With that kind of intro, I could make some vague marketing connections about teamwork and competition and playmaking, but those are all corny. There is, however, a much more interesting parallel between basketball and blog posts that could impact the way creators talk to their audience. It all comes down to data and analytics.

Even if you don’t know anything about the NBA, you’re probably familiar with the concept of analytics. Access to good data helps us make smarter decisions, regardless of the field.

Basketball went through an analytics revolution over the last decade that changed the way teams play. The gist of the evolution comes down to simple math about which plays offer the most value. Layups, dunks, and foul shots are easy and usually net two points. Hitting a three-pointer is harder, but it’s worth an extra point. The most inefficient play in basketball is a mid-range jump shot because it’s hard to make yet still only counts for two points. So teams stopped taking those shots and replaced them with more threes and layups.

The last few years, I’ve had this theory that the same type of thinking took over publishing and marketing. Companies found that longform content—typically defined as anything over 2,000 words—drove more value than middling posts, even though most digital articles fall under 1,000 words. Those 800-word posts became inefficient. A BuzzSumo study of 100 million articles revealed that longform content gets more shares. Per CoSchedule, there’s a similar correlation for search engine rankings. A joint report from BuzzSumo and Moz also found that longer stories received more referral links than shorter posts.

The takeaway was very clear: The longer the content, the better.

There’s nothing empirically wrong with this data. Based on what we know about search and social platforms, their algorithms have picked up on these signals that favor longer word counts. I, like many other editors, adjusted accordingly. I pushed our marketing team to think long or short. Short posts were still easy wins. We could write 300 words about an infographic in an hour and get decent traffic. A long reported story might take a week or two, but the SEO payoff would be worth it. At one point, I started telling new hires and freelancers point blank: Don’t turn in anything between 700 and 1,000 words.

But what if these algorithmic signals missed something?

In December, we surveyed 1,024 people in the U.S. to find out about their media and marketing preferences. One of our questions dealt with preferred word count when reading online. According to the survey, 75 percent of the public prefers articles they read to be under 1,000 words. Only 5 percent prefer articles over 2,000 words.

When I saw the data, this was my reaction:

The more I thought about it, the more both points could coexist. The average adult reads about 200 words per minute, which means longform articles take at least 10 minutes to complete. Most people can’t dedicate that much time during the day. But they can find four minutes between meetings or during lunch. At the same time, if I wanted to thoroughly learn about a topic, I’d much rather shell out 10 minutes to read a definitive source than piece together knowledge here and there from a bunch of 800-word blog posts.

As an editor and writer, this made me rethink my hard stance on word counts. It makes sense that people would validate the best longform content on search and social even as they typically stick with the mid-range blog posts. That doesn’t mean every longform post is good. In fact, plenty of them are worse than Ben Simmons at the foul line. Some stories work best at 850 words, regardless of what Google prioritizes.

Here’s the true answer to the word count dilemma: It depends. As is usually the case, blanket solutions aren’t that helpful. If you write about transparent hiring practices in the tech industry, your audience probably needs you to write more. If you’re dreaming up a Taco Bell subway system, probably not. The only real rule you should adopt is being open to the word count that your story deserves.

But now I have to wrap it up. I’m over 800 words, and I don’t want to force a longer word count for no reason. As my old basketball coaches would say, sometimes it’s best to take what the defense gives you.

Contently’s full report on 2019 content preferences will be published the end of January. To get early access to some of the data, click here to sign up for our email newsletter.

The post The Lost Art of the Mid-Range Blog Post appeared first on Contently.

Last summer, SEMRush produced a study on the most impactful ranking factors. The data showed that using exact keywords on a page didn’t offer the same SEO value as other engagement-driven factors.

These insights suggest that publishing engagement content is more important than optimizing the technical aspects of your site. That’s true to an extent, mostly for well-known sites that get plenty of backlinks. But for a lot of sites, this isn’t the reality. In those cases, the structural integrity of your blog or company page is crucial. If you set up your site carefully and effectively, then you make it so much easier to reap the benefits if your content starts to drive serious engagement.

Most people are familiar with keywords, backlinks, and bounce rate. But if you really want to master SEO, here are 5 factors worth exploring.

Metadata

Metadata (or data about data) is how a search engine validates the relevancy of your content compared to what’s promised in the page’s code. Meta tags can be used for a number of different things, but that doesn’t mean every single one is worth including. The current area of interest is the apparent increase in the length of a meta description that Google displays on SERPs beneath a page title. Previously, a 155-character description was seen the most within page-one results. Starting in in late November 2017, Google seems to be ushering in SERPs with descriptions peaking at over 300 characters.

Even though meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, writing ones that stay on trend with the latest algorithms is vital for making sure competitors aren’t edging you out with more valuable copy.

Site speed

We all love dazzling interactive Java and CSS, but too much of it can cost you if those files aren’t compressed and minified. Almost a decade ago, Google confirmed that site speed does, in fact, influence SERPs. People want instantaneous load times, and Google wants to prioritize results that will delight those users. If your site loads faster than a competitor’s for a page with similar information, that may be enough for you to rank ahead. This SEO factor is only growing in importance. Google announced that come July 2018, speed will also factor in for mobile search.

Schema markup & structured data

In addition to metadata, pages also have smaller elements called microdata that can be classified using semantic vocabulary. As IronPaper explains it, metadata tells search engines what the page is about; microdata reveals what elements are on the page.

We can take care of these elements by using Schema markups. Meta tags are able to validate what your site can broadly offer a user, but Schema refers to a particular technology that provides granular, structured data about your page.

Schema offers an incredibly robust library, but much like meta tags, there’s no need to include every one applicable to your site. The key is assessing which handful of items are most important for your piece. Rather than stuffing an article with a particular keyword, you can use a schema markup to signal that you want the piece to rank for pages that include things like company names, products, and places.

Site architecture

For those of us who aren’t UX wizards, setting up a completely logical site map is daunting, especially if the site is large. Fortunately, you can write a file called robots.txt to tell search engines how you want them to crawl your site.

For example, certain parts of your site, like duplicated content or a convoluted directory, could hurt your SEO potential. To cover these issues up, look into the disallow feature. It’ll let you hide that content from search results without having to delete anything from your site.

Just remember that robots.txt can be a double-edged sword if used incorrectly. Blocking directories that contain useful content and quality backlinks could wind up setting you back.

Mobile-first indexing

Perhaps the most compelling reason to check in on the structure of your site is Google’s impending introduction of mobile-first indexing. In 2017, mobile traffic topped desktop traffic for the first time, per analysis by SimilarWeb. That trend is not going to change anytime soon.

For this reason, Google will soon use your mobile site as the primary version when indexing your content. (Check out this helpful FAQ Bridget Randolph wrote for Moz for more information). In other words, building a site with mobile in mind is no longer a best practice—it’s mandatory.

The post The SEO Factors You’re Probably Ignoring appeared first on Contently.

To me, that scenario is the best way to describe what happens when a brand does all the right things creating a valuable blog post but then ignores internal linking. It’s like whiffing on an open goal with the game on the line.

You may write the most imaginative, persuasive, captivating copy, and regularly produce insightful, enjoyable, valuable content for your audience, but if you neglect to build internal links, you’re hurting your business. Not only can internal links direct people who visit your site to other relevant material, but they also boost your SEO potential.

To capitalize on the work you’re already putting in, here’s how marketers can get the most out of their links.

Navigation stations

Most marketers have some understanding of SEO basics. You want to own unique keywords important to your business. You don’t want headlines to be too short or too long. Images, video, and other visual assets help.

Since search engine bots constantly crawl your sites to gauge which pages are most important, linking to them in a strategic way is another way to boost your search rankings. Doing so leads to a better customer journey, encouraging people to spend more time on your site, and hopefully, click to learn more about your company’s services.

If visitors get enough value out of your site to click on other links, your bounce rate will drop significantly. In turn, this will enhance the overall authority of your website in the eyes of search engine bots, which increases your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Talking of bots, they need to crawl every aspect of your website in order to index your content. If there are isolated pages that aren’t linked anywhere else, they’ll have no way of knowing it exists, no matter how wonderful the writing.

In its guide to internal links, Moz visualizes the perfect website architecture, with the blue dot at the top representing the homepage:

Having a clear interlinking structure ensures search engines can read and understand your website, with each link acting as a signpost, pointing them in the direction of important content. The more ‘signs’ you have pointing to relevant material, the clearer you make the pathway and the greater probability you have of getting noticed by potential customers. The more you publish, the trickier this gets since you’ll probably end up writing about the same core topics and keywords, making a consistent strategy all the more important.

The aim of the game is to ensure your most important web pages have the highest number of internal links pointing in their direction, and you can also check for and prevent broken links (a negative ranking factor that also disrupts user experience). If you’re looking for some insight into the signals you’re sending bots, you can create an Internal Links Report using Google’s Search Console.

Pointing in the right direction

When planning a new blog post or refining copy on your service pages, it’s extremely beneficial to conduct a quick audit to see where you can naturally link to other material. I’m a fan of the “site:” search operator in Google, and regularly employ this tactic when working on my own company’s site.

Since we’re talking about SEO advice for content marketers in this article, I thought it would make sense to look at other relevant material on The Content Strategist. If you type “site: contently.com/strategist SEO” into Google, the results bring up more than 250 related pages:

Armed with this knowledge, we now know that The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Content Marketers is the highest-ranking resource, which works out well since it’s an e-book packed with actionable advice. [Editor’s note: Albeit one that could use a facelift since it’s a little dated.] This makes it a natural, valuable internal link that hopefully benefits readers while also reaffirming the page’s prominence in the eyes of Google, laying down another signpost. Contently would be wise to link to the guide in other posts related to SEO.

It’s also wise to bear keywords in mind when forming anchor text (the words used in your hyperlinks) because there’s much SEO value to be gained there. Good anchor text should be descriptive in nature and highly relevant to the target page. “Click here,” for instance, doesn’t carry nearly as much weight as how to form an effective content marketing strategy. The former doesn’t give much of a clue as to the content, while the longer link contains the phrase “content marketing strategy”—a clear signal that increases the likelihood of the target page ranking well.

So if you’re already focused on creating smart, engaging articles, you’re on the right path. But it’s important to remember that’s just the first step to success. Once your content is ready, then it’s time to link it all together to really achieve your SEO goals.

The post Connecting the Dots: How to Raise Your Search Rankings With Internal Linking appeared first on Contently.

Did you know that most ads have an average click-through rate of only 0.06 percent? I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem like a good conversion rate for your hard-spent money.

An area where we’re not seeing these kinds of rates of decline is influencer marketing. Just check out the stats: 74 percent of people use social media to decide whether they want to buy something. Influencer marketing has a 37 percent better retention rate than business that doesn’t come through word of mouth.

The question then becomes, how do you use these folks to push your product? That’s what we’re going to look at today.

1. Start with the ‘who’

First off, make sure that your market is actually going to be influenced by the influencers you want to target. This seems like a straightforward step, but people often skip it. They just expect a famous person to endorse their product.

That mentality might get you a lot of views, but if you partner with people who aren’t actually interested in your product, then your business won’t benefit. So, instead, find out who your audience listens to.

One of the best ways to do this is to survey your audience and find out what websites they regularly visit, who they follow on Twitter, and so on. From there, you’ll have a much better idea of how to proceed.

Also, look at BuzzSumo and Followerwonk, made by Moz. They can give you some valuable insights into which influencers affect different audiences. When you pinpoint some influencers who could fit your brand, spend some time simply listening to them so you know who they are and what they have to say.

2. Find out what kind of influencers you want

Once you narrow down your targets, you’ll have to decide how much you want to spend. Most people trying to run an influencer campaign will start by going after the biggest influencer in their field. But there are several problems with this strategy:

• These influencers tend to be very expensive.

• Their audiences are often less engaged than those of smaller influencers.

So if you’re just starting out, consider targeting smaller influencers, or, as they’re known in the industry, micro-influencers. These people are cheaper, easier to sway, and capable of providing a bigger per-person impact.

3. Don’t ignore influencers already on your side

Do you already have some influencers speaking positively about your product (something you can find out by checking backlinks)? Then make sure you talk to them as well. Chances are you’ll build up their loyalty to your brand simply by giving them some kind words and sharing the content they create. (Don’t just share the content about your brand; they’ll see right through that.) Since these influencers already know what you offer, their enthusiasm will come across as more organic and convincing.

4. Make inroads

If you don’t want to pay influencers an arm and a leg, build a rapport with them first. Once you’ve got a relationship going, they might start endorsing your product all on their own.

Compliment them, get involved in the conversation, and share their content across your network. Partnerships can be about more than money, and reciprocity can go a long way.

5. Create engaging content

Many influencers may have a great voice or connection with their followers, but they can still struggle to produce interesting content. In fact, they might struggle more than others, because they’re expected to do so continuously. For that reason, you may want to help them create content.

You can brainstorm blog posts or social copy for them to share, offer useful statistics, or relay insights about how your industry works. If you have counter-intuitive information that hasn’t been covered yet, that could work particularly well.

6. Realign your onsite marketing

Just launching an influencer marketing campaign is not enough. You also have to ensure that your site is geared toward influencer marketing. When people start pushing your product, your website has to be a natural continuation of that push.

The idea is that you aren’t just a company, but that you’ve got a personality. Your website has to be likable and interesting. This can be achieved through good content marketing or just by making sure the language and visuals mesh well and create a good user experience. If you have that consistency from your marketing campaigns to your website, your audience will be more inclined to trust what you have to say.

7. Don’t neglect your influencers

Your relationship with influencers doesn’t stop as soon as you reach an agreement. Remember that you actually have to keep your influencers happy and communicate with them so your referrals don’t dry up.

Take some time to reward them. This can obviously come in the form of financial compensation. But paying influencers has led to problems in the past for some companies due to increasingly stricter advertising regulations. In addition to sharing their content and giving some exposure, you could also give influencers an advanced trial period with new products (as long as you make certain that they don’t have to review it positively). They could give you feedback, which, in turn, would only benefit your company.

8. Go back to step one

You can’t sit on your laurels in the influencer game. Competitors may try to take your influencers from you. Maybe someone loses his or her influence as new voices emerge over time. For that reason, you’ve always got to be on the lookout for new partnerships.

Also, consider moving upstream. If you already have devoted micro-influencers, maybe it’s time to invest in a few of the bigger fish. In other words, you’ll be using your influencer marketing strategy to influence the influencers. Before you know it, it’ll be time to go back to the top of the list and start again.

The post 8 Tips for Running Your First Influencer Marketing Campaign appeared first on Contently.

At some point over the past 12 months, everyone seemed to simultaneously realize that simply saying the word “scale” would make them sound smart as hell in any meeting. When I wrote “scale” into the headline of this article, my first thought was that I’m an all-powerful god. My second thought was that this headline is going to absolutely kill it in search.

