Reading Best of inbound: July and Augsut

July
Content Marketing: an other view

UX is important
Make it easier for your visitors / customers to solve their problems
Let users create content
Sponsor events
Think about adjacent fields

100 Lessons Learned from 10 Years of SEO

Don’t link-build too fast
Meta descriptions help your CTR
Work on a good product
Stay creative and don’t obsess with algorithmic details
Big brands are slow – you can beat them
Keyword research is the basis of all your activites(!)
Learn about internet marketing / CRO(!!)
You need to work together with other teams
Don’t try to screw your competition over – try to learn from them
Don’t build links, build customers – your ingenious tactics will probably be destroyed by google anyway
Talk about your what you’ve learned
Have a strategy
Profit should be your top goal

Importance of Determining SERP Competition

How many organic links are on the site? What are the other elements?
Check for synonyms, singular/plural, etc.
Use Google Ads, Insights to find attractive keywords
Look for verticals

August

SERP Analysis

Identify your 5 – 10 core set of keywords
Use Google’s Contextual Targeting tool (adwords) to find ideas and group them in 3 different buckets based on volume
Start with the lowest bucket and work up
Higher domain authority, harder competition
Start scraping the SERP: URL, Domain Authority, Page Authority, #indexed links, #linking root domains
What types are the backlinks? Import backlinks into Link Detective
Broken Links? Do some broken link building
Lots of low level backlinks? Easier competition
Link Diversity (#Links / #Root domains) low or high?
Check root domains for same IP / C-Blocks

HQ Link Building Tactics

How can your service help universities / students? Create a unique landing page and get links
Local charity events
College logos on your product
Offer useful tools for businesses which help them for free
Organize a (local) event
Egobait & Infographics
Sponsor your product for an event

#79/111: Get Content, Get Customers

What is it about?

A whole book about content marketing, yeah! Joe Pullizzi and New Barrett write about creating your content strategy, choosing your platform and providing information.

What can I learn?

Integrate your content marketing: This is an important first step. Often there is lot of information in a company: white papers, public reports or speeches. But you can’t just put everything online and be happy. You may have to refine it. Try to integration the content creation process into your daily work, e.g. if you’ve won a new customer or completed a great job.

Select your platform: There are different platforms like blogging, podcasting, video blogging, etc. It’s important that you choose a appropriate platform. If you are like to speak, maybe a podcast is the perfect platform for your information. Furthermore, you should think about the potential consumer of your information. Maybe writing a column is more appropriate for your prospects.

Deliver useful information: Information isn’t just information. Many, many companies make the mistake to provide boring information on their blogs. Your information should encourage your customer to try something new or to fix a problem for herself. Maybe you could write about some current event or explain cool things to them.

Conclusion

Get Content, Get Customers is a really nice book and one of the fews that are written exclusively on content marketing. There are some cool examples in this book about content marketing, e.g. one special magazine for customers of a wealth management company. Very inspiring! Great book.

#65/111: Writing White Papers

What is it about?

How to write a white paper? Michael A. Stelzner, who has written over 130 white papers, explains his procedure of writing a white paper from interviewing experts to offering the solution.

What can I learn?

Interview experts: If you aren’t an expert on a topic you could become one or you could interview some. Firstly, you should identify the experts. Write them an email with the most important information (topic, estimate amount of time and questions) and ask them if they could answer your questions.

State the problem in depth: If you are writing a white paper, you should focus on the problem. If you are writing a 6-12 page white paper, circa 2-3 pages should be on the problem. Some people don’t exactly know what the problem is. Let’s take IPv6 as an example. The biggest problem at the moment with IPv4 is its limited amount of IP addresses. You could write about the implications and how IPv6 solves them. Moreover, you could write about additional features of IPv6.

Offer generic solutions first: If you go to the solution, you shouldn’t try to sell your service/product yet. Firstly, offer a generic solution which everybody could implement on their own. This will maintain your credibility. After that you can talk about your specific solution. Tell your readers how it is different and superior to the generic one.

Conclusion

Writing White Papers is a nice book which shows you the basics of writing white papers. Some chapters are disappointing because they are very short. However, if you are a writer and want to go into writing white papers, this could be a valuable asset.