4/10 You're an expert, aren't you?

The Opportunity

Want to make an expert feel good?  Ask them to talk about their subject matter:  “Explain to me why my case is going to take so long”, “Why does immigration work like that?”, “What makes this strategy better than that?”

I’m betting you could talk for hours about the career you’ve chosen to spend your life on.

Keywords are for Cornerstones

Your clients aren’t experts - they don’t know the language to describe what they really need - that’s why cornerstone pages are architected so you can connect with your audience using the words they use.

Cluster pages are where you answer the questions your clients don’t even know they had.  Sure, some of this information will be on the cornerstone page - but when you want to explain a specific use case or speak to a particular customer type - a dedicated page makes more sense.

People appreciate this approach and machines do too! Seeing a cornerstone page surrounded by smaller supporting pages, all addressing different aspects of your business, helps build your topical authority.

Get In Touch

So that’s pretty much your content production strategy: know what’s out there, build cornerstone pages, then add additional pages from your expertise. Want to see how that could look for your business? Reply to this email and let's chat.

Featured Playlist

11 Great Tracks For Zombie Fest ’23
Who needs brains when you've got beats this good!
Featuring artists like: • The Flaming Lips • The All Seeing I • The Hooters • Falling In Reverse • Terje Rypdal • Harley Poe • The Cranberries • The Cure • Misfits • The Black Dahlia Murder • Trash Talk
Made by musicto community members

Next Week: Media Diversification - you mean I can’t just write it?!

3/10 Cornerstone Pages - How Are They Made?

The Opportunity

Searchers are now being served cornerstone pages - evergreen content that, once written, stays relevant pretty much forever (though they’ll need to be tended to once in a while).

Everyone Rejoice!

Architecting a cornerstone page is ridiculously complex. We were going to share a 7 minute video showing you our process but, who has the time.  I’m not saying you couldn’t learn how to do it. I’m saying unless your business is SEO, there’s no point in learning how to do it.

Digital Marketing Is No Longer DIY

The promise of the old playbook was that you could do it yourself, trading time against the cost of outsourcing - those days are over.  If you want to compete for your audience you will need expert help.

If you’ve given up on content marketing, or if you never started because you didn’t have the time, this new world works in your favor.  Correctly architected pages enable you to connect with your audience without you spending hours every week writing and publishing and sharing etc.

Get In Touch

If you’d like to chat about what this means for your business, reply to this email and book a session.

Featured Playlist

Educating Matt, Semester 1: Funk X Metal 101
2 Different Matts + 2 Completely Different Styles of Music x 1 Playlist = Genre Education
Featuring artists like: • Animals As Leaders • Willie West • FEVER 333 • George Clinton • Loathe • The Meters • Protest The Hero
Made with musicto community member Matt McCalpin

Next Week: Content Clusters - tasty snacks? - for your customers, yes

2/10 Cornerstone Content - You Vs.Machine

The Opportunity

Cornerstone pages help people find the answers they need. Search engines favor pages with the most complete information so they tend to be pretty big, typically thousands of words. These pages are hard to produce - they require expertise, experience, and time.  As a result, many businesses don’t have such pages.

AI can summarize information on a topic and, with some basic SEO prompts, create something that looks like a cornerstone page. If the competition isn’t very strong, that’s what Google is going to serve to your customers.

Creating your own cornerstones, with the expertise gained from actually doing the work rather than scraping it from websites, gives you an opportunity to position yourself as the go-to authority in your industry.

You've Gotta Speak Human & Machine

While your content has to feel good to humans, it still has to make sense to the algorithm. In order to be recognized as legitimate, your content will need to share similar architecture - words, phrases, headers - as the current top performing page.

Once you know how to architect the page, you can bring in the experience and expertise that makes you more compelling than your competition and in doing so, better than the AI.

Get In Touch

Wondering what your cornerstone content could be? Reply to this email and book a session.

Featured Playlist

The Latin Side
The Latin they didn't teach you at school!
Featuring artists like: • Stan Getz • João Gilberto • Scalene • Pérez Prado • Tulipa Ruiz • tulengua • Ana Tijoux • Paquito D'Rivera • Camaron De La Isla
Made with Simply Friday client Roberto Chavez

Next Week: Creating Cornerstones - scary for you - fun for us.

1/10 Where To Start In The Digital Jungle?

The Opportunity

Everybody reading this knows of a competitor who is lame at what they do but seemingly good at marketing - whose digital moat seems unsurpassable.  The good news is that search companies also know this and are trying to fix it.

If you can convey how great you are at what you do - there’s never been a better time to be in business. If you don’t think you’re better than your competition, this series is not for you.

