Contenido Marketing para el talento de deterioro

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The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

There’s a reason people balk at content marketing – it’s hard. Not only do we have to be marketers, but now we’re supposed to be subject-matter experts, writers, and designers? Sure, we can hire it out, and sometimes we should, but there’s something to be said for crafting a piece of content entirely on your own. It’s not just ego – it’s your vision and only you really understand what you want in the finished product.

For me, the gap is often in the design and illustration. I’m assuming you’re a subject-matter expert in something and can write about it competently (it’s ok if you’re not a poet). If you’re like me, and your expectations are bigger than your talents, I’d like to offer a few shortcuts I’ve learned for designing your own content.

It’s amazing what you can do with a few words and a splash of color. For example, I started a recent post by writing out how much money Google made last year:

With just one font and strategic use of color, I was able to not only emphasize that $29B is a lot of money, but I tied it to Google’s identity. Best of all, it only took a few minutes.

I have to come clean and admit that I learned this trick (a couple of these tricks, actually) from Rand. Here’s another example, from his recent post on the responsibilities of a modern SEO:

The image looks great, and it really livened up Rand’s post, but what is it, really? It’s just well-placed text with a splash of color. I’m not picking on Rand – my point is that these small touches can make a huge difference.

Even if you go beyond text, you don’t have to be an artist to create a simple illustration that effectively communicates an idea. Justin Briggs had a great post here recently on how Google might detect spam, and it included images like this one:

Practically speaking, it’s just some circles and arrows, but these images really helped illustrate the complex ideas in Justin’s post. It wasn’t the complexity of the design that mattered, but the depth of the ideas behind the design.

Let’s pick on Rand again. Here’s an image he did for a recent post on inbound marketing:

I’ll let you in on a little secret – boxes and arrows are one of Rand’s favorite tricks. It’s hard to argue, because this image is a lot more compelling than a bulleted list. I hope you’re also seeing a pattern here – it’s the quality of the thought behind the image that really matters.

I admit that I’m trying to keep this post to mostly SEOmoz examples – not to pat ourselves on the back, but to show that we practice what I’m preaching. Here’s an outside example I really like, though, a Minimalist Muppet poster created by Eric Slager:

Obviously, this one is a bit more complex than my previous examples, but the actual design elements are pretty simple. The concept is genius, but the graphic itself really is minimalist. The minimalist meme has been going around – here’s another example with superhero posters (via ScreenRant.com):

My minimalist Roger Mozbot illustration should make a bit more sense now. The moral of this story: you can do a lot with some basic skills, if the core concept is strong enough. Clearly, this is the work of talented designers, but you don’t have to be an Adobe Illustrator guru to create something similar. You just have to start with great ideas.

It’s not stealing if you take your own stuff – good content creators learn when and how to re-use their own content. That doesn’t necessarily mean using the same image over and over (although there are times when even that can be very effective). It means learning how to re-use elements of your own illustrations, sometimes even within the same post. Recently, I did a post on marketing ethics, and I illustrated the post with whiteboard-style drawings like this one:

It won’t hang in a museum anytime soon, but I think the series of illustrations helped simplify a difficult topic. If you look at the 5 illustrations, you’ll see each of them have some variation on the same 5 elements:

You don’t have to be a connoisseur of the fine arts to realize that element #2 is just the same guy with a bowtie and element #5 is the blue car “painted” red. Take away the brick wall in the 1st image and the gray box, and I essentially created 5 illustrations with 3 main elements.

