if not more than how your audience thinks.

But assuming you do a good job of appeasing the bots, and the bots in turn bring you unsuspecting humans, then you have to know what to do with the humans.  This is where a deep understanding of your audience’s psychographics will help in developing a strategy for broadening and, more importantly, deepening your relationship with your audience.  Psychographics refers to an understanding of who your consumer is, where they are coming from, what they are looking for, and how they look for it…what motivates them.  It’s the psychology counter point to demographics which is more focused on quantitative group profiling than understanding the motivations or attitudes, interests, and opinions of the people that compose that group.  Both are important.  But the motivations side of that coin is most often overlooked.

Publishing excellent content is good.  Leveraging Search Engine Optimization practices to promote your excellent content is great.  But if you have a growing audience for your content, it rapidly becomes important to understand why they like you.  Knowing why your audience likes you will help build a sustainable approach to your content strategy as you understand the motivations behind the numbers for your success.

So, this all begs the questions, “how do I discern the motivations of my audience?”  Well, there in lies the tough stuff.  It requires primary research.  I mean talking to actual humans….I know, this is something we thought we could avoid in an era of Analytics.  I thought for a long time, that math would enable me to tool away in my little digital cave and at the same time affect real people through the internet everywhere.  Well, it seems analytics shows us what’s working, but still fails to explain the details of why (or as a colleague recently pointed out…why not)  Primary research with real life humans is still required in understanding why humans behave they way they do.

The good news is that this primary research when coupled with rigorous analytics is like pulling the curtain back to expose a method behind the magic.  And that’s powerful.

I just finished reading Rae Hoffman’s post in the Outspoken Media blog about Google’s new real time search inclusion of Tweets.  Now tweets deemed relevant to a keyword search appear at the top of the SERP evidently assigning huge value to recency in the algorithm.  Hoffman does an excellent job of outlining why this is scary as hell.  Really, everyone should read it.

The story reminded me of the  Google Sidewiki launch.  That new service by Google allows anyone to post a comment about anyone else’s website.  If you have the Sidewiki tool on your browser you can view the posts left by everyone else over time.  It’s a potential nightmare for folks interested in having their website represent their best foot forward.  I posted about this issue a while back, and can understand the challenge of blending the internet value of “transparency” with the marketer’s desire to influence brand sentiment.  But the tone-deafness of Google in how (now two) products have been released is troubling.

The lack of sensitivity reflected by these launches is alluded to in Ken Auletta’s book, Googled.  (Here’s a review of the book) He attributes it to an extreme engineer’s mindset.  This may or may not be true, but my concern is that as Google marches on toward controlling more and more of our experience on the web, there will be more and more of these missteps that place our privacy and security at increasingly greater risk.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Real Time Search (igeek.co.za)
• Never too early: Making the most of Google Sidewiki (smartblogs.com)
• Sidewiki Defeat Helps Block Only Google SideWiki Comments, Not Toolbar Users (seroundtable.com)

Here’s a video from Blaine Mathieu, CMO of Lyris, regarding Marketing trends for 2010.  He does a great job of pitching his company’s offerings, but regardless, I agree with his sense of industry direction.

From a high level, quant skills will be more valuable than ever in Marketing as Analytics is not something just for the web master to care about anymore.  Social Network apps & brand sentiment, Mobile apps, Email campaigns and Search marketing can all be measured in ways never dreamed of before.  The ability to measure and track metrics will penetrate more and more deeply into the mindset of modern integrated marketing.

The tools to build these apps and the contexts within which to deploy them are rapidly approaching maturity.  This should drive costs down well enough to make app development a function of every integrated marketing campaign.  Then tracking all those apps through Analytics will drive a stronger perceived value for quant skill sets in the integrated marketing professional.

There could be a danger of the pendulum swinging a little too far and traditional qualitative skills being slightly less valued in the short term.  I don’t know, but I could see how that might happen.  But, I think over time, qualitative skills will find solid footing again and the integrated marketing professional will emerge as someone who is capable of thinking equally out of the left as well as the right side of his/her brain.

My blog is about a few things, but a couple of those things are Integrated Marketing and Mobile.  On both fronts, I’m becoming a huge Flurry fan.

First, on the Marketing front, Flurry is a perfect example of how to write a Company Blog.  What I mean to say is that Flurry does an amazing job of providing extremely useful information to the community rather than just hyping their own products and news all day long on the blog.  I did some keyword searches in Google on the topics of mobile app economics and stuff like that.  The Flurry blog returned high in the search result and for good reason!  The information I clicked through to was relevant, well researched and very well written.  Bottom line, those guys know how to use their Blog in the context of Search Engine Marketing and not just as a personal PR wire.

