Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing presented Content SEO Best Practices at the Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston. There was a tremendous amount of information presented, and Lee spoke very fast. This makes video a better format to review the information, because you can pause and go back if you need to.

He covered B2B Content Optimization Strategy, Core SEO Tips and B2B SEO Best & Worst Practices. The video of his presentation is below, as well as his slides so you can follow along. The second part of the session featured Jiyan Wei of PRWeb, which you will see in the slides, but not in the video. That will be in a separate post published next week.

View the original article

Original article

Related posts:

1. How to Create Viral Video With User Generated Content Computer manufacturer MSI came up with an interesting YouTube contest...
2. 5 Easy Tips to Content Marketing on Twitter Sometimes you wonder, why something as simple as Twitter that...
3. Social Media Strategy – Turn Your Content into a Lady in a Bikini I love to study different kind of concepts. It can...

Recently, I have been thinking about what make social media carry so much hype and hope for organizations in the future. One of the reasons social media grew beyond expectation is because of it’s ability to simplify sharing of ideas and experiences with each another.

Organizations understand the power of word of mouth online and is ready to do whatever it takes to get users to talk about their brand.

Small organizations will start joining social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Youtube and publish articles, pictures and videos, hopping that something will stick in the users mind. When it does, they pray and hope that the users will start going online and share the content with their friends.

However most of the time users are not interested in sharing content that is not relevant to them or have no entertainment or educational value whatsoever. Simply put, they cant find a good reason to share your content or talk about you at all.

Larger organizations with substantial marketing budget will try to run social medial contests. Typically the contests will require the users to tag their friends on pictures or share whatever product info and get rewarded for it.

Again this is no difference with creating an adverting campaign and tracking the response rate. You will have to sustain the hype and when it dies down, you will have to think of another campaign to generate the hype again.

Identify Areas People Can Talk About

Besides pictures and videos. People like to share their experiences online. It doesn’t matter if they they are sharing it with strangers. They will talk to anyone who are willing to listen.

Organizations need to start improving their customer service experience in order to deal with the increasing demands of the customers. Most importantly, they need to realize that they are doing it to help their customers find a reason to talk about them.

Brand Story From Nordstrom

For those who don’t know what Nordstom is, it is a high-end department store that spread across the United States. They are legendary in the area of customer service since 1901. In fact, their branding was built entirely through the customers’ WoM (Word of Mouth) experience. Here is an example of building a brand through story telling.

About a a few decades ago, a customer walked into one of the Nordstorm store with 2 snow tires. He walked up to the tire counter, put the tire down and asked for money back. The clerk who started work for 2 weeks, saw the pricing on the tire and reached out in to the cash register and pull out $145 for the man. The thing about this is that Nordstrom never sell tires. According to company lore, the clerk accepted the tire because that is what the customers wanted.

This is just an example of how important customers are to Nordstrom. It is this type of stories, mixed with social media that can really propel your brand on the social web and into brand mortality.

Don’t Confuse Campaigns With True WoM Experiences

At this point, you must be thinking “Why don’t I just run campaigns that get people talking about me?＂ Well, you can do that, but do you have the budget and innovative ideas to keep coming up with campaigns to engage your customers? Most importantly, what is the life span of the WoM effort? 1 month, 2 months or 3 months?

True WoM experience comes from the desire to want to share something good with someone. In this case, it can an unique experience you provide on a consistent basis, or an act beyond the call of duty.

Whatever it may be, the perks of such WoM is the longevity and the cost of maintaining it (zero cost).

Share With Us

Do you have any story you think is worth sharing? Feel free to tell us about it in the comment box below.

Related posts:

1. 4 Big Reasons Why People Share Content Online When Oprah Winfrey devote an entire show to Twitter, we...
2. Animoto Let You Create Slideshow That Draw Eyeballs Animoto is a new online mash-up tool that allows you...
3. How to Create Viral Video With User Generated Content Computer manufacturer MSI came up with an interesting YouTube contest...

In one month’s time, 2009 will come to an end. Many believe that the future will be driven by technology and innovation and some major organizations aren’t afraid of using the internet to let everyone know about their vision of the future.

Below are 8 videos, each giving a description of what the future holds. Have you got your own vision of the future?

If I leave out any videos, please feel free to add the links in the comment box below. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. 30 Predictions of Twitter’s Future Caught on Camera Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur recently publish a video discussing...
2. Social Media Strategy – Turn Your Content into a Lady in a Bikini I love to study different kind of concepts. It can...
3. The Future of The Internet – Web 3.0? Web 1.0 was described as the ‘read only’ internet. At...

Ever wonder what the world will be like in 2015? Well, Google may have the answer. Google CEO Eric Schmidt made his predictions during a 45-minute interview at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009 in October. Here are the essence of what he said.

1. Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
2. Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
3. Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
4. Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
5. “We’re starting to make significant money off of YouTube”, content will move towards more video.
6. “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
7. There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
8. “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
9. It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

He also elaborated on point 2, regarding teenagers and this is what he has to say:

Talk to a teenager about how they consume information. And remember – in five years from now, that’s your employee.

That’s the future!

Related posts:

1. 30 Predictions of Twitter’s Future Caught on Camera Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur recently publish a video discussing...
2. 37 Statistics to Show Social Media is Not a Fad Anymore Socialnomics have been circulating the following video since July 2009...
3. What T.Have Eker’s Jar Concept Got to Do With Social Media I recently attended T.Hav Eker’s Millionaire Mind Intensive and was...