Last year, Rand did a great piece illustrating indexation issues. Some of the illustrations were pretty complex, like this one:

Before the days of Roger Mozbot (or, as we call it, the Time of Despair), Rand used to frequently create illustrations that were essentially Googlebot + Page icons + Arrows + Text. Again, I’m not picking on him – the finished products were great. Break them down, though (and pay attention over years of content), and you’ll see that Rand was re-using a lot of work he’d already done. That’s one of the reasons he can pound out an amazing blog post between 2-4am on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Re-use starts with being a curator of your own content. Eventually, you may even build some custom illustration libraries. Here’s an example – back in 2008, I wrote an e-book on CRO that started with an illustrated guide to conversion metrics. It included images like this one:

If you read my recent post on duplicate content and Panda, this may seem oddly familiar. That post used a number of similar web-page images, including:

In that post, I easily converted this basic template into 8 different illustrations. Condensed, those illustrations look something like this:

I don’t want to beat you to death with this point, but I think it’s often easy to miss how elements can build on each other. This kind of approach not only saves time, but it gives your content a consistent look and feel and can make your work look more professional.

You can also see how easy it would be to split these web-page templates into a basic library of layers (I actually have multiple Photoshop files, but the core concept is the same):

As you develop these design libraries over time, especially with an image as flexible as a basic web-page, you find more and more creative ways to use them. Best of all, the quality of your illustrations improves even as they take less time to create. You may even find yourself earning a reputation for your distinctive talent-impaired style.

Stop saying you’re “not a designer” and design something. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be based on a good idea. Over time, you’ll get better, even if you can only put in 10-15 minutes a day. If you find yourself staring at the computer screen for an hour, pick a new medium. A few months ago, I got up, walked to Office Depot, and bought a box of Crayola markers. It was one of the best creative decisions I’ve made in a long time. Whatever it takes, get started.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Artículo Marketing: Principalmente una estafa - pizarra el viernes

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Article marketing is mostly a scam. Well, wait... some types of article marketing are really scammy. Guest blogging, legitimate article sharing, and similar tactics are great and sustainable linkbuilding practices, but making up terrible article content and passing it off as something people should read or link to is both bad for users and bad for long-term SEO. This week, Rand discusses some of the reasons article marketing is so nefarious and some alternatives that are more user-friendly. Have any alternatives or tactics you're fond of? Let us know in the comments below!

Howdy SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about one of the scummiest, lowdownest, dirtiest, ugliest, messiest, nastiest, no goodnesst things of all in the SEO world, it is called article marketing.

Now, there are some good, authentic, legitimate forms of article marketing. They're usually called guest blogging or guest authorship, guest writing. What article marketing has come to mean in the field that we are in is something just sickeningly awful. So what I want to do today is talk about it a little bit. You can probably feel some of my pain. Then, we can get into it in the comments and talk more. I know one of the issues, too, is that some folks have success with this, especially early on in their careers, and then think, oh, this is how I can do SEO. I can just do article marketing.

Let me first, for those of you who aren't familiar, walk you through how article marketing or article spinning, article republishing is done. Basically, we have our friend here. I don't know, let's call him Fred. Fred is clacking away on his keyboard. He's like, "Oh, you know what? I am going to make a useless, fairly painful to read, crap article about why cats are the best pets, and in that article I am going to link back to pages on my site that are about cat ownership or cat food or whatever it is that I am trying to rank for. Those links are going to pass me some nice juice. They'll go over to my website. That'll be real nice there." But instead of just publishing on my site, I might publish it on my site, but I am also going to either take it with me and submit it to a bunch of article directories, article portals, article resource sites, sometimes they're called article publishers. They have all sorts of different names - article portals or something like that sometimes.

Or even better, I'm going to use the article spinning robot software that I downloaded which will go and submit it to all these different article sites for me. By the way, one of the great features of it is it bypasses the CAPTCHA by reading it or they have special arrangements and it only cost me $299. How can I go wrong? My god! It sounds like an amazing deal. Who wouldn't want to spin their article with Article Spinning Robot 5000 for $300? What a . . . sure, that's totally going to work.