The other reason I’m digging on Flurry so much right now has to do with the Mobile specific stuff.  My blog is in part dedicated to the process of building a mobile app I’m working on with a partner.  We think there’s at least a small business to be built around the app.  The kind of industry information I’m gleaning from the Flurry blog is helping to better position the app and discern potential business models.  It’s just so comforting to know there’s a tool out there that can enable me to gather the kind of quantitative penetration and usage data that makes me want to stay up all night looking at charts and spreadsheets!

So, if you’re a Marketer, check out the Flurry blog from a best practices perspective.  If you’re into Mobile, check it out for some really great mobile app industry data.

While running Famplosion, I had a sneaking suspicion that the volume of content we added had a direct impact on the traffic we’d get to our site.  Initially, the traffic spikes per content submission volume spikes would happen on about a 2 to 3 day delay.  I guessed this was due to the infrequency of getting indexed by the googlebot when we were first getting started.  The Googlebot did not come around as regularly to reindex us.  Then in time, that dropped to a one day delay once the Googlebot was indexing us essentially every day.

Seeing the correlation I had to ask whether my hunch about causation was true.  I definitely got some basic experience in asking that question around holidays when my Editors would take a few days off.  We’d see dips in traffic correspondingly.  However, I couldn’t know for certain that these dips were not reflections of our audience’s behavior moreso than an algorithmic issue derived from reduced content submission volume.

Well, my suspicions have been confirmed by a new report put out by the folks at Changing Content.  They ran as scientific an inquiry as I’ve seen in this area to determine the true value of changing content.  It’s a very interesting report you can get here!

Also, we used to get content from a variety of sources for Famplosion.  Some sources we subscribed to spewed the same content to sites all over the web.  I had a hunch the SEO value of this content was less than the SEO value of content my Editors would contribute manually.  This was important stuff for me to know because the “cost per content” metric was one I used to measure our operation all the time.  I basically needed to know whether the high cost of human edited content was valuable enough to justify the expense when compared to the less expensive subscription services that were more parsed through tons of scripts before getting published on our site.  My hypothesis was that the human contributed content (being more specifically relevant to our site’s audience) had a great enough SEO value to justify the high cost-per-content when compared to the content that we subscribed to along with everyone else out there.

So that leads me to something else I think I really like about the Changing Content widget offering.  The content they provide in their little tool for their clients is human edited!  As far as I’m concerned, that makes a huge difference, which I would LOVE to see quantified relative to crawled/indexed/parsed content.

I guess the more my intuition is validated by a scientific method, the better I feel about myself….hmm, all sorts of theological implications in that statement…will have to think that through.

Regardless, check out Changing Content when you get a chance.  Looks like a very cool tool.

And hats off to Jason Cohen, whose blog is where I first read about this tool!

Every once in a while, something or someone comes along to serve as a sign post signifying some major shift that’s occurring in business, culture or politics.  Inbound Marketing, the new book from the guys who started HubSpot may prove to be one of those sign posts.

To be fair, the business shift this book highlights has been happening for a little while now.  Maybe a year or two, at least.  But with this book, and more importantly with HubSpot the company, the pace of this shift happening should certainly get taken up a notch.

For decades, major brands have lead the way in marketing through buying the biggest megaphones our media culture had to offer.  TV, Print and Radio & Retail were the ways to reach a consumer base millions strong and terribly geographically distributed.  Well, we all knew the Internet would change that someday, but how exactly has not been abundantly clear until now.

Inbound Marketing does an excellent job of describing this transition and how to navigate Marketing’s  New World Order.

Anyone interested, eager or needing to succeed at marketing in a modern context should read this book.

It’s written to an audience with very little experience in Search Engine Optimization or any of that, so it should not be an intimidating read for the old school.  They did a great job on that front.  It’s a total reference book for the newby.

My only reservation came when they started talking about Sales and how to manage the Sales funnel.  The book is obviously best suited for marketers targeting large volumes of sales opportunities, and this large volume lends itself to more technical methods of managing the sales pipeline or funnel.  My reaction to the chapter or two in the book on Sales was based on the fact that a lot of large enterprise sales actually requires pretty deep personal relationships between the sales individual and their company accounts.  It’s really hard to figure out how to pursue the more sophisticated sales cycles using these more technical Funnel management methods because the Sales reps personal relationships are critical to understanding the stage of a sales cycle any account may be in.  Plus, in many cases the name of the game is penetrating accounts deeply moreso than pursuing as many accounts as possible.  So, I think a lot of the old school Sales Reps out there with serious rolodexes are probably still safe for now.