After all, scaling your content marketing program is on a lot of people’s minds right now. 2017 is approaching, so it’s time to plan how we’re going to kick ass next year. And there’s never a more optimistic time in content than when you’re planning your ideal budget. I almost talked myself into blowing 30 percent of our budget on VR cameras just now. (It’s the future!)

Unfortunately, figuring out how to scale your content efforts is a much more measured activity, especially when your VP of finance doesn’t see how a hoverboard and 17 GoPros will help the company sell more software. As the head of the edit and strategy teams here at Contently, it’s a challenge I think about a lot.

This month, it seemed to be on our readers’ minds too. I got a ton of questions about scaling a content marketing program in 2017, so this week, we’re sticking to just one topic. But it’s a damn good one.

We’re creating content and think we understand our audience. The bigger challenge is scaling. We use social media and SEO for organic search. What should we do to scale and reach more people?

—Kate, New York

Right now, a lot of brands are finishing up their “if we build it, they will come” content marketing strategy and … well, they’re realizing that no one came.

Far too often, I hear brands say their goal is to “build a content marketing hub.” It’s kind of like buying some land in a rural field, spending months building a community center on it, and then looking at it and saying, “Well, my work here is done. Time for people to start showing up!”

If someone asks you, “What did we get for that $500,000 you spent this year?” responding with “a content hub” is not a great answer. That’s not a result.

You could respond with something like this…

But it’s just not true. Content marketing is about a lot more than content.

In my July column, I talked a lot about the specific distribution tactics that work best, so I’m not going to rehash them all again. But as you finalize your growth plan for 2017, keep a few key principles in mind:

1. Document your strategy and forecast the compounding returns of your content.

We’ve all heard the stat: More than 60 percent of marketers still don’t have a documented content strategy heading into 2017. I still struggle to understand why.

Getting a budget and resources for your content marketing program without a content strategy is like applying for a bank loan without a business plan. The bank isn’t going to give you much money, and chances are, your CEO won’t either.

You need to show how your content efforts map to business goals and how you’re going to reach your target audience. Forecasting audience growth is always going to be an educated guess, but paid distribution helps make it fairly predictable.

Say that you’re starting a content marketing budget from scratch. Between staff, freelancers, and site maintenance fees, you’re going to spend $20,000 a month to produce content. Then you have another $20,000 to spend on paid distribution on Facebook, which allows you to hone in on your ideal audience thanks to its advanced targeting features.

If your content is good, it’s not hard to get a $0.25 cost per click on Facebook. That translates to around 60,000 unique visitors each month off the bat (assuming one-third of the clicks come from people who click twice). Let’s say 5 percent of those 60,000 visitors share your content, driving three new readers with each share. That’s another 9,000 visitors, bringing your total to 69,000.

But let’s say you use an email capture tool like SumoMe to entice 5 percent of those readers to become newsletter subscribers. That’s 3,000 subscribers right there, half of whom will likely visit again next month. You’ll start to see a gradual rise, particularly as your email list grows and long-tail search and social traffic give your publication a continued boost.

Month 1

Paid: 60,000

Social: 9,000

Total: 69,000

Month 2

Paid: 60,000

Social: 10,000

Email: 1,500

Search: 1,000

Total: 72,500

Month 3

Paid: 60,000

Social: 13,000

Email: 3,000

Search: 3,000

Total: 79,000

This is a simplified calculation, but it illustrates what venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz calls “the compounding returns of content marketing.” Basically, as you create and distribute more content, your audience naturally grows. You build a loyal audience through email and social. The content published in previous months attracts long-tail traffic.

This prediction doesn’t just hold for readers. It’s true for other conversion events, like newsletter subscribers (illustrated above), e-book downloads, leads, opps, etc. No matter your KPIs, the same dynamic tends to hold true.

Pictured: One of my favorite charts ever

Of course, none of this works if you don’t do the next thing on the list.

2. Commit to creating freaking amazing content

In September, the marketing data platform Beckon announced a remarkable finding: The top 5 percent of branded content accounts for 90 percent of all engagement.

Some folks have taken that to mean that content marketing doesn’t work. I don’t see it that way. To me, the stat validates something obvious—that if you create something original and great, you have the opportunity to monopolize consumer attention and leave your competitors in the shadows. It’s proof that mediocre content just doesn’t work—on social or search.

When I interviewed Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin last year, this is what he had to say:

I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality. The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top 5 or 10 percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.

Ask [this]: If they’re searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now?

Unless the answer is a slam dunk, “Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,” I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.

It’s true. Great stories are the only thing that breaks through.

3. Spend at least 25 percent of your budget on paid distribution

Or half. Or more, depending on your goals and what stage you’re in. Acquiring new readers in your target audience is what allows a content marketing program to grow. Content only matters if people see it.

Yes, you need to maintain a steady stream of content to keep your subscribers and followers engaged. But the winning formula in 2017 will be to push readers to amazing pieces of content through paid distribution platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Outbrain, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Do that and you will crush the meeting with your CEO next December.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do I Scale My Content Marketing Program? appeared first on Contently.

For many content marketers, organic traffic earned through SEO is like a holiday bonus: It’s cool if it happens, but no one is planning their monthly budget around it.

“It’s not something they go for head-on,” said Dana DiTomaso, partner at digital marketing agency Kick Point. “People think about content and then say, ‘Oh, we’re going to do a social push.’ But really, good content should be driving your organic traffic on a regular basis.”

But what can you do about SEO? You’re just a creative person, right? Wrong. The days of clear distinctions between the content team and the SEO department are long gone. Content marketers should not only be aware of how their work affects search engine rankings, but also actively use that feedback and awareness to optimize their work.

Here are seven things that content marketers should be doing right now, according to some of the most masterful minds in SEO.

1. Jessica Bowman: SEO first, create later

For experienced marketing teams, the content creation process has become a high-level assembly line. The problem, according to SEO management consultant Jessica Bowman, is that SEO is often only considered after the fact. Rather than waiting until a piece of content is complete and then handing it off to the search expert, content marketers should keep SEO in mind from the very beginning.

“The problem I see in content marketing is that it’s after. It’s always the add-on piece,” Bowman said. “Instead, what I’d love to see them start doing is thinking about keyword research before you start brainstorming your content calendar.”

That research can guide content creation in a couple of ways. It exposes both what users want to know and, with a bit of additional digging, what questions existing content has already answered. Instead of retrofitting content to accommodate those keywords, content strategists can then build stories around them, organically incorporating SEO from the start.

“The writers need to incorporate the keywords into their thinking and brainstorming before they write,” Bowman explained. “It needs to be in the creative brief. Then, when they start writing, that needs to be what drives the creative direction.”

The same goes for link building. Thinking about what will inspire people to share and link to a piece of content before it’s created is much more effective than trying to figure out how to make finalized copy more appealing to influencers.

2. Dana DiTomaso: Tap into title tags

According to Dana DiTomaso, if there’s one easy fix content marketers can use to maximize the impact of their work, it’s not some sneaky, newfangled SEO trick.

“[It’s] title tags—which I know are the least sexy thing in content marketing,” she said. “But they actually make a difference.”

Title tags are the headlines that show up in search results. (For a quick lesson, check out this helpful Moz post.) Where so many brand publishers go wrong is making their title tags the same as their headlines. While a great headline is certainly a strong ranking tactic, DiTomaso stressed that it doesn’t serve quite the same function. Rather than rehashing the headline, which is typically engagement-focused, title tags should directly reflect the keywords you want people to use to find the article.

“We have the tendency in our industry to focus on the new shiny,” she said. “How about you just look at the title tags? It one hundred percent makes a difference. We’ve seen examples where literally all we’ve done on the page is change the title tag and then magically things are showing up better. And you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, this SEO thing really does work.'”

3. Paddy Moogan: Canvas your competitors

When it comes to SEO, no one loses points for peeking at their neighbor’s work. In fact, Paddy Moogan, co-founder of digital marketing firm Aira, agrees with Bowman: Checking out your competitors’ content is the first logical step when deciding what you want to create.

“But you have to look wider than your average competitors and find your content competitors,” he said.

For example, consider a travel website that sells flights and hotels and wants to rank for keywords such as “flights to New York” or “apartments in Rome.” Looking into competing travel sites that will also rank for those terms is simply a matter of common sense and basic research.

“However,” Moogan said, “you also need to look wider, and in this example, you’d look at travel bloggers. They don’t compete for these kind of keywords but do produce content that does well online, so you can probably learn a lot from them.”

4. Stephanie Chang: Links are forever

What type of content is more valuable: a topical take or something more evergreen? Is it better to attract lots of visitors right now or build long-term link equity?

Why not both?

“Keep URLs evergreen whenever possible,” said Stephanie Chang, Etsy’s acquisition manager and former SEO manager. “But you can modify the meta title and the H1, so that they are tailored for the audience.”

Take, for example, the link equity of an annual gift guide. According to Chang, the URL slug shouldn’t be “2015-holiday-gift-guide”: the extra specificity isn’t worth sacrificing the possibility of using the URL as a long-term content investment. A better option would be “holiday-gift-guide.”

“This way, we can reuse the same URL year after year, making the page stronger each year,” Chang said. “However, the meta title and H1 can still say ‘2015 Gift Guide,’ so that the content appears to be relevant and timely to its target audience.”

5. Erin Monday: Think SEO while you social

Even marketers who feel at home with both social and SEO can no longer think about the strategies separately. Search and social are colliding, and content’s job is to keep up.

“Twitter is integrating and indexing with traditional Google Search more and more,” said social media marketing expert Erin Monday. “So you better be applying some of your traditional SEO treatments in the Twittersphere.”

Some important actions to focus on include picking keyword-relevant handles, adding keywords to tweets, and thinking about SEO with regard to the names of videos and images being shared.

“If you look at how Twitter handles populate the regular SERP [search engine results page] results, even now, we can see traditional keywords at play,” Monday said. Applying SEO strategies to social media can help give your content that extra attention boost.

6. Stephan Spencer: Use linkerati outreach tools

For content creators, link building can be intimidating. Worrying about making great content is consuming enough, do you really have to spend time and energy wooing members of the so-called linkerati[note]Influencers, bloggers, journalists, etc.[/note]?

According to SEO strategist Stephan Spencer, you do, but it doesn’t have to be as exhausting as you think. Using an outreach tool—Spencer likes Pitchbox—can make it much easier to connect with the digital elite.

The tools can create a list of influencers according to certain metrics such as MozRank, domain authority, and Klout score. Once finalized, the software can ask influencers to share or participate in a piece of content. And participation, according to Spencer, is always the better of the two options. “You’ve got to get them involved,” he said. “You’ve got to scratch their own itch.”

For instance, if you’re creating some content, asking an influencer for a quotation is far better than asking that person to share one of your existing articles, no matter how relevant it is to their audience.

“It systemizes and provides workflow and pipeline reports for outreach to the influencers,” Spencer said of these outreach tools. “That allows you to scale it. You don’t have to do it all via brute force in your email account one at a time.”

7. Marie Haynes: Go great or go home

“My best advice would be to stop looking for shortcuts,” search engine marketing consultant Marie Haynes told me. “Every piece of content that you produce needs to be the absolute best of its kind.”

Previously, marketers could use SEO tactics like link building, keywords, and title tags to make content perform well in search regardless of the quality. That, however, is no longer the case.

Haynes knows plenty of businesses that crank out a quick, short blog post every single day, believing that the more they publish, the better. “This mindset must change,” she said. “I only recommend publishing content when you are able to produce something that is significantly better than what already exists on the web. If Google sees that a large portion of your site consists of content that rarely engages anyone, then this could trigger a demotion by the Panda filter.”

Essentially, it’s time prioritize quality over quantity. As Haynes put it: “Google is getting better and better at recognizing content that truly is useful to people.”

The post 7 Tips From SEO Wizards That Will Boost Your Content appeared first on Contently.

And as a result, there’s a natural tendency to play it safe. You started out planning to crush it, but now you’re just standing around making repeated comments about the punch. (Or posting DIY punch recipes on your brand blog.) It feels like the prudent move, but, in fact, you’re dooming yourself. By playing it safe, you’re merely guaranteeing failure.

Today, I want to talk about the biggest content strategy mistake I see from brands: completely failing to have an opinion.

If you don’t have an opinion, you won’t have an audience

Conventional wisdom says it’s not safe for brands to take a stance. (You should buy our product doesn’t count.) Having an opinion means saying something that people will disagree with, which sparks fears of ostracizing potential customers. But as our VP of Brand Development Elisa Cool wrote last week, the biggest possible audience isn’t always the best. If you cater to the lowest customer denominator, you’ll never end up talking to the audience you actually want to reach.

I’ll take that one step further: No one will want to read your content, and you won’t have an audience at all.

Think about the publications you like to read. Chances are, your interest is rooted in the opinions and perspectives they consistently cover. From The New York Times to Gawker, publishers build loyal audiences by presenting ideas that readers can agree with, disagree with, or just plain contemplate. As humans, we love being told stories that makes us think—that up our intellectual game in some way. No one gets excited about reading a fact sheet. This might seem pretty obvious, but it tends to get overlooked when brands craft content strategies.

Even when brands are aware of this idea, a lot of them try to address it by asking, What does our brand believe in? This isn’t a bad question to ask, but it’s not quite the right one. A better question is What do the people who represent our brand believe in?

When you wonder what your brand believes in, it’s easy to land on something bland and broad that would sound ridiculous if it came from a person. We believe in happiness. We believe in togetherness. We believe in innovation. These are not things you would tell someone at a dinner party. (So glad you believe in happiness, Bob. Now please pass the Chardonnay.)

If you focus on what the key people in your company believe, it increases your chances of coming up with interesting content. Your CEO doesn’t believe in the general concept of innovation; he believes that very specific things lead to success in your industry. Our co-founder Shane Snow doesn’t believe in content, but he does believe that brands will win if they invest in telling great stories instead of intrusive advertising, and that a combination of great technology and superb creative talent are the keys to actually accomplishing that mission. This belief informs our own content strategy, guiding us in the right direction.

When you get specific and have a clear opinion, it makes content strategy easy. It unleashes your creativity, fueling story ideas. It forces you to figure out how to support your points through data, reporting, and other storytelling fundamentals. It forces you to figure out how to tell those stories—the medium you’ll use, the CMS you’ll publish on, and the channels you’ll distribute them through. It prompts you to figure out the crucial elements of your strategy, turning the process from a stiff and sterile exercise into something that flows naturally.

When you look at the brands with the most successful content strategies, they’re all driven by a unique perspective. GE’s excellent content has been powered by Beth Comstock’s belief that her team has a responsibility to spur innovation by tirelessly reporting on the next-level experiments going on inside the company. Virgin’s content empire has been built on the back of Richard Branson’s unique and irreverent take on the world. Moz has built a diehard audience thanks to Rand Fishkin’s devotion to helping marketers in any way he can.

As Fishkin once told me, “We really don’t think about content marketing as being part of our funnel. It’s part of our mission.”

An evolving process

When you go past bland platitudes and actually capture what ideas your company stands for, you’ve gone a long way toward creating a culture of intellectual curiosity within your brand. But like all aspects of content marketing, you can’t just do something once. It has to be a constant, evolving process.