So, once you get your article published up on all these different sites, the goal is, the idea is that hopefully when I search Google for why cats are the best pets, I see hundreds of different results. Oh, look at all these article sites that I submitted to, they're all getting indexed, and that must mean they're passing link juice back to me, and hey some of these article sites have a nice home page PageRank, maybe a 4 or a 5 or even 3. Super exciting. Clearly going to be incredibly valuable and useful for my SEO practices. So the goal is I am going to get these hundreds of sites that are all linking back to me with the anchor text that I have optimized from my article and that's going to help me rank.

You know what the problem is? The thing that sucks about this is that sometimes it works. In fact, sometimes it works for months at a time or even a year or two at a time.

I was just in New York. I was speaking at an affiliate conference event, and there were some people in the room. One of the people there asked me, she said, "You know, Rand, I do a lot of article marketing, and I am wondering, instead of writing unique content pieces, entirely unique, I heard that Google only duplicate content checks the first and the last paragraph. So can I just leave the middle paragraphs the same and produce hundreds of different articles, send them out to all the different sites? Because usually the editors, they don't even have editors or they are crappy. They don't review anything. So, if the first paragraph is unique, they usually accept the article and I can get them reposted. Do you think that will work well?"

I don't even know how to tell you what's wrong with your frame of mind when you ask these questions. It's incredibly frustrating. I tried to be very empathetic and explain, hey, search engines use these Markov chain analyses, they can detect duplicate content, very similar content pretty easily, and these sites tend to be very low quality anyway. She's sort of like, "Well, okay. I hear you, but I did get my rankings up quite a bit when I used the article spinner." It's sort of like, yeah, the problem with all of this stuff, with low quality tactics like this is that sometimes they work in the short term and you have to decide whether it is worth the risks.

Let's talk about a few of those. First off, does Google really want to count those links? Is that what search engineers feel like are going to provide the best results? When I search for something in Google and they say, "Ah, well, you know what, looks like Rand's article on white cats are the best pets, that's been spun on 300 article sites, so he must be the very best resource in the whole world on that topic." Can you possibly imagine a Googler thinking that way? So, instead they're going to be writing algorithms to try and prevent this stuff from working. They do all the time. Some of them fall out of favor. You can see they'll sometimes publicly lose their PageRank, or they won't but they'll lose their ability to pass link juice, or the sites will be completely penalized and they won't rank anywhere in the top 5 or 10 results and your site won't rank anywhere. One day Google just wakes up, does an algorithm change. You wake up in the morning, and boom, all your rankings are gone. You're way down in the penalty box. You go, "What did I do wrong? I've been a good article spinner. How could they do this to me?"

Another big risk is the duplicate content side. If you've submitting any content that you'd actually like to rank for, it's going to be pretty tough because some of these article sites are going to claim it's their own. They're going to earn links to their site more than you're able to earn links to your site. You might be penalized and they stay unpenalized, meaning that they're going to essentially cannibalize the traffic that you could have earned. If you are writing anything really good, you should be wanting to put it on one of two sites - your own 90% of the time, or maybe 10% of the time on a guest posting on another blog, on another website, on a content site, that has great reach, great reputation, that's going to earn you some trust and authority, not just from the links you're going to get. That's not the goal. The goal is to get readership and trust over to your site from real people who enjoy that content.

Of course, the content itself. Most of the time when people are talking about doing article marketing or article spinning, they're talking about the worst quality, lowest junk crap. As you can see with updates like Panda and Big Daddy and Vince a little bit, Google is just getting so much smarter about content analysis, and they're able to determine what matters in a block of text and what actual people like. They use user and usage data to do this now. Trying to game that system with low quality junk is not going to get you very far.

Finally, the thing that I think people forget about the most is they'll spend weeks or months, hours and hours on end, trying to spin the right things and find the right directories and getting their articles submitted here and generating some junky crap over there. I think to myself, imagine, imagine if you were doing something authentic. Imagine if you were doing real high quality SEO and inbound marketing. Imagine if instead of doing that, you got 50 more Twitter followers that day and you shared a bunch of good stuff and you wrote one guest post that maybe only went to one site, but that link lasted for the next 10 years. Imagine what you've lost when you spend time doing this kind of crap.