As for their old school Marketing colleagues, y’all better get on the band wagon.  It’s a whole new world and the folks at HubSpot seem poised to dominate!

OK, it only took about 9 months to generate enough revenue through Adsense to clear the 100$ threshold required before they send out a payment.  I guess Adsense won’t be a serious revenue stream for me anytime soon!

It couldn’t be easier though.  I have to say, I dig the concept of focusing on traffic and getting paid by Google for the effort.  Now I just need to figure out how to scale my traffic to where the Google payments are actually meaningful.

Content, content, content.

This is really SEO 101.  To drive crazy traffic requires crazy volumes of quality content, and of course a content platform that is optimized according to search engine best practices.  To get started on understanding those best practices, I highly recommend the book from those guys at Hubspot, Inbound Marketing.  It’s a solid introduction for those new to SEO, which is great.  It’s a bit of articulating the obvious for those who have been at Internet Marketing for a while, but even there it’s valuable from the perspective of providing a framework for explaining Internet (or Inbound) marketing to others.

As for driving crazy volumes of quality content, well, that’s between you and your imagination.

So, the new thing seems to be Google’s Sidewiki service.  Actually, I’m not sure it’s a service, in fact, I’m not sure what it is, so maybe they have a team putting together a new nomenclature for Sidewiki which will finally steal some momentum from the Twitter vocabularly….which interestingly enough got us all to stop thinking so googley…hmm, it seems there’s an internet vernacular horse race going on.

In any case, the new horse in the race is Google’s sidewiki.  Basically, you (meaning anyone and everyone) can post a public comment on a website (meaning any website anywhere that could belong to anyone).  Your post could be raving positive, or brutally negative, and the owner of the site has no ability to moderate those comments at all.  The Comment appears along the left side of your browser if you have installed Sidewiki.  So, go to the “sidewikify me please site“, install it and you’ll see what I mean.

From a Marketer’s perspective, this seems pretty scary.  It’s super scary for Marketers who work for companies with products no one likes…do those still exist in this economy?

So, for all you folks running your own websites, better get on the bandwagon before it runs you over.  As for me, I’m the first Sidewiki post on Famplosion.com!  Which kind of stokes me actually.

I have a feeling this is going to be a real love hate relationship.  But what else is new in the realm of Internet Marketing!

I’ve got a business blog at famplosion.blogspot.com originally established on Blogger. I’ve been adding posts to the blog for the last couple years and rcently handed over the reigns for the blog to one of my awesome Editors. She’s been cranking out content on the blog and cross linking her heart out. All good, right?

Well, it’s clear to us all now that the true SEO value of the Blog is being missed as long as it is located on Blogspot instead of being hosted on the Famplosion domain. The biggest reason for this is that Google gives traffic credit to Blogspot when the blog is hosted there as opposed to Famplosion.

Being a digital media company, that’s a problem.

So, we decided to move the blog off Blogspot and onto something we could host locally. But once the decision was made then came the issued around transferring that content.

I was a little worried about these issues after having read an article here and there about the challenges of moving content from one blog to another. Plus, there were issues around using Blogger specifically that concerned me. Here’s a link.

Long story short, I was poking around WordPress a little bit last night, and discovered that if I want to migrate content from one blogging platform to WordPress (hosted on my server) there’s a tool for that. Pow!

Here’s an article that describes the process…

The other day I was putting some slides together that provided a high level introduction to Internet Marketing strategies and tactics.  I used the Library and Dewey decimal system as an analogy to explain the role Google now plays in organizing the world’s information, at least the information that can be found on a web site somewhere in the world.

I was kind of pleased with myself for how well the analogy seemed to both explain Google’s role to folks with little background or understanding of search engine optimization and that sort of thing.  But I was much more pleased with myself when I read a friend’s blog and saw him use the same analogy, albeit with much greater eloquence than I could muster.

That friend is Paul O’Brien, and I’ve long considered him a guru with regards to Search Engine Marketing and Optimization.  In fact, he’s one of the few people who has their own folder in my Email Inbox since every email I get from him has something in it I don’t want to forget.  In short, he’s a very talented modern consumer marketing machine!

So, I thought anyone who reads this article would be better served by reading Paul’s. here it is…