A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

You know you want to attend Share15, but your boss may need some convincing. If it’s not enough to share what previous attendees have to say about the conference, let us help prepare you with ways to convince your boss. Three main reasons:

1. Product Knowledge
2. Industry Insights and Skills
3. Networking

You will gain valuable insights with incredible learning opportunities

Share15 is packed with great ways to learn the latest skills, techniques and the latest thinking. From BrightEdge certification courses for those new to the platform and for more experienced users, to hands-on labs, group discussion forums, breakout and general sessions and more.  Whether you want to roll up your sleeves and learn new products and features, hear experts discuss the latest trends or contribute to discussion forums on marketing challenges, Share15 has something to offer for your interests and expertise. Sponsors and BrightEdge will be showcasing the latest technologies at the solution showcase and during hands-on labs held throughout the conference.

Attending Share15 will elevate your performance

The agenda has been created to focus on delivering answers to the key challenges facing digital marketers, content marketers and search professionals today. You will hear from practitioners, experts and leaders in the industry who will offer insights from case studies of real-world application of the latest marketing techniques.  With over 60 case studies from marketers at leading brands, you will walk away with practical solutions you can put immediately into use.

You will network with leaders in our industry and our peers

Share15 is full of marketing leaders and practitioners.  With over 60 speakers and attendees from many of the world’s largest brands you will make connections you can only imagine. Whatever your role, industry or company type Share15 will have attendees and speakers ready to share their insights, knowledge and skills with you, or to just chat about industry gossip over lunch or drinks. We’ve designed the event to give you plenty of opportunities to engage with the other attendees in a fun and meaningful way. If this information alone isn’t enough,  we’ve created justification letters you can share with your boss to convince them to send you. You can download versions customized for Search Professionals, Content Marketers, and those most interested in Digital Marketing. They help explain the benefits you and your company will gain from your attending the event and will help you create an approximate budget to show what the investment will be. We hope you are able to use all of this to convince your boss to let you join us at Share15. 

dpatel

M Posted 11 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

For both B2C and B2B companies, exposure and driving relevant traffic is critical to finding new leads and improving the brand’s reach. Content syndication offers brands an opportunity to leverage the audience of other popular sites to increase the visibility of their original site. Content syndication can be controversial in the minds of some marketers, because like many other SEO methods, there is both a right way and a wrong way to use it. If you do not use this system correctly, you can end up penalized because of duplicate content, hurting your marketing efforts. If you are considering using this method as a part of your lead generation tactics, here is what you should know about using it successfully.

Understanding how content syndication can boost lead generation

Content syndication means publishing a copy of your existing content from your website on another site. You might choose to do a copy of an entire article, a snippet or just a headline. The goal behind this type of tactic is to attract the interest of the audience on the more popular site and send them back to your original site and grow your own brand reach.

By publishing on a more established website, you can also give your content greater authority because you will be associated with the site and brand the audience already trusts. Generating greater traffic and improving your brand authority are both valuable aspects to finding new leads, and content syndication can be a successful method for both B2B and B2C companies. The key to using this method appropriately is selecting the right content and posting it on the right website while also avoiding any potential Google penalties that could end up hurting your original website.

Choosing your website

Using content syndication successfully requires sites that can help you attract the traffic you need. That means finding a website that targets your own ideal audience and has a higher authority than your site. This can help bolster your own reputation and encourage the people who visit your brand site after reading your content to trust what you have to say.

Choosing your content

Generally, it is best to syndicate some of your highest quality content. You have to remember that the site publishing the content is considered an authoritative website. If you publish only mediocre work, then the article will not attract the desired attention. At the same time, the entire purpose of the syndication process is to send the traffic from the publishing site back to your original site. That means you do not want to publish all of your best work on other sites. There should be enough left that is unique to your site so people who visit your page will find something valuable which encourages them to stay and explore. You also need to consider the type of content you want to publish. If you are interested primarily in growing traffic, for instance, it might make more sense to syndicate just headlines or smaller portions of your pieces. This will offer the audience enough to interest them and encourage them to click through and learn more. If you are taking more of a brand awareness approach to building leads, you might find success by syndicating entire articles or longer excerpts, which will increase the number of people who read your ideas in full on the original site.

Avoiding penalties

Avoiding Google’s duplicate content penalties is always a chief concern for those interested in syndicating some of their content. After all, recent Google updates, including the famed Panda update, have played a large role in trying to eliminate duplicate content from SERPs. Fortunately, when content syndication is done well, you do not have to worry about incurring any problems. Here are a few tips you can use to let Google ‘understand’ your content.