The culture of discussion we have here at Contently is one of the biggest reasons we’ve been able to build a devoted audience of over 200,000 monthly readers. Internally, we’re always debating what we believe on various industry topics and issues. Our Slack chats and team meetings often more closely resemble a liberal arts class than a tech team meeting.

These debates have sparked our most interesting and widely read articles—like this piece on Twitter and the future of platforms—especially the stories that were born from disagreement. Although we all believe in the same basic principles as Shane, every person on our team has slightly different views on the future of media and marketing. I’m a little more fanatically bullish on the future of chat apps and platforms in general than Shane or Sam Slaughter, our VP of content; Dillon Baker, our associate editor, and I have different takes on where adblocking is headed; Sam and Ray Cheng, our VP of marketing, think about ROI in slightly different ways.[note]Though their methodology for calculating it is the same.[/note] These different viewpoints force us to come up with more nuanced and interesting angles for our stories and back them up with compelling evidence.

It’s obviously easier to work through ideas inside a 100-employee startup like ours than an organization with 30,000 people. But the fundamentals remain the same:

1. Identify the unique perspectives of your key brand representatives.

2. Use those perspectives to guide your content strategy.

3. Never stop debating—keep asking your stakeholders what they believe in and embrace all of the perspectives you have at your disposal.

If you do that with your content strategy, it’ll end up the way prom never did: with everyone satisfied and free of regret.

The post Why Your Brand Needs to Have an Opinion appeared first on Contently.

This month, content marketing platform BuzzSumo and inbound marketing software developer Moz released the results of an extensive joint study on the correlation between content, shares, and links. The researchers set out to uncover what type of content receives both—assessing a million posts in the process.

Let’s take a look at five major takeaways from the report and how brands can apply these findings to their own marketing strategies.

(All charts via Moz and BuzzSumo.)

1. The majority of posts receive very few shares and links

It might be hard to believe when you’re looking at that BuzzFeed article with 10,000 shares, but most content just doesn’t get shared or linked to much, if at all. After looking at sample of 100,000 posts, BuzzSumo and Moz found that more than half had two or fewer Facebook interactions and Twitter shares, one or zero Google+ shares, and no LinkedIn shares.

A larger sample of over 750,000 posts that received numerous shares was discovered to have very few links. In fact, more than 50 percent of these had no linkbacks at all.

From this data, we can extrapolate two things: Most digital content has no impact, and marketers may not be paying enough attention to distribution to increase the exposure of their content. BuzzSumo’s Steve Rayson writes:

What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is simply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.

2. Content with research and strong opinions drive more shares and links

We might assume an article with a lot of shares will also generate a lot of external links, but that isn’t the case. While some sites do see a high correlation of shares and links—The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and The Atlantic among them—this overlap was not visible with content from the majority of sites analyzed (which include 600,000 other domains).

Why do some sites fare better than others in this respect? The study concludes that the sites with higher correlations tend to be “respected sites that produce regular content about the latest developments in their areas.” See the chart below for a few more examples of sites that had strong correlations between shares and links.

The takeaway here is that people link to content backed by research and reporting, as well as opinion content that’s respected for its distinct point of view. Here’s another way of looking at it: Audiences may feel more compelled to share and link to content that has gained their trust. Rayson writes:

Whilst almost everyone can share content, often through the click of a button, not everyone can easily link to content. The fact that sites such as Five Thirty Eight and Pew Research achieve over 18 referring domain links on average is a testament to the power of research content.

3. Certain formats—listicles and videos—get more shares

To determine which content formats perform best, BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed list posts, quizzes, “why” posts, “how to” posts, infographics, and videos.

List posts, “why” posts, and videos were found to have a higher correlation between sharing and linking.

Interestingly, not all videos have the same ability to acquire links. The study found that Vine videos received many shares but hardly any external or referring domain links. “Six-second content is likely to be entertaining rather than informative and helpful,” Rayson explained. YouTube videos and quizzes also got many shares but no links.

The bottom line: Strive for a balanced publishing output if you’re aiming for both shares and links.

4. The length of your text content matters

Last year we learned that, contrary to popular belief, longform stories have a better chance of going viral than short posts, with the optimal length being upwards of 2,000 words. After studying close to 490,000 text-based articles, BuzzSumo and Moz found that 80 percent of content contains fewer than 1,000 words, while only 2.5 percent surpasses 3,000 words. Once again, though, longer content was found to produce more shares and links.

In fact, the average number of shares of stories between 3,000 and 10,000 words had more than double the average number of shares and triple the number of links than articles under 1,000 words.

With so much evidence pointing to the benefits of longform content, it’s time for brands to commit to high-quality, in-depth storytelling. Snackable content isn’t filling readers up these days.

5. People share content that’s personal, but link to content that’s useful

Why consumers share and link is still a bit of a mystery, but BuzzSumo and Moz have some solid theories. Based on their research, they believe these behaviors have become very personal acts—we do it to reveal our passions or show support for colleagues and friends. Because clicking a share button requires minimal effort, the majority of content will always receive more shares than links—particularly if it’s entertaining.

Since getting some to link to your work takes more effort, authoritative content that delivers value and is backed by sound research is your best bet, which also explains why insightful longform articles from respected publications have performed well on this front.

Hopefully this analysis will take out some of the guesswork moving forward, but remember that going viral is never a sure thing, not even if you use the perfect number of emojis.

The post 5 Ways Content Goes Viral appeared first on Contently.

It’s a maxim we hear all the time in publishing—one that has content strategists everywhere preaching that you don’t need more content, you just need better content.

That’s the assumption many content creators have been betting on.

Recently, two titans of content marketing, HubSpot and Moz, put it to the test. Both sites experimented with increasing and reducing their publishing cadence and tracked the consequences. And, in the timeless words of Upworthy, you won’t believe what happened next.

HubSpot: Is high volume the right play?

HubSpot runs one of the most prolific marketing blogs in the industry, publishing an average of 23 posts per workweek.

Over the course of six weeks, HubSpot ran three different editorial strategies in two-week phases to see how they performed.

• Their benchmark strategy: (23 posts per workweek)
• Low volume, high comprehensiveness: (11.5 posts per workweek)
• High volume, low comprehensiveness (34.5 posts per workweek)

HubSpot measured its success based on views, new leads, and subscribers—all organic. However, it only looked at traffic that comes from new posts published within that timeframe, since 92 percent of its leads and 75 percent of its traffic in a given month come from previously published posts.

Based on the adage that opens this article, the low-volume strategy should be most effective, right? Or at least just as effective as the rest. Not so.

HubSpot found that the low-volume phase received over 30 percent less traffic than the benchmark and high-volume phases.

That’s a pretty striking finding. But perhaps what’s most interesting is that the benchmark and high-volume phases received almost the same amount of traffic. In other words, consumers will pay roughly the same amount of attention to 23 posts as they will to 35. According to HubSpot, this points to a crucial conclusion: Its readers can only handle so much content.

Additionally, the lower-volume phase also saw a dip in traffic from email and social. The reason for this one is simple: The fewer posts that are published, the fewer links to click on in email and social. For HubSpot, the moral of the story here is: “Comprehensiveness can’t make up for frequency—at least when it comes to short-term traffic.”

The high-volume phase also garnered the largest number of leads among the phases—and almost double the leads of the benchmark phase.

However, HubSpot concluded, “considering new blog posts only account for 8% of our month’s lead generation capabilities, the difference in leads between these two phases is negligible.”

That’s not to say that HubSpot concluded that comprehensiveness isn’t a winning formula; as part of the experiment, HubSpot also analyzed the performance of the six types of posts it publishes, concluded that it would greatly benefit from increasing the number of “deep tactical posts,” its most comprehensive post type. For HubSpot, quantity is still king.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Moz: Do we even have to publish every day?

Moz ran the same experiment as HubSpot, but came to a significantly different conclusion.

Moz takes a substantially different approach to content marketing than HubSpot; it only publishes once per weekday, and all of its content tends to be extremely comprehensive.

Like HubSpot, Moz found that publishing at double its benchmark frequency resulted in increased traffic, and publishing at half its normal frequency resulted in decreased traffic—but with much smaller margins than HubSpot’s findings, with just a 2.9 percent drop in sessions.

Daily view:

Weekly view:

Moz also found that the experiment had minimal effect on its email subscriptions and the quality of its posts.

Additionally, engagement with Moz’s content (thumbs up and comments) remained rather steady during the half-cadence phase, in relation to the normal phase. However, engagement dropped when it increased the frequency of its posts. This finding fits HubSpot’s conclusion that readers can only take so much content before they stop paying attention or tune it out.

As a result, Moz concluded that the boost from doubling the cadence of its publishing was negligible—as was the dip during its half-cadence period. While it’ll stick to its strategy, it now no longer feels obligated to try and post every day.

The report states, “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.”

It should be noted that both publications chose to largely stick with their current strategies, and yet both publications approach content production quite differently. Moz publishes less content at high quality, and HubSpot publishes more content of varying quality. So, what does that say about these experiments? Perhaps each publication’s audience grows accustomed to how frequently they consume this content, and large fluctuations in that frequency can throw them off.

It’s also clear that there is not one right way to publish across the board. Every publication needs to test its publishing frequency out for themselves to some extent to see how its readers respond. You don’t have to experiment as comprehensively as HubSpot and Moz did, but at least try out some top-line experimentation. For those looking to get started, HubSpot provides tips for running this test at the end of its report.

The post How Often Should You Publish? Moz and HubSpot’s New Experiment Gives a Surprising Answer appeared first on Contently.

I’ve been writing this monthly roundup of the best branded content for the past 18 months (save for last month, when Dillon Baker did all too good a job filling in for me) and truthfully, I’m still trying to nail down a firm answer to this subjective question.

Most people I meet in the industry are trying to do the same thing.

I can rely on my own opinion of what’s good, but no CMO stays employed just because I give something two thumbs up. To go beyond intuition, I look at any available stats. YouTube views give me a big, shiny number to point to, but they’re also easily juiced by pre-roll buys—with a big enough media budget, any brand can appear to go viral. Usually, I sense-check that number with Sharedcount, a great tool for figuring out how many times a URL has been shared. Shares are an imperfect stat, but they provide a decent gauge for how much people are championing a piece of branded content. This heart-warming TD Ameritrade video, for instance, has over 4.1 million YouTube views, while this pretty hilarious Jet.com explainer featuring Kumail Nanjiani has just 80,000 views. However, the Jet video has over 1,000 more shares (5,788 to 4,636), not to mention 100 percent more Kumail. Based on that info, I’d bet anything that TD Ameritrade video’s views have been inflated by pre-rolls.

When evaluating content, I also need to factor in the larger context of each piece—how it fits into a larger campaign, how it aligns with the brand’s goals, how much press it’s gotten, etc. As my boss Shane Snow has pointed out, Oreo’s famous Super Bowl tweet was nothing special; an innocuous Justin Bieber tweet the same day got significantly more engagement. But what made the tweet such a success was that every damn advertising journalist on the planet wrote about it, giving the classic cookie a reputation as innovative.

Felix Baumgartner’s jump from space for Red Bull wasn’t a huge success just because of the millions who viewed the live stream and the 40 million-plus who watched it after; it was also a win because it fundamentally reinforced Red Bull as a badass, adventurous brand, giving its far-reaching content efforts even more credibility.

And Jet.com’s explainer video with Kumail Nanjiani is especially awesome, not just because it’s really funny, but also because it’s a great piece of bottom-funnel content. Usually, funny branded content is top-of-funnel territory, work that leaves you with positive associations so you’ll buy something down the road. Jet’s video skips all that bullshit and simply makes you crack up by reminding you that “five pounds of mayonnaise is actually a fundamentally ridiculous thing to buy” while simultaneously convincing you to sign up for its ingenious service, which delivers shopper-club savings on normal-sized items. Jet.com is already being called the Amazon killer, but regardless of whether that’s true or not, I think the company could demolish how marketers think of content’s role in the funnel.

Ultimately, I just end up throwing all of these factors in a giant pot to see what comes out smelling the best. But we’re also working on a formal way to score branded content for these things, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to email me (lazer@contently.com) and Jordan (jordan@contently.com), who does all the work and is better at math.

And now, onto the rest of the best branded content of July…

(Props to our awesome intern Julia Schur for helping round these up. Please follow her; she tweets way too many smart things to only have 242 followers).

Coca-Cola: “El SMS”

One of the smartest things a brand can do is give a very talented person the budget and creative freedom to tell a story before getting the hell out of the way. That’s what Coca-Cola did in its latest short film in its “Crossroads” series, tapping Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, to direct a short film about two close teenage male friends, one of whom who has a big secret revealed when he leaves his phone unattended. The banter is spot-on, the climax poignant, and although Coca-Cola’s product placement lingers for a beat too long, it also makes the company part of the feel-good ending. It’s already earned over 1.5 million views on YouTube, thumbs-up votes, and over 40,000 shares.

This is the third and final film in Coca-Cola’s “Crossroads” series, in which teenage friends hit crucial moments in their lives and are faced with the challenge of stepping up to support one another. In reality, these big teenage moments usually don’t end with a happy ending, but Coca-Cola’s films successfully immerse us in a world where they do.

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola is a Contently client.)

GE: #DroneWeek

Last week, GE held #DroneWeek, five days of Periscope live streams from a tricked-out drone that flew across the country and filmed GE machines as they endured tests in apocalyptic conditions (giant hail! fire! frogs raining from the sky!). The appeal was twofold: First, these are tests that few human beings have ever seen before, and second… DRONES!

The campaign sparked a good amount of press, though it’s hard to track the success of a Periscope campaign. Still, you have to give GE credit for trying out something fairly ambitious on a new channel (even if I do believe Periscope has very limited potential for brands). Most of all, #DroneWeek is just an awesome idea with #SharkWeek potential; I can easily see the company learning from what worked and didn’t work, and hitting it big in years to come. Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll find ourselves eagerly watching a movie in which a semi-comatose Tara Reid gets sucked into a tornado of drones.

Portal A: “Is Man… Kind?”

As I wrote two weeks ago, ad shop Portal A’s parody of Airbnb’s kind of unnerving “ManKind” campaign is just brilliant. A video like this shows how these guys are funny, fast, and damn good at what they do. Bonus points because agencies are usually terrible at doing content marketing of any kind for themselves.

JPMC: “Brownsville: Revitalizing a Community, One Person at a Time”

In July, JPMorgan Chase relaunched its website to mimic its mobile app, putting content front and center. What’s most impressive is the quality of that content. For example, take “Brownsville: Revitalizing a Community, One Person at a Time,” a five-part series of essays and videos that tells the tales of community leaders fighting to revitalize aspects of the Brooklyn neighborhood, from the justice system to educational opportunities to entrepreneurialism and mentorship. One of the world’s biggest financial institutions diving into local reporting may raise some eyebrows, but the quality of the stories is inspiring and worth checking out for yourself.