So, are there some alternatives? I was talking to some people at the affiliate show about the alternatives they are using. They're like, "Yeah, you know, when article marketing stopped working for me, I went with some directory link submission stuff. Then I tried some do follow commenting, and that seemed to work all right." They are sort of like, "Oh, you know, maybe some nofollow comments. That could work as well. It seems like sometimes nofollow comments do work. I'll do some reciprocal link exchanges." No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Just no. Okay.

How about you try something, anything real? Real and useful. If you think that you can manipulate the search engines or that search engine optimization, that the practice of improving your rankings and gaining traffic is going to be done through this kind of stuff, you're living a decade ago man. This is not going to work. One of the worst parts about this is that when you do this, the impression you create on users, on visitors who do find you, even if you manage to win . . . let's imagine that you got your content up to number one using article spinning and article robots and article marketing. Good for you. Imagine what's going to happen when I come to your site, I visit, and I am, like, "God, this is totally junky." Then I see a bunch of nofollow comment spam that you've left on the Web, and I see the articles of low quality that you've submitted everywhere. What am I going to think about your brand? How is your conversion rate possibly going to match up to the high rankings that you've achieved? If it doesn't, why are you even bothering? Isn't it so much easier to get 100 visitors and convert 10 of them than to get 10,000 visitors and convert 1 out of 1,000? It always is.

So, I really want to suggest it's not that article marketing is evil. This isn't a moral thing. This is about wasting your time and energy as a marketer and doing things that just detract from our profession.

I hope that you will avoid the classic forms of article marketing and consider some real authentic alternatives. I certainly hope that you'll join me again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Contenido Marketing para el talento de deterioro

Error al deserializar el cuerpo del mensaje de respuesta para la operación 'Translate'. Se superó la cuota de longitud del contenido de cadena (8192) al leer los datos XML. Esta cuota se puede aumentar cambiando la propiedad MaxStringContentLength en el objeto XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas que se usa para crear el lector XML. Línea 2, posición 8299.
Error al deserializar el cuerpo del mensaje de respuesta para la operación 'Translate'. Se superó la cuota de longitud del contenido de cadena (8192) al leer los datos XML. Esta cuota se puede aumentar cambiando la propiedad MaxStringContentLength en el objeto XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas que se usa para crear el lector XML. Línea 1, posición 8824.
The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

There’s a reason people balk at content marketing – it’s hard. Not only do we have to be marketers, but now we’re supposed to be subject-matter experts, writers, and designers? Sure, we can hire it out, and sometimes we should, but there’s something to be said for crafting a piece of content entirely on your own. It’s not just ego – it’s your vision and only you really understand what you want in the finished product.

For me, the gap is often in the design and illustration. I’m assuming you’re a subject-matter expert in something and can write about it competently (it’s ok if you’re not a poet). If you’re like me, and your expectations are bigger than your talents, I’d like to offer a few shortcuts I’ve learned for designing your own content.

It’s amazing what you can do with a few words and a splash of color. For example, I started a recent post by writing out how much money Google made last year:

With just one font and strategic use of color, I was able to not only emphasize that $29B is a lot of money, but I tied it to Google’s identity. Best of all, it only took a few minutes.

I have to come clean and admit that I learned this trick (a couple of these tricks, actually) from Rand. Here’s another example, from his recent post on the responsibilities of a modern SEO:

The image looks great, and it really livened up Rand’s post, but what is it, really? It’s just well-placed text with a splash of color. I’m not picking on Rand – my point is that these small touches can make a huge difference.

Even if you go beyond text, you don’t have to be an artist to create a simple illustration that effectively communicates an idea. Justin Briggs had a great post here recently on how Google might detect spam, and it included images like this one:

Practically speaking, it’s just some circles and arrows, but these images really helped illustrate the complex ideas in Justin’s post. It wasn’t the complexity of the design that mattered, but the depth of the ideas behind the design.