Rel=canonical

Whenever possible, this solution is the best choice for avoiding Google penalties. You place this tag on the page with the syndicated content and have the tag list the original address of the article. This tells Google that the second version is just a copy and where the original lives. Not only does this allow you to avoid potential problems, but any links that go to the copy of the article will be ‘counted’ for the original version. The canonical tag for an article about green dresses would look like this according to Google:

NoIndex

If you cannot place a canonical tag on the copy of the article, see if you can place a NoIndex in the copy of the article. This tells Google not to ‘read’ this version of the article, so there is only one copy in the Search Engine Index. While this will solve your duplicate content problem, any links that the copy accrues will not point back to your original piece, which can limit the benefits of the syndication process. According to Google, using this meta tag should look like this:

Including an attribution link

Sometimes you might be publishing a syndicated copy on a website that does not want to include a canonical tag or a NoIndex. In that case, the best solution may be a direct attribution link. This link should go directly to the original version of the article. This will generally be enough to let the search engines know that this is a copy of the original article. Like the NoIndex solution, however, any links that reference the copy will not acknowledge your original site. If the site that will be hosting your content will not agree to any of these conditions, you will have to carefully evaluate whether the syndication is worth the effort. It is possible that the copy of the article will end up ranking higher than your original, since it is a more authoritative site. If the site is a fantastic match for your marketing efforts, however, and has the potential to generate some traffic and leads for you, then the risk may be worth it.

Paid syndication

In addition to syndicating your content through other industry websites, you also have the option of using one of the many paid options. For this system you will select vendors who will reprint your content on popular websites to help you get your material in front of the ideal audience. Some of the more popular vendors are: - Emedia - Netline - Reachmail - ThirdDoorMedia - Ziff Davis These sites work on a Cost Per Lead (CPL) system. It is generally best for you to start with tight filters that allow you to focus on cultivating the most appropriate leads. You can always loosen your filters as you gauge your success with the system.

Tighter filters will increase your CPL, but the higher quality of the leads should offset the higher investment. Working with paid syndication requires some experimenting to find the system that will work best for you. Begin by confirming with the vendor exactly what they will be doing to generate leads. You will then want to begin with about two to three assets in rotation. It is best to use pieces that have helped you bring in leads in the past. If at all possible, supply your own marketing content as well. If you do not have any available, most vendors will supply it and you can then make modifications to better suite your brand. Beginning with a small budget and a short rotation time will allow you accurately gauge the success of the system based upon your current parameters without spending unnecessarily.

You can then modify your filters or content and try again as you better understood your path to success. Content syndication can be a wonderful means of growing traffic and establishing authority through already-popular sites. To use this system correctly, however, you need to be careful with your selections and employ best practices to minimize risk and maximize yield.  

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

Duy Vu is the SEO manager at Assurance, overseeing all the SEO initiatives for their web properties. He is their self-described ‘go-to’ SEO guy, and we thought that it sounded like he would have some excellent insights into the ever-developing digital marketing industry. Duy Vu will be joining us in just a few weeks for Share15, so we took the time to sit down with him and talk about the upcoming conference and his latest insights into the digital marketing world.

Building Your SEO Brand and Reputation

Bright Edge (BE): What project will you speak about at Share15?

Duy Vu (DV): I plan on exploring the intersection of SEO and reputation management. It is a topic on the mind of many marketers and brands who want to venture into digital marketing but worry about controlling how their brands are perceived online. They want to know how to remain up-to-date on what people are saying about their brands and what they can do to improve their brand perception.

I plan on delving into a variety of tactics people can employ to strengthen their SEO while also improving their reputation and their relationship with their customers. The people who are most successful with SEO and managing their brand perception focus chiefly on building a strong, positive relationship with their customers.

Understanding How People Search for Your Brand at Share15

BE: Why will attendees want to be sure to attend your session?

DV: Search and reputation management are critical subjects for all brands. We all know how quickly a bad customer experience or a poorly thought-out ad campaign can go viral and hurt a company’s reputation overnight. This prospect scares many companies. They know that they need to leverage digital media, but they want to make sure they do it right. It is becoming increasingly common knowledge that digital media and SEO offer you powerful tools for getting your message in front of customers, but people do not want to get burned by those same methods. I think that attendees at my session will learn a lot about search and reputation. I will delve into understanding how people search about your company, including brand and non-brand queries. I believe that reputation management is an area of SEO that does not get enough attention.