(Full disclosure: JPMC is a Contently client.)

Airbnb: #HostWithPride Film

Airbnb’s “ManKind” campaign might have gotten off to stronger start if the company simply led with a different piece of content. #HostWithPride is an excellent brand film, a four-minute long examination of the limitations and fears LGBTQ couples face when they choose where to travel. It’s an issue that most straight people don’t think about a lot, so kudos to Airbnb for highlighting this issue with a meaningful video.

The film even led to some useful dialogue about Airbnb’s service. When Airbnb hosted the video on its Facebook page, one user expressed his frustration that the company doesn’t provide the option to indicate an LGBT-friendly listing. It eventually sparked an interesting discussion, and the company representation responding claimed to forward the request to the product team.

I’m probably being overly optimistic, but this could be a situation where a piece of content leads to an important internal dialogue that makes Airbnb’s product stronger.

HubSpot and Moz: “A Big Crazy Publishing Volume Experiment”

The most common question I hear from content marketers is “How much should I publish?” It’s a difficult question to answer—though we’ve tried—and the truth is the answer differs for everyone. The most successful publishers take a data-driven approach and try out different iterations. Moz and HubSpot did just that, changing their publishing volume and frequency, measuring the impact, and revealing all the findings in two fascinating (and very detailed) reports. The reports made me rethink my content strategy, and I bet they’ll have a similar effect on you.

Cornetto: Two Sides

Cornetto is back with the latest short film in its “Love Stories” series, and what can I say: I’m a sucker for both a good prom story and YouTube experiments.

Similar to Honda’s “The Other Side,” the story alternates perspective, flipping between the film’s two protagonists, Josh and Carly, as Josh tries to ask Carly to prom. The dual perspectives feels hokey until the final dance scene, when it all comes together and the video becomes absolutely hilarious.

It also brought back some really traumatizing prom memories of my own, but that’s a story for another roundup. Have anything you think we missed? Wanna chat about teen movies? Hit me up @joelazauskas on Twitter and help me convince my boss that I’m a content marketing influencer.

The post The Best Branded Content of July appeared first on Contently.

While this change is the first official Panda tweak since 4.1 ten months ago, that doesn’t mean Google has been inactive. In fact, two big changes have already happened this year: The first was dubbed, a bit hyperbolically, “Mobilegeddon,” and the second as either the “Phantom Update” or the “Quality Update,” depending on whom you ask. If you need a refresher, you can read about those here and here.

Put in simple terms, “Mobilegeddon” required sites to be mobile-optimized or face a fall in their search rankings, while the “Quality Update” rewarded sites that featured what Google considers to be quality content.

This update, like the “Quality Update”, was never officially announced by Google. Instead, Search Engine Land’s news editor, Barry Schwartz, had to plead with Google employee Gary Illyes on Twitter to confirm that Panda was indeed in the midst of an update.

@rustybrick Yes, last weekend we began rolling out a Panda refresh that will take a few months to complete. It affects 2-3% of the queries.

— Gary Illyes (@methode) July 24, 2015

Not surprisingly, given the medium, the response was cryptic at best. Still, experts have connected enough dots to draw some takeaways from the slow roll out of Panda 4.2. Here are the most relevant ones for content marketers.

The rollout will be slower than usual

Panda 4.2 was first implemented on July 18, and the rollout is expected to take effect over a few months. Rollout times have grown in the past few updates, and the time between them has grown longer as well.

Sites hit by Panda 4.1 have had 10 months to wallow in their punishment, and for those that fixed their site, 4.2’s slow rollout can’t come quick enough. For the sites punished by 4.2, it may be some time before the next update comes along. Unfortunately, after the update is released, it’s too late to make changes; your search rankings will take a hit no matter what you do.

Still, it would be silly to use that as an excuse not to keep improving your site and your content. You never know when the next update will be, and focusing on quality always helps tremendously.

The slow rollout also means that measuring changes to ranking and search traffic will be more difficult than in earlier updates, as it’s hard to know when and if the algorithm will affect your site. This also means that what exactly the update is rewarding and punishing is somewhat of a mystery, though it’s safe to assume that these will be in line with Panda has always meant to promote: quality content.

2–3 percent of search queries will be affected

That may seem like a small number, but nothing is small when it comes to Google. As Brafton notes, 2–3 percent equates to 36 million searches.

Compared to recent updates, this number isn’t quite as impressive: 4.0 affected 7.5 percent of all search traffic, while 4.1 hit 3–5 percent. Still, if you look further back, 2–3 percent is still relatively large; from Sept. 2011 to May 2014, no single update impacted more than 2.4 percent of queries.

Creating quality content remains the best way to respond

If you notice your site’s search traffic beginning to plummet (or if it begins to plummet in the coming months), it’s safe to say that Panda 4.2 has punished your site. If that’s the case, there’s really only one option: Focus on creating quality content, and wait for the next update.

Of course, “quality content” is a bit vague: What exactly is Google asking for with Panda? It’s important to remember what exactly Google’s initial intentions were with Panda, as they’ve stayed relatively the same: to punish content mills, keyword stuffing, ugly or broken websites, and any sort of unsavory practices that exploit Google’s search algorithm.

Leading SEO expert Rand Fishkin suggests in an interview with The Content Strategist that content creators should focus on quality rather than quantity when it comes to improving SEO rankings: “The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top five or ten percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.”

In other words, your site should be focusing on what it should probably be focusing on anyway: well-written, original content and better, less bloated website design. Though we’re still lacking concrete details of what exactly these updates are rewarding or punishing, these guidelines (and this insightful guide from our associate editor Jordan Teicher) should help.

After all, awesome content is always a noble goal to pursue, even if we don’t always know the ways of the fickle, mysterious Google gods.

The post 3 Things Content Marketers Need to Know About Google’s Panda 4.2 Update appeared first on Contently.

Why are marketers so motivated to amp up their SEO? Likely because the search game has changed, and they’re in need of some help. While Google has been updating its Panda algorithm to punish keyword stuffers and reward quality content for the past decade, that effort has escalated this past year. Between Google’s recent “Quality Update” and Mobilegeddon, the industry has realized that you need great content if you want to succeed at search.

Here are five stats to prove it.

1. Content creation is the most important factor in SEO effectiveness.

According to a June 2015 report by Ascend2, 72 percent of marketers worldwide said relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic.

It also seems more and more marketers are starting to realize the SEO power of content. Just a year before, an April 2014 survey found that only 57 percent of marketers said content creation was the most effective strategy for SEO.

2. The majority of links and shares goes to the top 5 or 10 percent of content out there.

That’s what Moz’s Rand Fishkin told our editor-in-chief Joe Lazauskas earlier this year.

“I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.”

In other words, you should invest a lot of time in a few extraordinary pieces; the days of tricking search engines by polluting the web with mediocrity are long gone.

“If [readers are] searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now?” Fishkin encouraged marketers to ask themselves. “Unless the answer is a slam dunk, ‘Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,’ I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.”

3. The most successful companies treat their search and content creation strategies as one.

According to a 2013 Conductor study, 66 percent of best-in-class companies involve search in their content creation process from the beginning. Only 9 percent don’t take search into account until the end of the content creation process.

What makes a best-in-class organization? As the report states, these companies are “highly successful at SEO and were significantly more likely to experience up to 200% search traffic and search conversion growth in the past 12 months.”

4. More content = more indexed pages

Search Engine Journal reports that companies that blog have 434 percent more indexed pages than those that do not.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should just churn out tons of blog posts in hopes of something catching on. But, as Fishkin notes, the most effective way to satisfy the search gods is to consistently publish high-quality content that provides a valuable service to your audience.

The more you do that, the more search terms you’ll rank for, and the better off you’ll be.

On a related note, according to an infographic by Brafton, marketers identify web pages (50 percent) and white papers (40 percent) as being “very effective” for great SEO.

5. Lack of quality content is a major challenge to SEO success.

Naturally, marketers that aren’t producing strong content find themselves having trouble tackling SEO. The same June 2015 report from Ascend2 found that 33 percent of marketers identified lack of quality content as a major challenge to SEO success.

The top two challenges—changing search algorithms and budget constraints—are factors that are often outside of marketers’ control. However, what each marketing team should be able to control is the solid content that they produce. Once they do, strong search rankings should follow.

The post 5 Stats That Prove Great Content Is the Key to Great SEO appeared first on Contently.

Finance marketers aren’t known for their sense of humor, but there he was—this rabidly energetic man on stage—working the crowd for laughs like a stand-up comedian, introducing upcoming speakers like the hype man at a concert, and damn-near pleading for a chortle of laughter that would loosen the Windsor knots around the necks of the very serious men in the front row.

This, I realized, must be Jason Miller. LinkedIn’s head of global content for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has a well-earned reputation as a different kind of B2B marketer. His path to success has been downright bonkers. At Marketo, he generated a ridiculous amount of revenue with a coloring book. (Yes, really.) His B2B marketing book, Welcome to the Funnel, is as much about rock ‘n’ roll as it is about lead gen. Most guys in our office have man crushes on Ryan Gosling or Channing Tatum. Our VP of Marketing Ray Cheng has a man crush on Jason Miller.

I pretty much had no choice but to interview him about all things content marketing. And in honor of Ray, I started the interview with a pickup line.

So how did a journalist and a rock ‘n’ roll photographer like you end up in a content marketing interview like this?

Funny story, actually: When I was in college I played in a hard rock band. We had a showcase with Mercury Records and we needed to find somebody to open up for us. We invited our friends, this band called the Love Hogs, to open up our show.

The guy from Mercury Records came out and he signed a development deal for the opening band and left before we came on. I was really depressed, and that’s when I quit the band and decided I should probably go to college. Because of my love for playing in the band, I lived vicariously through music and the music industry. I thought the music industry was where I was going to be the rest of my life. I wanted to be a record exec in New York. That was my dream.

Around 2009, the industry was just still trying to figure out digital. It was bringing in new ideas around social media marketing, blogging, big data, and my efforts to try new things fell on deaf ears—so I quit. Went back to school, got a couple of digital degrees, learned about SEO marketing, pulled my way to a startup, and now I’m here.

It seems like you’re the guy bringing the creative juices at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. How does that mesh with the analytical side of this company?

That’s interesting because I learned pretty much everything I know about social and content and demand gen and email and analytics and whatnot when I was at Marketo. I reported directly to Jon Miller. Jon Miller has a degree in physics, but he’s a marketer. He is a brilliant marketer. You can imagine the hellish time I had creating a dashboard that would really mean something to him.

“I thought B2B marketing was pretty boring when I first started. All the content was written like a bunch of instruction manuals. Every cover was the same dark ominous cover with some 12-point Times New Roman font.

Everything that B2B marketers were doing, I just did the exact opposite.

I switched my love of rock ‘n’ roll and my love of Jerry Seinfeld and I pulled a George Costanza and did the exact opposite. Everything that B2B marketers were doing, I just did the exact opposite—I did [content] I thought would be funny and entertaining.

Jon pretty much told me to do whatever I want. He gave me the creative outlet. But he told me: you have to tie everything you do back to metrics because you have Marketo and you have the ability to do so. So keep your cost per lead under this amount and have some fun.

He did say: There is one metric I want you to focus on that can’t be measured. I just want you to get people to like the company.

When I was in the music industry, I had to take the bands out and entertain them. I’m an entertainer. I figured I could apply that to the top of the funnel, add a little personality, add a little fun to content, pull people in.

I like to think they knew what they were getting when they called me up—a little Axl Rose, a little Jerry Seinfeld, a little edge with my content. I like to turn things upside down—look at things different.

What were those metrics and that attribution model that allowed you to have your fun and be creative?

People over-complicate this model all the time. Why do you create content? You create content because the buying process has fundamentally changed and you need new ways to start conversations and engage with prospects.

We measured, number one, referral traffic. That’s a huge goal. Not only referral traffic but non-branded referral traffic, meaning if somebody is coming to your site without typing your keywords into the search engine, then they must be coming from your content.

Here’s another thing: The content purists will tell you never to gate top-of-funnel content. I don’t care about that. I do the exact opposite. I gate everything that’s worth an email address. If the value was worth more to that person than an email address, then we we’re winning.

The content purists will tell you never to gate top-of-funnel content. I don’t care about that. I gate everything that’s worth an email address.

We looked at referral traffic, non-branded referral traffic, and quality of leads, of course. Were the sales cycles shortened based on top-of-funnel content and middle-funnel content? Was it accelerating and awakening leads that were already nurture tracks but weren’t responsive? And, of course, we looked at engagement.

I think it’s a matter of time before research is going to tell us that social signals play a role in [search] rankings, but in the meantime, I think they play a pretty good early indicator of whether your content is relevant, if people like it. Then we use multi-touch attribution. So can see which channels they came in on and the pieces of content they consumed all the way to revenue. So we track that as a touch point, using multi-touch attribution, and then we divvy up those little touch points and attribute them to pipeline. Then we’d use Marketo or Eloqua—whatever the hell marketing automation [software] you use—to see which content, which campaigns, which outlets drove the most pipeline.

How have things changed in your role at LinkedIn? Obviously it’s a fairly different company than Marketo—have your goals and approach changed significantly since you made the move?

You know, I market to marketers, so what I really do is I find problems and I try to come up with innovative solutions to them and I write about them. That’s all I ever do. That’s all I ever did at Marketo. It got me where I’m at today so nothing has really changed—we use Eloqua now, which is interesting. [Laughs]

It’s not about creating more content, but creating more relevant content. We can’t all be the HubSpots of the world. They do a great job pushing out a ton of extremely relevant content. They’re a volume player, and it works for them. But most of us, we can’t really do that volume play. So I focus on the number one burning question on our prospects’ minds, and then I go in with one “big rock” piece of content.

It’s not about creating more content, but creating more relevant content.

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions operates almost like its own little startup. [When I came in], There were two people on the content team. There was an opportunity to educate around content marketing best practices, and a blog that needed some love and optimization.

A couple of years later, the LMS blog is in a really good place helping us drive MQLs, pipeline, and ultimately revenue.

This whole world of creating content for marketers is an interesting one. I’m in it, you’re in it. Recently, Rand Fishkin over at Moz said something really interesting in his “Whiteboard Friday” video. He said it’s not good enough to create good unique content anymore—you really need to create something that’s ten times better. When I look around the marketing content landscape there is a lot of generic 101 stuff out there. What do you think that people creating marketing content really need to do to stand out?

I love Rand. “Whiteboard Friday” is one of the pieces of content I watch every week. The Moz blog is something I read every morning—it’s a great mix of everything I think a hybrid marketer needs to know about.

It’s interesting to see a lot of SEO experts shifting their focus to how SEO supports a holistic content marketing strategy, and content marketers shifting to better understand how SEO plays into their strategy. Rand and the folks at Moz are a perfect example of why you need to be an expert in more than one marketing discipline.

Let’s be honest: How many content marketers create content answering their prospects’ pain points versus content marketers create content they think they know needs to be created? I don’t create anything that doesn’t address a problem or offer an innovative update to an old solution.