See The Forest For The Trees

When you see the big picture, everything changes. Knowing what websites are taking your customers - informs strategy. Knowing what they're saying and how they're saying it - informs tactics. Knowing where the low hanging fruit is in your digital jungle - informs where to start.

When you know how the competition are speaking to your customers, you’re able to enter the conversation and demonstrate how you can better meet their needs.

Get In Touch

vivaellipsis creates digital maps that deliver immediate insights, strategy and tactics for business owners that want to be found online.

If you’d like to learn more, you know the drill, reply to this email and let’s book a session.

Featured Playlist

Songs to Bond With Your Boss
A trip down Gen-X memory lane.
Featuring artists like: • Joni Mitchell • Nanci Griffith • 10,000 Maniacs • The Tragically Hip • Oingo Boingo • Billy Joel • Howard Jones • R.E.M. • Joe Jackson
Made with vivaellipsis client Liane Davey

Next Week: Cornerstone Content - what it is and why it’s important.

It's Been Years, What Have you Been Up To?

Here's what I've been doing...

Building musicto

musicto is a creator community spanning 38 countries, it generates thousands of cross cultural collaborations resulting in the mentoring and development of people across the globe.

It started with a clear content strategy built around consistent publishing, social media distribution and the leveraging of community generated content.

musicto.com averages 2.5 million search impressions every quarter, with over 25,000 people clicking through to the site - 80% of traffic is organic and total ad spend was $0.

vivaellipsis - Next Level Digital Agency

I met Matt through musicto in 2017, super bright with an analytical mind and a deep understanding of human behavior, we’ve worked together to develop his agency. While I still consult as Simply Friday, agency work is now handled by Matt's talented team of keyword researchers, AI prompt engineers, writers, designers and analysts.

Clients include law firms, thought leaders, influencers, publishers, and artists. Services range from full white glove management of a business’ digital strategy to modular products such as content production or social platform management.

10 Emails to Help You

Artificial Intelligence, changes in technical requirements and algorithm tweaks have had a fundamental impact on SEO. While digital marketing is more technical and complex than ever - there are huge opportunities for businesses if you know what you’re doing.

We’re taking what we’ve learned about being found online in 2023 and condensing it into a series of 10 emails.

1. Digital Positioning - know thyself (and thy competition).

2. Cornerstone Content - what it is and why it’s important.

3. Creating Cornerstones - this gets scary.

4. Content Clusters - sounds like a tasty snack - they aren't.

5. Media Diversification - you mean I can’t just write it?!

6. Social Media - doing it right or not at all.

7. Dashboards - GA4 - need I say more? Yes.

8. Kaizen for Content - stay still - you lose.

9. Email - automation is your friend.

10. AI - should you dance with the devil?

The emails are super short and hopefully entertaining. You’ll come away with a better grasp of the topic and a direction to go in should you have the resource to adopt the strategy.

Enough About Me :-)

What have you been up to?  I'd love to have a chat, find out how business is going and maybe see where we can help you.  You know the drill - reply to this email and we'll get a time in the calendar.

Featured Playlist

Conquering Worlds
Hybrid Orchestral Adrenaline to get you going. 
Featuring artists like: • Olexandr Ignatov • Two Steps from Hell • Kevin Rix • David Chappell • Really Slow Motion • Leonard Bernstein • Dmitry Ustinov • Geoff Love & His Orchestra

The Machines Are Coming

Lots of things in the press recently about machines beating humans, predicting sports and even running for President.  The future is most definitely here and it’s going to have an impact on your marketing strategy.

Right now it’s reckoned there are 1500 stories that could appear in your news feed every time you log into Facebook. 

The primary limiter of that number is quality.

Human Curation

Tools like quuu.co offer the promise of human curation.  Creators pay a fee to submit their content which is vetted by humans for quality.  Fee paying publishers can then have that vetted content sent to their social feeds.

Which sounds great until you find that maybe you don’t agree with the curators, and you end up spending time vetting content you've already paid for.

Arms Race

Of course, the promise of AI content curation is that unlike humans, machines are going to learn faster, not sleep, and they’re going to cost a hell of a lot less.

Which if you extrapolate out means that in the not too distant future, anybody with a digital footprint can pump out huge amounts of super relevant content and the amount of information is going to skyrocket.

That Facebook figure of 1500 is going to look remarkably quaint in a few years time.

What to Do?

It’s time to forgo the false dichotomy of quality and quantity in the content marketing world.  

The only thing we can do as business owners is double down on our unique, personal experiences so that when a prospect does finally see us, we appear radically more competent than our competition.

Publish less, publish better, publish human.

Written while listening to: Bargaining VI - 137 Bpm by musicto

Image Credit: GOOGLE MAN (Alpha Man) 2013 by Christopher Dombres on Flickr