BE: How do you leverage BrightEdge to succeed in your goals?

DV: When you are looking to monitor and manage your reputation through social media, you have to be able to accurately measure your Share of Voice and what people are saying about you. The BrightEdge platform makes it easy to analyze your site and how it is performing as well as your Share of Voice and how people are responding to your brand across the digital world. It is an excellent tool that allows us to leverage all that our SEO strategies are capable of accomplishing.

The Mobile Opportunity

BE: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges facing people in SEO?

DV: I think fully-integrated marketing is definitely up there. Many companies have siloed experiences rather than integrated. The problem with keeping your various channels separate, however, is that every challenge and development in one area of your campaign has implications across the other channels. It is important to learn how to bring the groups together. This past year has also been big with the various algorithm updates, particularly the mobile update. Some of our web properties had not been mobile-optimized and we really had to get on the ball and make sure they were ready. I think that experience was shared by people across the marketing world. It is important to always be looking ahead and staying abreast of the latest developments to try and stay in front of the changes.

The Need to Experiment with Content and SEO

BE: What would you recommend to people looking to succeed in SEO?

DV: Always experiment. It sounds simple, but so many people get caught up in just doing the recommended updates and implementing the advice from the latest gurus. The reason why those thought leaders have obtained their position, however, is that they are always looking for new ways to improve their SEO-- they are experimenting. You also need to play around with different aspects of your content and see how your website and brand reach responds. You could find some great new broad insights or just learn new ways to implement techniques specifically for your brand.

It is always a pleasure to chat with Duy, and we look forward to continuing the conversation at Share15 in just a few weeks. If you have not registered to join us, sign up now!

Conference Details September 21-23 Westin St. Francis San Francisco, CA

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

This year Clay Stobaugh, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Wiley will be delivering a fascinating general session keynote on how Wiley has transformed their digital business. For those familiar with digital marketing thought leaders and influencers Brian Solis from Altimeter/Prophet, Lee Odden from Top Rank, Rob Garner (formerly i-crossing), Paul Roetzer from PR 20/20, Dan Siroker from Optimizely and Ann Handley from Marketing Profs all have books published with Wiley.

Wiley: Helping people and organizations to develop the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Wiley is a global provider of knowledge and knowledge-enabled services that improve outcomes in the areas of research, professional training and practice, and education. Through the Research segment, the Company provides scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journals, magazines, databases and websites. The Talent Solutions & Education Services segment provides services, technology, insights and content that support learners and institutional partners in business and higher education to improve effectiveness by developing knowledge and skills. In Knowledge and Learning, higher education institutions, faculty and students benefit from Wiley’s print and digital content, online program management services and course management tools.

As Chief Marketing Officer at Wiley, Clay Stobaugh is responsible for the company’s marketing, communications and government affairs efforts worldwide. He leads Wiley’s revenue-driving marketing initiatives through key disciplines in the global “Marketing Revenue Center” including customer experience, demand generation, CRM, sales enablement, social media, content marketing, digital commerce, digital analytics and SEO/SEM.

Clay is focused on developing customer relationships and driving new revenue opportunities, he is helping to lead Wiley’s transformation from a traditional book publisher to a global provider of digital content and content enabled solutions. Last week BrightEdge had the privilege of meeting with Clay to talk through the Wiley digital marketing transformation. Below are a few extracts and insights from our conversation.

A brief history of change at Wiley

BrightEdge (BE): Please tell us a little about the history and the transformation at Wiley

Clay Stobaugh (CS): Wiley operates in three closely connected fields – higher education; professional development and lifelong learning; and scholarly research. In higher education many people still think that we’re simply a book publisher. That perception is changing as Wiley is actually helping people to learn online. In higher education we have witnessed a transformation from traditional textbooks to adaptive online learning environments. If I take a business or accounting class using WileyPlus, for example, the platform will not just provide me the digital book content, but it will also offer assignments, tutorials and study aids that help me understand the material better, as well as the social capability to interact anywhere at any time virtually with the instructor and other students taking the course.