In order to stand out, you need budget to do native advertising and pay to promote your own good content, some keyword research to understand the conversation about what content you should be putting out, and then on top of that you probably need somebody with a really big, bold, outgoing personality—and maybe a comedian.

I’m curious about your content ideation process. What’s the mix between just wanting to continue to double down on the tried-and-true stuff versus experimenting with new formats, ideas, and approaches?

I’m always trying to find out the next new thing, but I am just tired of the shiny-object syndrome, like Pinterest and Snapchat and stuff I’ll probably never ever use and I don’t really care to. The search engine’s job is to provide the most relevant answer to a search query’s type in. A content marketer’s job is to be that answer. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you need to own that conversation.

I’m constantly taking cues from being in the city or at a show and I’ll take little pictures or take little notes. On my OneNote, I probably have around 400 to 500 half-written blog posts, ideas that might have something to them. I take it back to my team and we get into a big whiteboard discussion on a Friday we call spitballing. We drink some wine and see what comes out of it.

In order to be a successful content marketer, you have to do a tremendous amount of trial and error, but you have to have a foundation to support your trial and error.

In order to be a successful content marketer, you have to do a tremendous amount of trial and error, but you have to have a foundation to support your trial and error. You certainly shouldn’t be trying to do anything unless you have some sort of foundation driving the results while you are trying to figure out what to do next.

We’re not going to start seeing the LinkedIn Marketing Solution Snapchat Discovery Channel anytime soon?

[Laughs] Not unless I read a blog post about someone using Snapchat to drive revenue for a B2B audience. If Snapchat wants to get me to use Snapchat, write that article and target me on LinkedIn.

I think if I wrote that blog post, it would have a 75 percent email open rate. Just so many subject line buzzwords right there.

The other thing and I think about a lot too is that I have never done this by myself. If you go about this alone, you’re probably going to fail and probably get fired. Again, bring an agency on board to help out with concepts and creatives, bring some additional writers on board to help out with writing and fleshing out your ideas.

A team of two with the right agencies and partners can market like a team of 10,000 with today’s technology. I don’t see a lot of people taking advantage of that. I see a lot of egos hijacking content strategies. I see a lot of people doing Meerkat sessions that have no business value. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

When you look at the social media landscape right now, it seems like every single social platform—Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat—is really doubling down on original content to keep people on the platform. Do you see the potential for LinkedIn to become even more of a publisher in its own right? Could the Marketing Solutions blog be blown out to a full-fledged business publication?

I’m not really in a position to answer a question that big around LinkedIn specifically. But as far as LinkedIn Marketing Solutions goes, I do see us building what I call an owned media empire.

As far as LinkedIn Marketing Solutions goes, I do see us building what I call an owned media empire.

We’ve built this brand around the “sophisticated marketer.” In order for something to get stamped with the sophisticated marketer’s brand that we built, it has to reach a certain bar, and not every piece of content gets there.

We found that once we purchase a piece of content with the “sophisticated brand” on it that it usually does really, really well no matter what it is because we built this certain level of trust around that brand. Shane said something that really resonated with me last year at Finance Connect. I quote him in this all the time. It was about branded content and how we’re not really that good at it yet and we are still learning. Somebody asked him the question, like, “Are you afraid of companies creating content on their own turning off readers because they added their own logo or whatever?” He said something to the effect of “Your content should be so damn good that you want your brand logo to be on it.” I think that’s where it’s headed. The whole branding content thing, I know it goes back to 1906 or whatever, but we are really not that good at it yet in many cases. I think we’re getting better.

Do you think the way forward for brands is really building their owned media empires like you said, as opposed to just relying on advertising for your BuzzFeed but building magazines and publications of their own?

I completely agree. The one piece of content I took home from Finance Connect was your guys’ magazine. I read it on the plane and I still have it. I brought it home. It’s sitting on my coffee table, for Christ’s sake! Because it was so well done.

I was doing some research for though leadership for a presentation in London a few weeks ago. I was trying to write the case for B2C thought leadership. And I came across the story of Betty Crocker in the 1930s. They were selling flour. How do you differentiate yourself from the other guys selling flour? Well, they were trying to sell flour to people who were baking things. So they started the world’s first cooking show—a radio show.

It cost them a tremendous amount of money back then, but now you can do that with a podcast for 50 bucks or even free. Then they took a step further and created the world’s first cookbook.

That’s how they differentiated themselves, and now they’re a huge empire, but it all started with them building their own little media company. Shit, look at HGTV or Food Network or MasterChef. Those wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Betty Crocker. I think a brand today can take a page out of Betty Crocker’s history and say, “How do I create my own little owned media empire?”

The post LinkedIn’s Jason Miller on Egos, SEO, and His Plans to Build an ‘Owned Media Empire’ appeared first on Contently.

Last fall, I found myself in an editorial meeting at the office of a large brand. The company was relatively new to publishing, and its family-focused finance content had performed respectably so far, but the employees were still a long way from reaching the goals they’d set months before.

With the holidays approaching, we saw the opportunity for a timely piece of content: an infographic about the exorbitant costs of holiday travel for families. We suggested a slick production design with an accompanying article offering tips for saving money when visiting grandma. It was, we said, the type of content that could easily go viral. I showed the employees this list of the 10 most viral infographics and pointed out that they all racked up hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. If we approached this project the right way, other personal finance blogs would pick it up, as would mommy bloggers and travel sites.

An awkward pause ensued. Across the table, noses crinkled. Shoulders rolled into noncommittal shrugs. “I don’t know,” their marketing director said. “Aren’t those expensive?”

Yes, we explained, but the ROI can be huge.

Another stakeholder piped up: “OurFictionalCompetitor.com doesn’t do infographics.”

With that, the idea of doing an infographic died. In its place, they opted to do a listicle. It was called “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With a Pumpkin.” And even if you wanted to find it, you’d have to struggle through page after page of similar-sounding Google results to do so.

No risk, no reward

For traditional media outlets, one of the most critical channels for building a readership is the old-fashioned “exclusive”. They get the coveted interview. They publish the big scandal before the other guys. In short, they have something no one else has. Brand publishers aren’t breaking news (yet), but they have a similar opportunity to earn seismic readership gains by giving the audience something they can’t get anywhere else.

But like the pumpkin publisher above, many brands shy away from going for the home run, preferring instead to play small ball, grinding away with slap singles and hoping to win by pure volume. This strategy is destined to fail, and no one explains it more effectively than Moz’s Rand Fishkin:

The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top five or 10 percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary. Ask [this]: If they’re searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now? Unless the answer is a slam dunk, “Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,” I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.

In short, if you’re publishing unambitious content, you’re throwing your money away. There’s no ROI for being just another voice in a crowd.

Excuses, excuses

Even though brands have a financial incentive for producing creative, original content, too many still insist on churning out mediocre work. They tend to justify that mindset with three typical reasons.

-It’s hard. When I show publishers great examples of branded content, like Land Rover’s outstanding “The Vanishing Game” or NVIDIA’s delightful debunking of lunar landing conspiracies, they often assume that marquee content is outside of their grasp. But with the right creative talent, this sort of thing is very doable. Look at what Contently accomplished with the team at Marriott Traveler. Sure, standing out can be challenging, but it’s far from impossible.

-It’s expensive. In fairness, content like “The Vanishing Game” is indeed a little spendy. But taking a chance and creating something exclusive doesn’t have to break your budget. As Amanda Walgrove recently pointed out on The Content Strategist, the old fashioned article remains the most effective type of branded content. It’s also one of the easiest to produce. Video is a close second in effectiveness but remains substantially more difficult to create. The lesson here? Put some effort into creating outstanding articles that give your readers something they can’t get elsewhere, and watch the wins roll in.

-It isn’t being done by competitors. This facepalm-worthy comment crops up more often than you’d believe. As I’ve noted previously, when brands enter the content game, they’re not just competing with the other brands in their industry—they’re competing with every other established media brand out there. This realization alone should spur brands to create truly ambitious content. It’s a crowded field, and you’ve got to stand out to win.

The pumpkin publisher offered up each one of these flimsy excuses, some more than once. But even though its content was unambitious, its goals were anything but.

No substitute for a good story

A few weeks later, the company published the pumpkin piece, along with a few others, all of which were similarly worthless. A month rolled by, accompanied by more unfocused, uninteresting content. The executives expected slow, organic growth and gradual development of an owned audience. It wasn’t happening. In fact, almost no one was reading their content. Few viewers arrived, and almost none stayed.

“Give it time,” the marketing director said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

At this point, we know what was coming. We also knew that letting it happen would be the only way we’d convince them to be smarter about their content. When the quarter came to a close two months later, they’d missed their content goals—every metric, from pageviews to engagement—by nearly 75 percent. This, we thought, would be our opportunity. But before we could even suggest doing better content, the stakeholders decided that pouring money into distribution would be their magic bullet.

We sighed. And then we waited.

At the end of the next quarter, little had changed. Despite tens of thousands of dollars spent on distribution, their content was still underperforming—and not by a little. At this point, they were ready to throw in the towel. “Maybe content marketing isn’t right for our industry,” they said.

Our response? “Give it another quarter. And give us a chance to do something great this time.”

Three months later, their content had surpassed all of their goals. Their audience was growing, sharing, and engaging. But we didn’t give them a magic bullet. There is no secret to why their new content succeeded where their old stuff failed.

All it took was great stories.

We gave their audience thoughtful, useful content they couldn’t get anywhere else. We made it interesting, and we made it unique to their brand. We started with the stories themselves, and everything else fell into place.

Ryan Galloway is the Senior Managing Editor at Contently.

The post Why Ambitious Content Is the Only Content That Matters appeared first on Contently.

Earlier this year, we tried to help you sound wiser at your next meeting by offering 10 content marketing predictions for 2015 from the pros. And now, with 2015 almost halfway through (and still no flying cars), we’re starting to see just how accurate some of those forecasts were.

Visually and JBH offer some insights into the state of content marketing with a new infographic that includes stats from marketers and tips for boosting your content strategy.

The first prediction from our article, that content marketing budgets would reach record highs, seems to be accurate thus far. As visualized in the infographic, 50 percent of B2C marketers plan to increase their budgets this year. Why? Because content marketing has become the most commercially important marketing trend of 2015, with almost 30 percent of marketers saying it’s the most crucial strategy for driving results.

Marketers are also understanding how to get the most value out of the content by engaging audiences with helpful and/or entertaining information. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the top goal for marketers in 2015 is to build customer relationships and loyalty.

For a few industry leaders like HubSpot, KISSmetrics, and Moz, building those relationships is contingent on maintaining a top-notch blog. HubSpot’s blog reportedly receives 37 percent of the site’s traffic, whereas only 13 percent goes to the Hubspot homepage. Likewise, KISSmetrics receives a whopping 70 percent of traffic share to its blog, which features a healthy mixture of articles, marketing tips, and infographics.

To feel even smarter about your content strategy, scroll through the whole infographic below.

The post Infographic: 2015’s Biggest Content Marketing Trends appeared first on Contently.

Previously the co-founder of his student newspaper at Knox College, young McClure had moved to New York City to make his way as a newsman. At the time, the burgeoning—and unregulated—advertising industry was beginning to make newspapers around the world more sensational.

It was a tumultuous atmosphere bearing remarkable similarities to today’s digital rat race that would launch news giants like Pulitzer and Hearst. But amidst the chaos, McClure began paying writers for what present-day pundits would call “slow journalism”: longform investigations, books, and deeply reported features. Instead of publishing the stories himself, he bought the rights and sold the stories to publishers around the world.

He called it “syndication.” His company, McClure Newspaper Syndicate, went on to represent some of the most influential writers of the day, from William Jennings Bryan to Teddy Roosevelt to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The company established a business model that traditional media companies would follow for more than a century, generating billions of dollars in revenue.

McClure and its successors gave publishers something they couldn’t get themselves: access to top content and talent from the world’s far corners—and for cheap. Because a syndicate could sell a book or article or comic strip to various buyers, it could charge less and make more profit. It became the paradigm for television (pilots and reruns), artists (musical and graphic alike), and printed works (whose books and stories could be resold in different languages and locales). This is not unlike the software business: Create something once, then sell copies of it ad infinitum.

A “syndicate,” by dictionary definition, is “a group of individuals or organizations combined to promote some common interest.” In media, this means legally publishing someone else’s content, typically in exchange for a fee or credit. The modern buzzword “licensed content” is often used interchangeably with “syndicated content.”

Today, syndication is still a big part of traditional media’s business model. But like everything else, it’s being tugged apart by technology. Recent shifts in the way people publish, access, and consume media—social media and content marketing being chief change agents—pose challenges for the syndication model, specifically for news content.

My personal interest in syndication stems in part from the my own company, where we help brands become publishers of education and entertainment in order to build loyal audiences. (We provide software tools and freelance talent to create original content, engage readers and viewers on the web, and optimize the process over time.) As our business has grown from three guys in coffee shops to 80 employees and the world’s largest network of freelance journalists, we’ve debated: Should we get into syndicated content, helping brands like Coca-Cola to license articles from traditional publishers like CNN? Or should we stick to helping brands just do original content?

The key questions in my mind as we’ve explored the syndication model are the following:

1. Is licensing content effective for brand publishers, who have different business goals than traditional publishers? Is it worth paying for?
2. Will syndication in general continue to work as the media landscape evolves?

After much research, the short answers are:

1. No.
2. In some cases.

If you don’t want to read the long answer below, feel feel to tweet this and close the tab:

Research shows: Licensed content doesn’t work in content marketing. For brands, original content always wins.

Syndication and traditional media

Originally, what made the syndication business work were access and options. Or, rather, a lack of them.

E.g., A local magazine in Kentucky couldn’t get Rudyard Kipling to write for it in 1920. But it might buy a reprint license for Kipling’s poems.

E.g., A newspaper in Oregon couldn’t ship a reporter to New York to cover an election in 1955, but it could buy a story about it from a news wire like the Associated Press.

E.g., A cable TV channel probably couldn’t afford to make something as popular Seinfeld in 1999, but it could buy the right to rerun it.

In each of these examples, the second publisher doesn’t need to create something new; it can buy a copy of the original and give its own audience access to it. Notably, there would be little point in a New York newspaper licensing content from another New York newspaper, if each could send its own reporters to cover the same stories. And a New York Post editor would rather swim naked in the Hudson than rerun a story by the Daily News. But a Kentucky paper and a New York paper aren’t competing for the same readers, so a syndication arrangement is a win-win.

Until the Internet, that is.

Today, licensing and syndication only really works for content that people are willing to pay for, or content under strict access control. This is why movie theaters are still open and Comcast and Hulu Plus rake in millions. Local print papers still license stories from news wires, but it’s a tough business, and one that doesn’t translate to the web. It no longer makes sense for a local paper to republish a national Reuters story on its website when online readers could get that story elsewhere.