I love to study different kind of concepts. It can some how help you crystallize your thoughts on a particular subject and improve the way you do things. Social media marketing never fail to revolve around good concepts. In the next two posts, I want to talk about the concepts I have learn that make content creation easier to understand and hopefully be able to help you implement your content creation strategies better.

I have observe that most business owners (you included) think that if they try to be generous and give their knowledge away, there will be nothing left to sell, there will be no business. However, this is far from the truth.

When I was doing my research, I came across a 2007 post by Sean D’Souza titled ‘So What if You Give Most of It Away? The Bikini Concepts’.

The author suggested that the more secrets you give away for free, the more demand you are creating for your product. In fact, he even gave a rule of thumb in how much content you should give: Give 90% of your secrets away and keeping just 10% of it. He argued that the attraction factor is stronger than keeping all the ideas and content to yourself.

In the 21st century, free stuff has become an expectation rather than a surprise. People expect to be given free samples, they expect to be given free gifts. In fact, most web 2.0 platforms operate with a freemium business model. You sign up for a free account with some basic features and if you like to have more advance features, you will have to pay a premium for it (examples include FlickrPro, LinkedIn Pro, Techrigy, Animoto etc).

In Chris Anderson’s book ‘Free: The Future of Radical Price’, he too argued in favor of giving free stuff away. With so many evidences pointing to a freemium future, I hope that you too will not hesitate to share your best ideas on the social web, because the more you share, the more they buy. So start turning your content into a pretty lady in a bikini and people will pay premium to see what the bikini didn’t reveal. Have fun!

“Give away the ideas. Sell the system.” – Sean D’Souza

Related posts:

1. Singapore Firms Using Social Media As Hiring Tools Social media is now use for pretty much everything business....
2. 5 Easy Tips to Content Marketing on Twitter Sometimes you wonder, why something as simple as Twitter that...
3. 5 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools Not long ago, Channel NewsAsia posted a report highlighting the...

Sometimes you wonder, why something as simple as Twitter that can only update 140 characters can cause so much confusion among content marketers. Maybe we should see Twitter as a hammer, a tool that is simple to use yet powerful. It can help build a 3 storage bookshelf or it can be use to build a home that can house an entire family.

It all depends on how you will be using the hammer. Will you wield it in a disastrous way or will you use it skillfully together with a group of like-minded individuals. It is the same concept for Twitter, do poorly and you will smash your thumb, do it well and you can bring significant results to your content marketing. Here are 5 easy ways to strengthen your content marketing efforts.

Share your thoughts in small, bite size updates

Some of us spend alot of time blogging, writing articles and sharing our knowledge. This is good and still important. But besides doing that, how about writing bite size (140 characters) updates that will deliver a thought precisely and can resonate through the twittersphere, making you a thought leader.

Monitor and interact with conversations

Because content marketing is about conversation as it is broadcasting your message, you will still need to maintain a dialogue with customers, prospects and industry leaders. By using tools such as Tweetdeck and TweetGrid, you can monitor what is been said, participate and add value to the conversations.

Follow the critical trends in your market

With the technology moving so fast, it is quite hard to stay current. Therefore, we need all the help we can get. Twitter is an ideal tool to help us follow the trends of our industry. You can make use of tools such as Twitter Search or Monitter to find out what is going on around the topic of your choice.

Create interest group to discuss pressing problems

creating an interest group can help you focus on major issues that is bugging your prospects or customers. One of the tools you can use is Tweetworks since it can create ad hoc group on the fly.

Extend the reach of your blog post

Bloggers want to reach as many people as they can with their work. As we increase our use of Twitter, we may develop hundreds or even thousands of followers on Twitter whom may be interested in the articles we write. Using Twitterfeed, we may be able to automatically pull our blog post on to Twitter.

Many people think that Twitter is just a fad. But I am sure that for content marketers, it is a tool that may be useful to build your credibility and reputation as a thought leader.

Related posts:

1. Using Twitter for Business – 3 Great Articles Within 24 Hours In the span of 24 hours, 3 comprehensive articles about...
2. Many Still Don’t Know What Twitter is There For Contrary to what most people think, Twitter’s biggest problem is...
3. How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a Case Study This is one of the cases study that shows that...

In writing a good blog, Content is often the King. The first thing is always to work on writing useful and unique content which will draws readers in and generates links from other blogs, builds the profile and reputation of the blog. However sometimes great content is simply not enough as many bloggers write excellent content.

People keep asking how they find readers. My answers to them are to write unique and useful content for your readers. It’s a principle that I strongly believe in. Interacting with your readers is the next important thing. The more you interact with readers in a genuine way the more likely they are to stay around and spread the word about you.

Always use good titles. A lot is written about the effectiveness of quality post titles at getting attention and drawing in readers to your blog. In my mind there is little doubt about how important it is to invest time into smart title generation.

Do a little promotion about yourself as it’s also important to let your readers spread the news about you – without some self promotion you may never find those first readers to help you spread the virus.

Use basic SEO principles which are worth learning the basic principles on how search engines index and rank online content. While some bloggers become a little obsessed by SEO – setting up your blog smartly and keeping some of the basics in mind as you write is a common sense way of building a blog that will bring in significant SE traffic over the long term.

A nice blog design will give readers a professional feel. Inviting design that communicates what a blog is about, that enables good navigation and that draws readers into the content can really take a blog to the next level.

Related posts:

1. 5 Blogging Goals You Want to Achieve One of your main objectives to setting up a business...
2. So You Think You Have The Best Blog? Some folks can write stuff people want to read, and...
3. Blog-a-Trend – HP TouchSmart600 PC and HP Mini Up For Grab It was a hectic weekend last Saturday and I have...