In our Talent Solutions and Education Services business, Wiley is investing in technology that will help a corporation skill-test people to ensure that they’re ready for the job. We also provide certification and online learning solutions such as Cross Knowledge so employees can continue to grow and learn once they have the job. Finally, in our Research business, Wiley works with authors, societies and librarians to publish research that has an impact on our day-to-day lives. Here we are seeing some great changes in how information is used and shared, and as the needs of the research community continually transform, Wiley invests in tools and technology that supports these changes. What makes Wiley unique is that through each of these fields, we support all the elements of the knowledge economy – from education, to job skills, and research and innovation.

Digital transformation at Wiley – mind-sets, skillsets, and toolsets

BE: How do you view the role of the modern day digital marketer at Wiley?

CS: If you think about modern marketers there are three things we talk about - mindset, skill set and tool set. You are not a modern marketer if you have the mindset, but not the skills or tools. As management, it is our job to provide the tools, but they are expensive and complex, so we are responsible for training and creating organizational structure around those tools. As a marketer, I look at the digital tools and platforms that will give us the ability to measure and derive performance. We can then choose the tools that best drive revenue and have a place at the executive table.

Transformation, training,and certification

BE: How did you go about transforming Wiley to a digital organization?

CS: I work very closely with Dan Mooney (who is going to share more insights on this at Share15), and the digital and SEO team, in our marketing revenue center and we’ve been working on centralizing our efforts for SEO. Search and content are pivotal to digital transformation success. BrightEdge is our trusted enterprise Content and SEO platform, and we have mirrored the excellent BrightEdge training and certification program to establish a certification for content and SEO within Wiley. There are three levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced).

Basically, we are making it easier for people to understand content and SEO — we have over 340 of our colleagues around the globe enrolled in our SEO certification. Bottom-up we have certifications and top-down we have SEO scorecards that evaluate the ‘SEO health’ of our businesses. It helps people to understand the importance of content and SEO and then how to act on that. The skill development and roll out of BrightEdge training and certification has been key. As with other marketing channels and disciplines we’re making this a part of our culture to be modern marketers.

Measurement and success

BE: How do you approach measurement and results of content success?

CS: We are currently building out our CRM and our measurement capabilities, but we need that holistic single customer view of what we are doing. But before that is beneficial we need to make sure our employees know how to use/are trained on the sales and social and CRM tools and BrightEdge content and SEO platform. This mindset of delivering the skills and ultimately holding people accountable by measuring results is important.

BE: How does BrightEdge help you with this digital transformation?

CS: With BrightEdge the ability to identify content and SEO areas where we can improve and then show the transformation of that work has a high-value impact.

The BrightEdge platform enables us to identify problems most people didn’t know existed.

Removing silos in the organization

BE: What is your approach towards digital collaboration?

CS: We have created an internal customer engagement framework. This is an 8-step process that goes through all the steps of modern marketing best practices. It starts with research to identify personas and customer journey maps and determine the correct KPIs. We then use these insights to drive our content strategy. Throughout the process, we measure and optimize.

BrightEdge’s Data Cube has been an incredibly valuable tool for researching and measuring our content strategy.

With this framework marketers are equipped to evolve into modern marketers and they are not siloed into a single business department. I will be sharing much more on this and a framework for modern-day marketing success at Share15. To hear Clay speak register for Share15 before tickets sell out fast. 

End Note: digital thought leaders - further reading

For those who like to read we highly recommend looking through the list of Wiley authors and the wealth of digital content and information. 

A BrightEdger

M Posted 11 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

Content Performance Marketing, the sharing of insights and the elevation of personal and professional performance, is central to the Share15 theme this year. Over 60 global brand speakers and 1000 digital, content, and search marketers come together on September 21 – 23 in the heart of San Francisco. As the search, content and digital marketing ecosystems continue to evolve in synergy Erin Everhart, Lead Manager for Digital Marketing - SEO, from Home Depot states:

“Because we consume content in different mediums and because we use so many different media types based on our time of day, device, search query, and maybe even our mood, companies can’t exist on only one channel.”

About Erin Everhart and Home Depot

Erin is speaking on the content marketing track at Share15 on the Demand for Content: People, Personas & Intent session alongside Michael Mothner, CEO of Wpromote and Jesse Farley from Cabela’s. Erin leads the content marketing team in the digital marketing and SEO department at Home Depot. Her primary focus is content optimization and marketing; better leveraging different channels for both onsite and offsite initiatives to increase .com traffic and demand.

Below, Erin shares further insights into how the search landscape has evolved and how the shift from keyword to page performance strategies signify the marriage of search and content performance marketing.

SEO is a different ballgame

BrightEdge (BE): In your opinion, just how much has SEO evolved in recent years?