Most of the time, syndication just doesn’t make sense for free content. The one place it does work, however, is when one publication has a loyal audience that doesn’t overlap with a smaller publication that produces specialized content.

People habitually visit only a handful of websites every day, most popularly search engines, portals, and social media sites. If a news site is lucky enough to have you as a loyal reader, it has an opportunity to show you content from other sites you might not frequent.

If you’re a small publication or an individual blogger, you likely want to be syndicated by one of those bigger sites. My own blogs are occasionally syndicated by publishers like Business Insider or Time, and this builds my audience. Those publishers can benefit from in-depth content (much like the kind that S.S. McClure brokered) that their audience hasn’t been exposed to, and I can reach more people with my brand.

However, I have little incentive to pay to republish a Business Insider story on my blog. My readers may as well go to BusinessInsider.com directly.

As Moz’s Rand Fishkin explained in a recent interview with The Content Strategist:

“If you’re a small or mid-sized website and you’re licensing content from the AP and the Times, you’re probably sunk. That’s not going to do much for what you’re building. That’s not going to do much for your SEO…

On the other hand, I see folks like Slate and Salon and The Washington Post and this fantastic blog post that was written by this author in this smaller space. That can be awesome. They have a huge megaphone and they can amplify a great piece of work that maybe has only been seen by a very, very small niche community.”

It might be valuable for me to link out to interesting BI stories from my social accounts, but syndicating those stories to my blog in their entirety doesn’t do much, and it doesn’t make me look better to my readers than simply tweeting the link to the original story. In fact, my research indicates that a smaller publisher syndicating content from a bigger publisher might leave a weird taste in readers’ mouths.

Which brings me to…

Licensed content and brands

The typical licensed content sales pitch to commercial brands goes like this:

• “It brings credibility to your content marketing campaigns.”
• “It helps you scale content and publish quickly.”
• “It fills coverage gaps.”
• “It generates strong social media value.”
• “It’s good for SEO.”
• “You get more bang for your buck.”
• “The ideal content mix is 1/3 licensed, 1/3 original, and 1/3 user-generated content.”

Unlike a media company, whose business aim is to show advertisements to the largest number of people possible, the overarching goal for most content marketers is to reach specific groups and build relationships with them. Brands anticipate that those relationships will eventually yield brand advocacy, trust, or sales. Traffic does not equal success.

In today’s media environment, most people arrive at content through social media, search, and email. Few media sites receive relatively large percentages of direct traffic.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at each of the above points:

• “It brings credibility to your content marketing campaigns.”

This claim is overblown at best. At worst, the opposite is true.

Last year, I surveyed a panel of 378 Internet readers from ages 18 to 60 about what they thought when a brand published licensed content on its blog for thought leadership. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said it did nothing for their opinion of the brand, and 32.8 percent said licensed content made the brand look worse, even if the content came from a respected name.

More comprehensive research needs to be done in this area, but these survey results indicate that unoriginal content from brands can put a weird taste in people’s mouths. If licensed content is really good, it can make a commercial brand look good only if it appears that the brand created the content itself. Most licensing agreements, however, require a prominent citation of the original source. This puts content-licensing brands in a double bind: In the same survey, 32 percent also said that a hard-to-find disclosure of authorship would make a brand look worse. Yikes.

• “It helps you scale content and publish quickly.”
• “It fills coverage gaps.”

These are both true. However, for brands, the goal should not simply be to publish. So these points are moot. Filling coverage gaps makes sense if you’re the only game in town (e.g., a local paper back in the day, or a cable provider like Comcast today). It doesn’t make sense if you are a small publisher or a site that receives most of its traffic through search, social, and email. If someone logs on to your site directly every day, then yes, filling coverage gaps is a good idea. But for content marketers, this is putting the cart way before the horse. There isn’t a brand publisher on Earth with a significant portion of traffic coming directly every day.

• “It generates strong social media value.”

There doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support this, compared to simply sharing external links to the original content via social media (which is much cheaper than licensing content and then sharing it). In fact, sharing links to others’ original content is generally viewed as good social media citizenship. I’d argue that sharing links to others’ content that you’ve republished on your own site doesn’t provide stronger value on social platforms than giving credit and linking to the publication where the article originally appeared.

• “It’s good for SEO.”

This one is patently false. As we’ve written before, Google looks down on unoriginal content more than ever. Cyrus Shepard, SEO expert and head of content at Moz, recently told me, “Syndicated content is like giving popcorn to children. It will keep them busy for a while, but that’s it. All the value is having something original.” This is from the top SEO firm out there.

Once again, if you’re the bigger fish in the syndication equation, you’re generally not going to be hurt by this, according to the Moz crew. But there’s no value in it if you’re the smaller fish.

• “You get more bang for your buck.”

The going rate for licensed online articles tends to be between $25 and 38 per story, which is 10–20x cheaper than a typical, well-researched original article. Unfortunately, as seen above, licensed content appears to provide little or no bang no matter how many bucks a brand spends. Producing 10x the amount of ineffective content is still, well, ineffective.

• “The ideal content mix is 1/3 licensed, 1/3 original, and 1/3 user-generated content.”

This, it turns out, is an arbitrary suggestion recommended by only one company (see below) that sells licensed content. There’s no research to support that this has worked for any commercial brand, much less as sweeping advice for all brands. Experts in categories from social to SEO to creative agencies tend to disagree with this statement, universally saying that high-quality original content, including user-generated content, is far more effective than non-original content for brands.

Old dogs with old tricks

As of 2015, I could only find one remaining company actively touting licensed content as a strategy for brand publishers. According to Moz.com data, this company’s own SEO authority has decreased in the last year, despite publishing over 600 pieces of content to its blog, many of them licensed from publishers like Business2Community and Forbes. (For comparison, we published a similar amount of original stories to our own blog and grew our SEO authority significantly. Our monthly unique readership is over 200,000 as of last month.) So it appears that what experts say about syndicated content is true: It’s hurting the company’s content marketing.

Heck, if this company is paying any attention to its own content performance, it likely knows that its licensed content is inferior. A year ago, I used social data to chart how the company’s own original content outperformed its licensed content by a factor of 10.

Other companies that broker licensed content for traditional publishers—folks like Bloomberg—have ramped up original content production studios for their brand clients that want to do content marketing. I’m yet to see a case study of a successful content licensing program for a brand that has resulted in real brand results (and not superficial metrics like “reach”). The big syndicates appear to be going all-in on original content for brands, and leaving licensed content for traditional media.

There’s plenty of evidence that original content works for building audiences and is good for getting licensed by bigger publishers, but that licensing content in the other direction does nothing for brands. If anything, a marketing strategy based on licensed content may be worse than one with no content.

The bottom line:

For content marketers, it’s far better to be syndicated than to syndicate.

Tellingly, when McClure Newspaper Syndicate wanted to build its own brand and sell its own services, it used original content to do it. Here’s the comic strip McClure sent to prospects in 1943:

Syndication will still have a place in the media ecosystem for some time. But we’d be amiss if we applied its old model to modern content marketing.

The post The Ultimate Content Marketer’s Guide to Syndication and Licensed Content appeared first on Contently.

However, despite this sharp increase in overall quality, many marketers have been hesitant to move beyond text-based articles and unleash the web’s full potential as a multimedia storytelling platform.

To some marketers, the specialized skills needed to produce visual content—whether video, infographics, or interactive media—make doing so seem like an excessively expensive proposition. And as a result, the same brands who have used written blog posts to dip their toes into the content waters consider the cost of multimedia an unfortunately high barrier to entry.

But instead of being overly cautious, brands should perhaps take a piece of advice from Matt Damon’s character in the 1998 poker movie Rounders. As Damon’s character says: “You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle… But you can’t win much either.”

Indeed, brands have much to gain by playing their cards right when it comes to multimedia.

No place is the sentiment more applicable than on Facebook, where autoplay video ads allow brands to showcase great content in a place viewers are bound to see them. Last week, Just Media’s president Brandon Friesen told us he was seeing click-through rates of up to 8 percent for video ads on Facebook, compared to rates of around 0.1 percent for the average banner ad.

Meanwhile, a 2014 Quintly study of more than 72,000 Facebook pages found that video posts generated the most user engagement of any format, with about 2,200 interactions per update. Photo updates came in second with about 1,400 interactions per post.

Of course, Facebook isn’t the only place companies have reaped the rewards of visual content.

The marketing software company Moz found that the video content it published on its website generated three times as many inbound links as content that was text only. Likewise, the enterprise software company Attivio found that once it started publishing video on its site, the average visitor started spending 100 percent more time with its content.

Bigger publishers also seem to agree. Just this past week, Jay Lauf, publisher of Quartz, told me he frequently encourages marketers to let his branded content team produce interactive features for them since it usually leads to higher user engagement.

And visual content isn’t only effective for producing engagement and clicks—it might also create more direct sales than other types of content.

A report created last year by Vidyard and Demand Metric found that 71 percent of marketers claimed video drove higher conversion rates than other forms of content. What’s particularly impressive about this data point is that while some marketers think of video as a big-budget branding tool, more than half of the respondents to the survey worked for B2B companies.

For even greater returns, some brands have found success creating video content that is customized for the individual consumer who sees it, according to a report from Forrester Research.

For instance, when Sass Global Travel sent customers an email including a video about an Argentina ski trip that integrated their names and locations into the content, people clicked on it 19.5 percent of the time and spent an average of three minutes on the video landing page. For those scoring at home, the company’s previous average click-through rate was just 1.8 percent—marking a 985 percent improvement. Not too shabby.

What this all goes to show is that when it comes to high-quality multimedia content, brands should consider channeling their inner Matt Damon and push their marketing dollars to the middle. Because after a while, as brands continue to invest in publishing, strong multimedia projects will merely be considered table stakes.

The post Rising ROI: Why Brands Are Going All-In on Multimedia Content appeared first on Contently.

Starting in the late ’90s, publishers and marketers alike started to taint SEO with the ugly of practice of keyword stuffing. As Google worked on updating their algorithm, marketers sabotaged the quality of their work by forcing feeding too many keywords into their writing to see if it would benefit a page’s ranking.

To see how keyword stuffing might look on an article page, Google gives an example about humidors:

We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.

But Google stopped all this by changing their search algorithm so it would penalize content creators who tried to rely on cheap tricks like keyword stuffing by pushing them down search rankings. As many of you probably know already, Google’s algorithm is fluid and esoteric, meaning content marketers and publishers will always be a few steps behind SEO best practices. By 2003, Google’s Florida algorithm update had already begun to improve rankings, and over the next decade, dozens of updates from Panda to Penguin to Pigeon fine-tuned the process. Last September, for example, Google’s Panda 4.1 release sought to penalize publishers who stuffed keywords into meta descriptions and title tags, not just body text.

But as search engine algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, experts say we need to get more sophisticated as well.

“Instead of focusing on keywords, focus on content,” says Ambar Shrivastava, a veteran developer who is now VP of product management for Tutor.com and the Princeton Review. “Really try to map out content to your target audience. You want to think about your audience and what’s important to them instead of creating pages built for keywords.”

Find What Makes You Unique

Focusing on content is an umbrella strategy that encompasses a number of different SEO tactics. But just about everyone can agree that content should be unique and useful. In other words, content creators need to find a niche that will help them stand out and try their best to avoid self-promotional pitches cluttering their prose. Moz, an inbound software company, suggests a good benchmark to measure the value of a piece of content is for pages to “be described by 80%+ of visitors as useful, high quality, & unique.”

As “The Wizard of Moz”—seriously, that’s his title—Rand Fishkin told Contently in a recent interview, “I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality. The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top five or ten percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.”

Learn to Love Long-Tail

If you have high-quality content, the next step is to make sure people can find it via search. All publishers want to show up on the first page of a search query on Google, but to direct users to relevant content, marketers need to learn how to master long-tail keywords, or distinct multi-word phrases specific to your brand and its publishing efforts.

According to Neil Patel, 70 percent of search traffic now comes from long-tail keywords. If you’re an up-and-coming men’s fashion service with a blog, like Trunk Club, you probably won’t get on the first Google page if someone searches “men’s clothes.” However, if you optimize your site effectively, when someone searches “handpicked men’s clothing,” you’ll show up near the very top of the first page.

The key is to be consistent. One of the major consequences of Google’s recent algorithm changes is that publishers can no longer track what keywords people type to find a site. In Google Analytics, search referral traffic shows up as “[not provided],” which makes it difficult to monitor popular keywords (although there are some external tools available for tracking them, such as HitTail, which Shrivastava helped build). However, this also has upsides, as it prevents content marketers from resorting to keyword stuffing. Instead, content creators can pay more attention to the little things. For example, page titles should be under 75 characters, URLs under 90 characters, and meta descriptions under 160 characters, per Moz.

Essentially, all of these factors point toward a new strain of SEO that favors a holistic experience. “SEO is a process: the way things earn attention, how they are amplified; who amplifies them; how they earn links; whether they’re targeted at things that people actually search for,” Fishkin said. “Whether they solve those search queries is the user experience you provide.”

Constantly Collaborate

UX looks like it will emerge as the final piece of the SEO puzzle. Even though some people view SEO as an editorial issue, it’s become much more nuanced than that. Editorial teams need to work closely with design and development teams to ensure that your content loads quickly on all platforms and that all visuals are formatted correctly.

“SEO and functionality are going to become much more intertwined,” Shrivastava adds. “Google is looking more at usability and user metrics. Making sure your site is mobile-friendly is becoming a big factor.”

Of course, these takes on SEO are all relevant right now, but Google will continue to refine their search algorithm, and when that happens, marketers will need to keep adjusting. SEO isn’t about gaming the system anymore; it’s about learning how to play by the rules. And the next time the rules change, publishers that focus on producing quality content will already be ahead of the game.

The post SEO Isn’t Dead. It’s Just Different appeared first on Contently.

But when you’re doing it well, it’s also an incredible amount of fun. As David Carr said, “Creating media content is a diverting activity that rarely resembles actual work.” Every day, I remind myself of that, and how lucky I am to lead a team that spends its days telling stories here on The Content Strategist and on our other publication, The Freelancer.

Last February, we shared 25 quotes that inspire us. This year, we’ve added 25 more from great thinkers, writers, and marketers that get us pumped to tell better stories every day. Hover over each image for easy sharing.

Images by Noah Smith

The post 50 Quotes That’ll Make You a Better Content Marketer appeared first on Contently.

At the center of it all is Fishkin, who’s built a uniquely personal relationship with the marketing community through thousands of blog posts, hundreds of White Board Friday videos, and some deeply intimate pieces, such as this fantastic essay about his year battling depression while running Moz. Content is the engine that drives Moz’s inbound marketing machine, but it’s also more than that. As Rand likes to say, it’s part of their DNA.

I spoke with “The Wizard of Moz” to find out more about how he built an audience of over 300,000 monthly readers, where SEO is headed in 2015, why licensing content doesn’t work, and, of course, who his favorite wizard is.

Moz has been making a really strong commitment to content marketing for the better part of a decade. Why has content continued to be such a priority for you?