Let’s pick on Rand again. Here’s an image he did for a recent post on inbound marketing:

I’ll let you in on a little secret – boxes and arrows are one of Rand’s favorite tricks. It’s hard to argue, because this image is a lot more compelling than a bulleted list. I hope you’re also seeing a pattern here – it’s the quality of the thought behind the image that really matters.

I admit that I’m trying to keep this post to mostly SEOmoz examples – not to pat ourselves on the back, but to show that we practice what I’m preaching. Here’s an outside example I really like, though, a Minimalist Muppet poster created by Eric Slager:

Obviously, this one is a bit more complex than my previous examples, but the actual design elements are pretty simple. The concept is genius, but the graphic itself really is minimalist. The minimalist meme has been going around – here’s another example with superhero posters (via ScreenRant.com):

My minimalist Roger Mozbot illustration should make a bit more sense now. The moral of this story: you can do a lot with some basic skills, if the core concept is strong enough. Clearly, this is the work of talented designers, but you don’t have to be an Adobe Illustrator guru to create something similar. You just have to start with great ideas.

It’s not stealing if you take your own stuff – good content creators learn when and how to re-use their own content. That doesn’t necessarily mean using the same image over and over (although there are times when even that can be very effective). It means learning how to re-use elements of your own illustrations, sometimes even within the same post. Recently, I did a post on marketing ethics, and I illustrated the post with whiteboard-style drawings like this one:

It won’t hang in a museum anytime soon, but I think the series of illustrations helped simplify a difficult topic. If you look at the 5 illustrations, you’ll see each of them have some variation on the same 5 elements:

You don’t have to be a connoisseur of the fine arts to realize that element #2 is just the same guy with a bowtie and element #5 is the blue car “painted” red. Take away the brick wall in the 1st image and the gray box, and I essentially created 5 illustrations with 3 main elements.

Last year, Rand did a great piece illustrating indexation issues. Some of the illustrations were pretty complex, like this one:

Before the days of Roger Mozbot (or, as we call it, the Time of Despair), Rand used to frequently create illustrations that were essentially Googlebot + Page icons + Arrows + Text. Again, I’m not picking on him – the finished products were great. Break them down, though (and pay attention over years of content), and you’ll see that Rand was re-using a lot of work he’d already done. That’s one of the reasons he can pound out an amazing blog post between 2-4am on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Re-use starts with being a curator of your own content. Eventually, you may even build some custom illustration libraries. Here’s an example – back in 2008, I wrote an e-book on CRO that started with an illustrated guide to conversion metrics. It included images like this one:

If you read my recent post on duplicate content and Panda, this may seem oddly familiar. That post used a number of similar web-page images, including:

In that post, I easily converted this basic template into 8 different illustrations. Condensed, those illustrations look something like this:

I don’t want to beat you to death with this point, but I think it’s often easy to miss how elements can build on each other. This kind of approach not only saves time, but it gives your content a consistent look and feel and can make your work look more professional.

You can also see how easy it would be to split these web-page templates into a basic library of layers (I actually have multiple Photoshop files, but the core concept is the same):

As you develop these design libraries over time, especially with an image as flexible as a basic web-page, you find more and more creative ways to use them. Best of all, the quality of your illustrations improves even as they take less time to create. You may even find yourself earning a reputation for your distinctive talent-impaired style.

Stop saying you’re “not a designer” and design something. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be based on a good idea. Over time, you’ll get better, even if you can only put in 10-15 minutes a day. If you find yourself staring at the computer screen for an hour, pick a new medium. A few months ago, I got up, walked to Office Depot, and bought a box of Crayola markers. It was one of the best creative decisions I’ve made in a long time. Whatever it takes, get started.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.