Erin Everhart (EE): It’s curious, actually, and something I’ve been thinking about more and more as search continues to evolve. You can ask almost anyone and they’ll agree that SEO is a totally different ballgame, if not a completely different sport, today than what it was 10, even 5 years ago. The tactics used today are completely different. I think a large part of that change is attributed to Google. It is becoming much more sophisticated at being able to spot the sites that aim to manipulate their algorithm. Search Engine Watch did a really great write-up of the history of Matt Cutts’ (and by transitive property, Google’s) stance on SEO. Points that were made in the early 2000s are the same things being said now, albeit replacing PageRank with Domain Authority. For example:

• 2002 - “ranking individual pages based on the number and the importance of the pages linked to them.”
• 2002 – “stay away from hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, sneaky redirects, lots of duplicate content on different domains and doorway pages.”
• 2003 – He was one of the inventors on Google’s patent that said it adjusted rankings based on how often a page is clicked, if the page had newer content, traffic and link weight.
• 2004 – “Thematic incoming links from authority sites carry more weight than on-page optimization.”

The point being that maybe SEO hasn’t really changed all that much in the past 10 years; Google has just gotten better at spotting the spam, forcing the old black hat SEOs to legitimize their tactics.

Page performance strategies are a new priority

BE: How important is page performance compared to keyword strategies in a Secure Search World?

EE: Just using keyword strategies doesn’t work too well because they’re often far too granular and really only encompass a small sliver of the landscape. Just think about the number of keywords out there and then the number of keyword variations out there that people use. One keyword is not indicative into how all of your users come to your site; it’s a fraction of a fraction of your potential customer base. Page performance strategies allow you to have a good viewpoint of both how people are getting to your site and what they’re doing once they get there, which ultimately you need both if you’re going to make a successful website. Just as you want your keyword to match your pages content, you also need to match up the intent of both the query and the page itself. Think - What’s the purpose? Transactional? Informational? Inspiration? Ranking a transactional page for an informational keyword is only going to bring you high bounce rates and annoyed users, who have already exited your site and found what they’re looking for on one of your competitors.

Content and SEO – “one cohesive bubble”

BE: What is your viewpoint and subsequent approach to leveraging SEO and content together?

EE: You have to view content and SEO in one cohesive bubble. Search can, and should, be helping drive what content you produce; content can, and should, be one of the key entry points for your users that helps move them through the buying journey. Content comes from a lot of different places, and there’s probably not one person in your organization who owns all the content. So, not only do you need to have writers embedded directly on your SEO team and everyone on your SEO team should have a content-first mentality, but you (as the SEO) need to ingrain yourself within the other teams who produce content. For example, social media, PR, email and web teams. Those will be some of the best relationships you can manage, making sure they understand how their actions impact SEO but more importantly, how you (as the SEO) can make their job easier and help them achieve their KPIs more efficiently.

Converged media – multi-channel marking versus omni-channel strategy

BE: What role does digital play in the convergence of media, search and content strategies?

EE: I don’t really view it as a convergence because I don’t think digital marketing can or could have ever existed without some form of content. They’re not interchangeable terms — content is used in digital marketing; digital marketing distributes the content — but there wasn’t a time when we marketed without content. That’s all marketing, not just digital. Content consumption has grown massively just by the sheer number of ways we, as users, can access it, but that content has to be distributed somehow. Because we consume content in different mediums and because we use so many different media types based on our time of day, device, search query, and maybe even our mood, companies can’t exist on only one channel. However, it’s not enough to just be active across all channels; that is a multi-channel marketing strategy. You have to make sure your messaging is aligned across all channels, and more importantly, they’re all working together to achieve the common business goal; that’s an omni-channel strategy.

“If multi-channel is each medium having its own swim line, omni-channel is one giant pool party."

How to take advantage of the Share15 networking opportunity

BE: What advice can you give share attendees in order for them to make the most out of their Share15 experience?

EE: Take advantage of every networking opportunity given to you at Share15, even if that’s coffee or a quick lunch. At Share15, you never know whom you’re going to meet and having that strong network of leading industry peers to bounce ideas off of is critical in this industry.

Join Erin and your digital marketing peers at Share15 and become part of the industry leading digital marketing community run by digital marketers for digital marketers.

Early bird pricing closes on July 31, so we would strongly advise you to sign up and take advantage of this rate.

Capacity is limited. Register here.