I think there’s two things. One is it’s part of our DNA. We believe in sharing and being transparent in putting out there the things that we’ve learned. Then the second piece is just that it continues to show tremendous return on investment for us. We have a pretty thorough content team in-house. We have a small team of three folks who work on our content team. Then we also have people around the company who contribute on a semi-regular basis, myself included.

We’ve become a hub for content and tactical and strategical advice for our industry. That platform has meant that many other contributors of content from around the marketing world want to share their stuff on Moz. We got a lot of terrific donations of content and could get contributions as well.

What about your three-person in-house team? How is that structured?

Cyrus [Shepard] leads that team. He’s our head of content and SEO. Then Isla [McKetta] and Trevor [Klein] both report up to him and they work on editing, they work on content ideas, and on filling in gaps and holes. They work on the content schedule, with external writers and our internal folks to get stuff, and promotional marketing posts about stuff that Moz is launching.

You guys post at least one thing every day. Why do you think it’s valuable to offer your audience something new on a daily basis?

Actually, we are testing whether it is the case that it’s valuable.

Interesting.

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’d post every night and there was active conversation on topics the next day. I’m not sure that, within the era of social media and the era of content, that quantity is the best thing in the world versus quality. We’re actually going to try going down to two or three posts a week and going up to eight or nine post a week and seeing what effect those things have.

Do you feel like, with two to three posts a week, you could do higher quality stuff than you’re doing right now with daily posts?

Maybe. We’re not sure about that but we want to try it.

What key metrics will you look at to determine whether that experiment is successful?

We actually have this little system called One Metric at Moz that basically collects all of our metrics and looks at how content historically has performed over time in our funnel—how visitors who touched certain content or performed in our funnel and then we correlate all the metrics. We link those up so that we can basically assign a single metric score to any given piece of content. after its first seven or eight days of performance.

[Editor’s note: Read more about One Metric here. It’s really cool.]

How much of an advantage is it to have that owned audience and community that Moz has?

I think it’s almost indescribably huge. I think if we didn’t have it, we’d be constantly working on building it.

What are the key benefits that you’ve seen?

I think that a bunch of them include cost of traffic. That’s absolutely a big one. There’s the tangible and obvious benefits of having an audience that is pre-disposed through sharing and amplifying your content. Even just hitting the publish button means that thousand of visits are going to come your way, which is crazy but pretty awesome.

You will also have a barometer. I think with a lot of folks, when they publish content, it’s tough for them to tell whether they didn’t promote it well or whether the content didn’t resonate. For us, it’s pretty easy to know that if a content resonates, it will be promoted and shared and reach lots of people.

I think it also means that our content is perceived more authoritatively because of the community behind it and because of the track [record] and history we’ve built up in the market leadership. I think there’s a high standard that the content is held to—which can be a really tough thing when you have let folks down.

Over the last 10 years, how has your approach to content marketing changed?

I’m not sure that our fundamental underlying approach to content has changed much over time. I think we still taken it to a tune of, “Hey, we want to invest in content regularly. We want to share what we learned and know. We want to collect the best opinions from people, whoever they are and wherever they are in our industry, and share them.”

We want to try and help marketers first. That’s our underlying goal. Then if it so happens that they end up becoming customers of Moz, that’s great too, but that’s a side benefit. We really don’t think about content marketing as being part of our funnel. It’s part of our mission.

What are some of the key tactics you guys have used to grow your audience over the years?

Email is certainly big, most of all the Moz Top 10, which is our bi-weekly newsletter. So is investing in different kinds of media. Obviously video with Whiteboard Friday, but also illustrations and bigger interactive pieces, like “MozCast” and “The Google Algorithm Change History.”

Big content pieces like “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO” [have also helped]. I think it’s important to balance out between daily content and big content investments that take a person or a team months to work on. Social media has been huge for us over the last five, six years as well.

We still get a good amount of referral traffic from other people blogging and sharing our stuff on the web. SEO has been terrific.

Speaking of SEO, it seems like, as Google evolves quite rapidly, there’s a lot of misconceptions out there. What do you think is the biggest misconception right now about SEO?

So many misconceptions. One big one for sure is that all SEO is manipulative and evil, and if you intentionally invest in it, then you are doing something wrong or bad. I think one of the most visible holders of that opinion is Matt Mullenweg over at WordPress. He speak at conferences and if he hears the word SEO, he’s like, “Get off my stage. You’re evil!”

Another interesting and odd one is that SEO will take care of itself—that if I publish unique content, then the search engines will rank it. Nothing could be further from the truth. SEO is a process: the way things earn attention, how they are amplified; who amplifies them; how they earn links; whether they’re targeted at things that people actually search for. Whether they solve those search queries is the user experience you provide.

I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality. The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top five or 10 percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.

Ask [this]: If they’re searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now?

Unless the answer is a slam dunk, “Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,” I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.

What advice would you give brands who are stuck publishing a lot of mediocre content?

Prior to deciding you’re going to publish on a topic or coming up with an idea, I would go research everything that’s out there and make sure I have the ability to say that this piece is better than this other piece, and here’s why.

Then I need to be impartial, and just passionate enough to apply that same logic to my own work. That can be done by looking at what ranks in search engines. You can also see what’s been shared in a particular topic or niche with BuzzSumo.

I think both of those processes can help you. I’d also probably urge you to get some harsh internal critique. Find some harsh critics who can bring their judgment to bear on your work. Get them to take a look at what you’ve done.

A lot of brands are still looking for an easy way out when it comes to SEO and content marketing by simply licensing content from other publishers—like the AP, Forbes, and The New York Times—to populate their blog. Do you think that has any value?

I think certain forms of re-publishing content can add value for certain publishers and media outlets, but it’s very rare.

If you’re a small or mid-sized website and you’re licensing content from the AP and the Times, you’re probably sunk. That’s not going to do much for what you’re building. That’s not going to do much for your SEO. You may be getting some stragglers of traffic when Google accidentally thinks you’re the original source, but yeah, that’s not a great model.

On the other hand, I see folks like Slate and Salon and The Washington Post and this fantastic blog post that was written by this author in this smaller space. That can be awesome. They have a huge megaphone and they can amplify a great piece of work that maybe has only been seen by a very, very small niche community.

So licensing works for big media companies, but not for brands.

Yeah, unfortunately. I think some brands are pretty smart about this. Some brands do say, “Hey, we’ve been building an audience with content. We have an audience, we found this great niche thing, we asked this person to contribute a unique piece for us—or we got their permission to republish it—and we shared it with our audience and that helped our credibility.”

That can work, but if you’re licensing from the AP, I don’t get it. I have not seen that work.

What do you think is going to change in SEO this year? What does 2015 hold?

I think we’re seeing a few big trends ongoing. One certainly is dark traffic and loss of data. More and more search referrals are coming through without a referral strain, which is very frustrating because it means a lot of your search traffic is being reported as direct. The search traffic that is coming, through, 95 percent of it is coming without a keyword referral, so you don’t know what people searched for.

I don’t think technology has caught up to this yet. We don’t have something out there where analytics are getting predictive about saying, “Hey, this is why we think the search traffic landed on this page; it probably came with this keyword.” You see some SEOs technologies doing that, but not web analytics technologies.

I think we’re going to keep seeing trends of growth in mobile search and flatter growth in desktop search, which is okay, and we have still an insane metric ton of desktop search going on. Mobile is growing much faster and I think that is putting different requirements on publishers of all kinds—especially in terms of the formatting of content, and what the content is intended to accomplish. Because your conversion rates on mobile are just [bad]—for anything other than the most simple transactions with brands you’ve already transacted with, mobile is not a transaction-heavy device. We’re all going to have to make changes there.

With conversions so difficult on mobile, how should brands approach change?

I think what you’re trying to convert people to is familiarity, trust, or a relationship with your brand. Hopefully maybe some social sharing, maybe an email address if you’re very lucky, but not “Fill out this 10-field form” or “Go through this three-step transaction process.”

You guys are really honest and transparent talking about your successes and your failures and your challenges as a company. It’s really rare. What benefits does that bring?

I think it has both benefits and drawbacks. We don’t do that because we believe it will make us more successful or because we believe it has a high return on investment. We do that because that’s who we are. That’s what we believe in. That’s what we wish other companies and organizations and governments and people of all kinds and sizes and shapes would do. It’s not a business requirement; it’s a values judgement.

Nonetheless, it seems to work. It feels like all those type of pieces get an incredible amount of comments and engagement from your audience. It seems to resonate.

Yeah, I think they do. I would say that they have benefits and drawbacks. When we’re growing and Moz is looking really good—when even if we struggle to raise capital, our customer keep us going and we have a terrific year —I don’t think it’s anything but positive. It tells a great story.

But over the last year and a half, we’ve grown at a much much slower rate than the prior six years. We’ve encountered hardships and launched some buggy software and spent months fixing it and those kind of things. [So] I think being transparent maybe has had its drawbacks too.

People love an underdog with a story, but they don’t necessarily love a company that became a market leaders and then stumbled. I think it doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the right thing for us.

Do you think content marketing is going to continue to grow in importance or is it the flavor of the day?

We’ve been doing content marketing since the dawn of the Internet and way before that. We just didn’t call it content marketing. I think SEOs called it linkbait for a while and they certainly did lots of that. I’m not sure what the Guinness Brewery Corporation called The Guinness Book of World Records, but that was certainly content marketing.

I think it will continue to be with us for a long time because great content is a great way to earn attention and awareness and trust, and to get people to engage with your brand and spread your message.

Final question: Who is your favorite wizard?

Well, probably Gandalf. He’s awesome.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Moz’s Rand Fishkin on Why Licensing Content Is for Suckers, His Favorite Wizard, and the Future of SEO appeared first on Contently.

While virtually every major digital media property seems to have a branded content studio these days, none has pinned as much of its success on native advertising as BuzzFeed, which does not run traditional display ads on its site.

As such, you would have to think the company’s financial stakeholders were displeased to read that, according to one major ad buyer, only 15 percent of clients who syndicated sponsored content on BuzzFeed in 2013 returned for 2014.

From the sound of things, brands have been hesitant to return to BuzzFeed because they have not yet been able to directly link sponsored stories to product sales—a line of thinking that fundamentally misunderstands the role content marketing plays in a company’s long-term success.

As DigitasLBi’s chief investment officer, Adam Shlachter, put it to The Wall Street Journal, “Social lift and buzz is great, but I have to know if that means I will sell more toothpaste.”

While yes, the ultimate goal of any kind of marketing is to make more money, it is extremely rare that a single piece of content will lead directly to sale. Rather, content marketing is about building a long-term relationship with customers so that the next time they are in the store looking for toothpaste, your brand will be one they recognize and trust.

Moz’s Rand Fishkin smartly illustrated this point in a slideshow on some of the myths surrounding content marketing.

Here’s how some ad buyers imagine content marketing will immediately lead to sales:

While that dream scenario would certainly be nice, Fishkin points out that content marketing takes a little longer to work its magic:

It’s understandable that marketers want to be able to link their ad spend to sales, but sometimes even trying to measure the conversion rate of sponsored content can backfire.

Contently’s e-book “The New World of Content Measurement” lays out the tension between quick sales and more sophisticated content marketing approaches well. Optimizing content for direct sales might create a few conversions, but those sales will likely be canceled out if you’ve created a large group of people who will never buy your brand again after being turned off by an over-the-top sales pitch.

A more effective way of building a relationship with consumers is to focus on creating engaging content that people will want to read all the way through—and then come back for more.

This isn’t to say that BuzzFeed’s sponsored content offering is a perfect product. In fact, it’s unfair to place the blame entirely at ad buyers’ feet. Much of the onus is on publishers to prove their value. Like marketers, studios have to present their content’s effectiveness with the right kind of data—pageviews and clicks aren’t going to be enough to demonstrate a native ad’s impact for a brand.

The Wall Street Journal also reports that each campaign at BuzzFeed costs at least $100,000. At that price, brands might be better off driving people to owned brand publications like General Electric’s GE Reports or Dell’s Tech Page One.

Contently’s research shows that readers trust stories on brand-owned websites nearly as much as they do sponsored stories on news sites.

And while sponsored content on BuzzFeed gives brands immediate access to a large audience on a mainstream site, there’s no guarantee that readers will find the next post a brand sponsors on the site.

By comparison, a branded channel provides consumers with a destination they can return to, as well as giving brands the opportunity to create additional touch-points when readers consent to sharing their email addresses or choose to follow the brand on social media.

Regardless of whether you choose to publish your brand’s content yourself or with a third-party media outlet, it’s important to make sure you’re measuring it the right way.

Otherwise, you’re just another caveman marketer waiting impatiently for clicks to immediately turn into sales. Ad buyers and studios have to realize that the process will never be as simple as “Them click, them buy.”

The post What Ad Buyers Still Don’t Get About Sponsored Content appeared first on Contently.

If your blog readership isn’t where you want it to be, it can be tempting to distribute your post far and wide by reaching out to people and asking if they’d like to republish it. After all, everyone wants free content.

“It’s an incredible advantage to have content that drives traffic from multiple places—especially when you only have to write it once,” Buffer content crafter Kevan Lee wrote in a blog post.

In the same post, Lee points out that Buffer, which has free and paid versions of its social media management tool, had 949 new conversions in republishing efforts from four sites, so it definitely benefited from the exposure. However, the effort was preceded by a massive amount of guest posting: Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich wrote 150 original guest posts in a nine-month period, to be precise. It was the top hits from this effort that paved the way for syndication on big-name sites such as Inc., Fast Company, The Next Web, Lifehacker, and more.

It’s true that reaching a new audience can be great for business. For example, Bankrate, a consumer financial service website, widely syndicates content, tools, and consumer bank rates on brand partner sites. It even pays brand partners based on performance. Its widespread syndication—and consistently valuable content—has helped establish its brand as an authority in the industry.

But since each business, and blog, is different, it’s wise to look at metrics such as referral traffic, social media shares, and conversions to see if these republished posts are getting results. Sometimes duplicating content doesn’t have much of an impact in terms of brand awareness at all, and there can be downsides.

Joe Chernov, HubSpot’s VP of Content, is quick to point out some of these drawbacks. “Letting others republish your content is tempting, though not necessarily for the right reasons,” he says. “It’s tempting because it appeals to your ego, and when ego is involved, it becomes easy to reverse engineer reasons to do it. Generally speaking, syndication will cost you traffic—and not just any traffic, but high-value organic search traffic.”

Chernov points out that early stage companies with little brand awareness that have attracted the interest of a large publisher may want to go for it anyway, despite the drawbacks. “In this scenario, the loss of traffic may be worth the gain in meaningful exposure,” he says.

If you do decide to let others reprint your content, there are a few ways to lessen the negative SEO effects, such as asking them to include a rel=canonical tag and to link back to your original post. But SEO specialist Cyrus Shepard, senior manager of the content team at Moz, points out that this strategy isn’t foolproof.

“You’ll see cases where the syndicatee—the person who publishes second—you’ll see cases where if they have enough domain authority, they will outrank the original publisher. That’s still a problem with Huffington Post and these people who just add a sentence or two to the story,” he said in an interview conducted by Contently co-founder Shane Snow.

Google itself warns of this possibility. The duplicate content section of its webmaster tools reads: “If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.”

“I am a huge fan of original content,” Shepard emphasized, adding that Moz doesn’t syndicate anything in either direction. “I think all the value is having something original.” He predicts that search engines will improve in their ability to determine where attribution lies and give credit to the original source in the future, while cracking down harder on reprinted content that doesn’t add value. In that vein, Shepard sees a dark future for any sites that rely on content that’s syndicated from other publishers. “Syndicated content is like giving popcorn to children. It will keep them busy for a while, but that’s it,” he said.

So that’s bad news for those on the receiving end of syndication, but back to the original question: Ultimately, should you let your content be republished or not? If you value brand awareness and exposure over valuable search traffic, and have metrics in place that you can check back on to see if you’re on track, you may be able to justify dipping your toes in. But unless you have a compelling reason to make that trade, you may want to hold off.

As Shepard says, “It’s much better to have that content on your own site where you’re earning your link equity.”

The post Should You Let Other Sites Republish Your Content? appeared first on Contently.

But content marketing is still in its infancy, and marketers have a number of challenges to overcome. As we discovered earlier this year, measurement remains a hurdle; our content measurement survey from this summer found over 90 percent of marketers were not confident that their key content metrics were effective in measuring business results. For the year’s end, we wanted to broaden our scope and ask our audience of content marketers some important questions related to their triumphs, failures, and future goals: What types of content led to the most ROI? What resources were in short supply? What are some of the biggest challenges marketers face on a daily basis?

What follows is a crucial snapshot of the content marketing landscape as we get ready to transition into 2015.

METHODOLOGY

Between November 5 and November 17, we surveyed 601 marketers with an 18-question online survey.

As the survey was answered by nearly our entire population target, the calculated margin of error was approximately one percent.

KEY FINDINGS

In the next section we’ll unpack the noteworthy results in detail, but at first glance, a few striking data points stand out:

— Sixty-nine percent of marketers back original content over licensed content.

— Fifty-seven percent of all companies have two or more people dedicated to content marketing.

— While a slim majority of marketers are devoting 25 percent or less of their marketing budgets to content, 23 percent are now devoting over half their marketing budgets to content.

— Fifty percent of marketers are looking at return on investment (ROI) and lifetime customer value (LTV) as the most valuable goals to measure.

— Seventy-four percent of marketers believe that they could drive 2.5x more ROI, brand lift, or LTV if they had an expert content team, indicating a strong level of optimism heading into the new year.

RESULTS & ANALYSIS

Publishing quality content over time requires a healthy investment when you account for the talent and tools required. Here, we see there’s a huge range in the resources companies are committing to content marketing. While 52 percent of marketers are devoting 25 percent or less of their marketing budget to content, a significant group—23 percent—have shifted over half of their marketing budget to content.

Over the past few years, it’s been common to see content marketing treated as an experimental marketing practice, often put in the hands of a single employee juggling other responsibilities. While that’s still the case for 43 percent of respondents, it’s promising that more than half of all brands have at least two employees dedicated full-time to content marketing. Companies like Coca-Cola have succeeded with a balanced model that teams a few full-time employees with dozens of freelancer working remotely.

Given the small teams who are dedicated to content marketing, it’s not a big surprise that approximately two-thirds of respondents are creating fewer than five pieces of content per week. Finding the right balance of quality and quantity is one of the biggest challenges marketers face today, but it’s one that needs to be tackled if brands want to compete with traditional media companies for audience attention.

Considering most marketers only publish a few times per week, filling those slots with the right content becomes even more important. Interestingly, respondents didn’t overwhelmingly prefer or dismiss one medium over another—save for infographics. Longform, shortform, video, and social media posts were all deemed the most effective medium by between 16 and 23 percent of respondents.

Of note: Almost one-fifth of those surveyed picked “I don’t know.” Perhaps the popularity of that answer choice echoes the idea marketers are still searching for the best way to link their content to business results.

A marketer is only as good as his/her tools, and those tools include time, money, and analytics. Fittingly, our respondents identified budget (34 percent), the inability to measure business results (22 percent), and lack of time (11 percent) as their biggest challenges.

Ostensibly, these challenges are all connected. A larger budget can open access to the necessary analytic tools and resources, and the right analytics help content marketers devote their time and money to the most effective tactics.

When it comes to publishing original content versus licensing content from other publishers—also known as syndication—the results are clear: More than two-thirds of those surveyed favor original content. That answer shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. If readers can get your content elsewhere, what would make them come to you specifically?

As Cyrus Shepherd, director of content and SEO at Moz, told Contently co-founder Shane Snow: “Syndicated content is like giving popcorn to children. It will keep them busy for a while, but that’s it.”

Moz, a robust content creator in its own right and a leader in search engine optimization, doesn’t syndicate any content in either direction. “I think all the value is having something original,” Shepherd said.

Licensed content from other publishers rose in popularity in the early days of content marketing as a one-click solution to populating corporate blogs and as a hack for boosting search rankings. But its clear from these findings marketers see limited value in it.

What if marketers could create content under ideal conditions? The responses here show how optimistic marketers are about the maximum benefits of their content marketing operations. Notably, a majority of respondents seem to think they could increase ROI or brand lift by 2x–5x with the right team producing high-quality content.

Interestingly, even though a plurality of marketers selected ROI as their most important marketing goal, lifetime customer value and audience growth were very close behind. When it comes to content, measuring success can be a complex endeavor, with ROI, LTV, and audience growth all intersecting at various points.

However, the results suggest marketers are embracing a nuanced approach when figuring out how content can impact their bottom lines. Cultivating a loyal audience takes time, but the benefits are long-lasting. Once you have a relationship with your consumers, the ROI should follow.

CONCLUSION

Though many still treat content marketing as an experimental trend, brands are quickly learning that there’s a science to creating content—and spending their sacred budget.

Clearly, there’s plenty of room for growth. According to a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, only 23 percent of B2C marketers are successful at tracking ROI. Everyone points to Red Bull, GE, and American Express as the all-stars of content marketing, but aspiring content marketers likely need some of the resources afforded to those best-in-class brands—a stable supply of time, money, and analytics that take the guesswork out of their jobs.

Ultimately, the fate of content marketing isn’t in the hands of the marketers pushing for creativity on a daily basis. In reality, it depends on a dedicated investment from the executive level. For example, American Express President Ed Gilligan fully supported Open Forum’s initiative to publish small business content, and Marriott International Chairman Bill Marriott, who doesn’t use computers, still saw the value of telling his company’s story directly to consumers and has invested heavily in content.

Thanks to an early commitment from the executive level, Red Bull now employs approximately 135 people just for their media house, and Nestlé’s digital editorial team consists of almost 20 community managers and designers producing content every day. And according to the Columbia Journalism Review, Coca-Cola “now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.”

In 2014, many brands tested the waters, and a few dove in headfirst. In 2015, we’ll see how many follow.

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola, GE, and American Express are Contently clients.)

Charts created by Brian Meyers

The post The State of Content Marketing Heading Into 2015 appeared first on Contently.

These were the halcyon days when you needed a college email address to get on Facebook. You couldn’t do too much on the network, but the big draw as a college senior was the Facebook group for your incoming freshman year class. Like the rest of my future classmates, I dedicated months trying to make headway on hookups that would never happen, but I was hooked nonetheless.

Today, at age 27 with a girlfriend and a full-time job as editor-in-chief of Contently, my Facebook addiction is different: I don’t want girls; I want traffic. I want Facebook to drive engaged readers and email signups for my magazine, and eventually, I’d like some of those people to become customers of Contently (mostly so that my sweet job and budget don’t go away).

After all, the main focus of my job is to publish content that attracts readers. And despite all the “Facebook sucks!” rhetoric circulating in the brand marketing world, Facebook is still the most important social network when it comes to driving referral traffic to your content. By far.

Just look at this freakin’ graph:

Courtesy of Shareaholic, the graph above is the result of 13 months of data collected from 200,000 websites that reach a total global audience of more than 250 million unique monthly visitors. You know who’s driving the most traffic? Facebook. And it’s not even remotely close. At the close of Q3, Facebook was driving 22.35 percent of all traffic, over four times that of the next closest competitor (Pinterest, with 5.52 percent) and over three times that of all other social networks combined.

Though Facebook has famously squeezed the reach of brands all year, the amount of referral traffic the platform is driving has also increased by 115 percent. Any editor publishing high-quality content—whether she works for a brand or a traditional publisher—will tell you Facebook remains a crucial driver of traffic.

I point this out to reinforce a point I made last month: Content marketers shouldn’t become frustrated with Facebook or consider abandoning the platform in the wake of all this doomsday news. You just need to know how to use the network correctly. It’s not a place to build a community or an audience; that’s what your owned blog, magazine, or online community is for. It’s not a place to self-promote; that, as we’ve seen, will reduce your reach to your PR team and maybe your mom. But it is a great place to seed great content to people so it gets shared like Kind Bars after a yoga class.

(Note to bosses: I could have been so much less PC with that metaphor, but I resisted this time!)

As EIC of Contently, one of my goals in 2015 will be doing a better job of engaging our Facebook audience. The analytics of similar blogs like HubSpot, Buffer, and Moz (all brands!) reveal that there’s huge potential for us do better and drive more traffic from Facebook. My days of trying to improve my dating game on Facebook game are long over. But my content marketing game? That’s just begun.

The post This Chart Reveals Just How Important Facebook Really Is for Content Marketers appeared first on Contently.

There’s more out there than YouTube. While YouTube is a great, well-known platform, there are tons of hosting services—and each one can contribute to your video strategy in different ways. There are also tried-and-true methods of presentation that work for brands. So what are some crucial factors to consider before getting started with video strategy?

Understand the ROI

For B2B companies, it’s important to factor video engagement into the lead scores for prospects. Unfortunately, as highlighted by the Content Marketing Institute, many marketing automation platforms (MAPs) don’t come with interaction with video as an out-of-the-box feature. (Vidyard is a platform that helps with this.) That means most platforms don’t track whether a viewer is spending time playing the video, how many times they pause (possibly to take notes), which parts they skip, and so on. Certain platforms can also help you drive engagements by offering an opt-in form at the end of the video or gating content. It can also display pop-out CTAs to ask questions and get feedback or interaction from viewers.

Setting up an infrastructure to track these metrics is crucial, especially for B2B brands. Consider the metric of video views, and the ratio of video views to pageviews (if it’s below 10 percent, it could mean there’s room for optimization, as most people who land on your page aren’t watching your video). Similarly, understanding attention span is important: if fewer than half of viewers are getting through the video, it could be a sign that viewers are losing interest in whatever story you’re telling pretty quickly.

These analytics are part of the reason why you should seriously consider working with a video host service like Vidyard, Wistia, or Brightcove that’s built to help marketers tackle these challenges.

Finding a video host

It can be tempting to host your own video content. You’d have greater control over presentation and you’d be able to customize your lead generation efforts and call-to-actions. For example, you’d have unrestricted access to data and analytics. You wouldn’t be restricted by the abilities of an existing video host. However, that means creating all your own solutions (e.g., analytics dashboards, tracking mechanisms, video containers). Self-hosting also comes with problems such as server bandwidth, file size limits, creating the analytics solution, and a slew of other technical issues. (They also don’t have the network effect that third-party platforms like Vine and Instagram Video provide.)

If you really must make content exclusive to your site, choose to embed it via a third party service. Moz advises that in the interest of search engine optimization and keeping your content exclusive on your site, you shouldn’t enable other people to embed it on theirs. Google will only find and rank your page for the video, keeping another page from leap-frogging you.

“Most popular paid hosting solutions allow you to define where your content can be embedded,” explains Moz. “You will also need to ensure that your video player will not display an ‘embed’ button as an overlay or box beneath the video.”

On the flip side, if you’re willing to sacrifice SEO and direct conversions in favor of shareability and earned media, you should make embedding available to everyone and make it visible to the public on whichever platform you’re hosting it on.

The decision to prioritize either direct marketing or brand awareness will ultimately guide your decision to select a video host provider. Although YouTube or Vimeo may seem like great default choices, they’re just the most obvious ones. Unfortunately, neither of these services necessarily have the features needed to integrate with your other communications channels or track ROI. For example, services like Vidyard can show you how many leads you’re generating and whether people are responding to your video through interactive questions. Emma integrates video marketing into emails, which will show you how engaged leads are. With the variety of specialized services for B2B and B2C businesses, you’ll have to do some work to pick the one that fits best with your company’s needs. The customers and prospects you retain will make it worthwhile.

The professional option

Longform video content can be an instrumental tool in creating a lasting impression on viewers, and platforms such as Vimeo are perfect for these videos. Their PRO service offers completely different features than their standard free membership—PRO users get priority uploading and conversion, unlimited bandwidth, and advanced analytics on videos. Vimeo’s community is also a deeply engaged one, where members often pay for their accounts to disable in-video advertising. Members are often creators themselves, and as Sprout Social highlights, they’re a much more engaged audience than the ones on mainstream video hosting sites.

Vimeo’s brand itself also has a certain prestige associated with it, as it is affiliated with international film festivals such as TIFF. Hosting content on Vimeo means that your brand’s video content will sit beside videos from some of the world’s most interesting videographers and independent filmmakers.

Yet in today’s attention economy, not many people have the time to watch long videos everyday. To reinforce your video efforts, you can share quick videos through Vine and Instagram as quick touch points for customers and consumers.

The short-form battle: Vine vs. Instagram

As this infographic by The 7th Chamber highlights, five tweets every second contain a Vine link. That same infographic shows that a branded Vine is four times more likely to be seen than a branded video.

Yet Vine’s momentum may have taken a dive since the advent of Instagram Video. According to the Hootsuite blog, “On June 26, six days after Video on Instagram was launched, less than 900,000 Vine links were shared on Twitter, compared to almost 3 million shared on June 15.” Mashable discovered that twice as many top 100 brands used Video on Instagram compared to Vine.

Regardless of which platform you choose, these quick, bite-sized videos are here to stay. Many brands have already begun building their presence on these platforms. They are great vehicles for brands to provide value by entertaining followers. Tide is active on Vine, and entertains viewers through pop culture references (e.g., Tide’s Vine on Discovery’s Shark Week). Brands such as Volkswagen also tap into pop culture events to create content that entertains viewers. Lowe’s launched an entertaining series instructing viewers on how to fix common problems around the house called “Fix in Six.” The possibilities are endless.

Closing thoughts

While it can be tempting to dive headfirst into the entertaining world of video, platform selection and setting measurable goals is crucial to your video strategy. You always want to be creating content with a purpose, and that doesn’t change when your content is in video form.

The post YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Oh My! How Should I Host My Brand Video? appeared first on Contently.