Go Google yourself - I dare you

Remove personal filtering by using an incognito window in chrome

• Don’t have chrome - get it here.
• Don’t know about incognito browsing – read here.

Put your name and / or your business name into the URL bar and see what you look like to the rest of the world.

This is important

This search is only performed by people who already know your name!

Think of that – these are people who have already experienced you enough to remember your name and who are now actively looking for information about you.

These people are your best potential customers.

How do you look?

• Does your photo appear on the search page?
• Are you near the top of the search page?
• Does extra information about your business appear in the search results?
• Does the first result in search take the potential customer to a good landing page?

You can have all of this – if you're prepared to do the work.

Want to talk about it?

If you’d like to discuss the results, reply to this email and book a session – first 30 minutes is free.

WTF is the Semantic Web? (NB: it’s great for local!)

I can almost hear you thinking “Shit – what now - another thing I don’t have time to learn about!” but trust me – this is a good one!

Language

HTML – hyper text markup language – is what the techies add to your content to make it look right on the internet. Search engines evaluate on-page HTML to deliver results, however (and this is a big however) search engines are clueless as to what any of the content wrapped inside HTML means.

Search Sucks

OK – compared to 1995, search is pretty awesome, but if you think about the search process, entering a few words into a box and receiving a list of results, most of which are completely irrelevant, it isn’t the most efficient.

Sure it’s getting better with the rise of mobile and the growing importance of local, but wouldn’t it be better if the machine actually understood what you were looking for?

Web 3.0 / The Semantic Web

The next stage of markup language is to tell the machine what is inside the markup tags.

Instead of having:

Simply Friday - A content consulting company in Los Angeles

Which to the search engines looks like this:

<p><em>Simply Friday</em> - A content consulting company in Los Angeles</p>

You could have:

Simply Friday - A content consulting company in Los Angeles

Which to the search engine looks like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness"><p><span itemprop="name"><em>Simply Friday</em></span> - <span itemprop="description">A content consulting company in Los Angeles.</span></p>

Did you spot the difference?

Both versions look exactly the same to the human reader – but to the search engine – the second version is way, waaaaay, more informative.

Here we’ve used a scheme to actually tell the machine what kind of content is wrapped inside these tags – it knows that Simply Friday is actually the name of a local business and that it is a content consulting company in Los Angeles.

Skynet here we come

If you’d like to contribute to the acceleration of humanity’s demise and get your contact page optimized for local, reply to this email and book a session.

Overcoming overconfidence with analytics

Trusting your gut-feel is all well and good when it comes to finding a romantic partner, a hiking trail or even a cupcake – but when it comes to your business – you might want to be a little more circumspect.

Feeling cocky?

Alongside your “gut-feel” sits the well establishedoverconfidence effect; in essence it states that human beings are notoriously bad at estimating the efficacy of their own judgments; to quote:

Overconfidence has been called the most “pervasive and potentially catastrophic” of all the cognitive biases to which human beings fall victim. It has been blamed for lawsuits, strikes, wars, and stock market bubbles and crashes.

Data to the rescue

The nice thing about an online business is that you don’t need to rely on your gut feel at all. If I built your website you have Google analytics installed and you should be receiving a PDF every Monday that shows you what happened on the site the previous week.

Over the last year or so Google have dramatically revamped the analytics tool and while yes, they made it horribly complex, there are some amazing tools that will make understanding what’s happening to your business easier.

Dashboards

Instead of receiving the default analytics report, Google Dashboards allow you to set up weekly, even daily reports that track exactly what you need to know: goals, keywords, landing pages, pretty much anything you want. Below is an image of a top level dashboard report – click on it to see a larger version.

If you’re serious about driving value from your website and would like to improve your management reporting, reply to this email and book a session.

Do something nice for someone

Go find a blog post that someone else has written, a post that you really enjoyed - and interact with it: comment on it, share it across your networks, hell maybe even blog about it; do something that if it was reciprocated, you’d be stoked.

You are reading other blogs, aren’t you?

Seriously, if you can’t immediately think of a post or a website that you’d go to – you’re doing it wrong.

Content strategy is as much about listening as it is creating and publishing. Not only does listening increase your breadth of knowledge and give you a wider range of topics to write about, it identifies like minded people, people who are likely to enjoy and share your content too!

“But I don’t have time!”

Bullshit. There’s always enough time – it’s all in the planning and the tools you use. You can keep track of 50 even 100 blogs a day in less than 15 minutes if you know how to set up the information flow.

Learn how to use RSS

It is not complicated, it’s just like email and you can sync your workstation and your mobile device. Here’s a 3 minute video that explains it beautifully:

http://www.commoncraft.com/video/rss

If you’d like to learn how to set it up efficiently and not get swamped in the information flow, reply to this email and book a session.

The best content I've read all year...

I have a client whose traffic is up over 180% year on year; he invested in writing resource, developed a newsletter, an outreach plan and in the last 12 months saw an additional 12,000 people visit the website.

His latest blog post has nothing to do with the business, but is perhaps the most beautiful piece of content I’ve read all year. While polishing a newly acquired pine dresser, the owner found a folded up piece of paper tucked behind one of the drawers – it turned out to be a love letter, written many years ago:

Jean,
I appreciate so much about you.
Your beauty. Your ability at the piano.
Your determination to grow through expressing the anger, pain and fear.
Your obvious accomplishment at creating a home out of a fixer-upper.
Your joy at nature. Your spirituality. Your inquisitiveness. Your caring.
Your care taking with me. Your willingness to do loving things for me.
Your smile. Your laughter. Your singing. Your voice in talking to me.
The affect on me when you say I love you.
Your love for me. Your love of your children.
Your gentle touch. Your kisses. Your caresses.
Your sharing with me your emotions. Your showing me your vulnerable sides.
Your warmth.
Your presence at my side. At all times, in bed, at meals, in public.
Your willingness to tackle hard work. Your planning a future with me. Your acceptance of me.
Your willingness to be exposed to new things, e.g. hiking and sailing.
Your feeling when reading Anorus Sileasius.
Your honesty with me.
Your views on things that are different from mine that give me a new perspective.
Your openness to the possibilities of life.
Your warmth with people that I see in record on class.
Your concerns for animals. Your awe at the universe.
Your enjoyment of the dock critters. Your enjoyment of beach walks. Your enjoyment of sunrises and sunsets.
Your love of beautiful flowers. Your love of growing things.
Your listening to my feelings. Your listening to my music.
Your maturity. Your childlike responses. Your songs of fairness.
Your body that is perfect in every way as it is yours and there is no aspect of it I don’t enjoy.
Your sleepy little girl aspect in the morning. Your snuggly feeling next to me.
I love you for all this and more.
ReedHere’s the link to the post if you’d like to share it with someone you love.

The point

Without having invested in a content strategy, without having done the work of writing and building an audience, they wouldn’t have any one to publish this to. It’s the work you do at the beginning, when no one is looking or reading, that sets you up to take advantage of beautiful opportunities like this.

If you’d like to get up and running, reply to this email and book a session.

Images – where to source them – for free

If you just want the tool here it is:

http://search.creativecommons.org/

But do remember to follow the conditions of the license!

Why use of imagery is changing

The arrival of the smart phone has meant that people are taking more photos than ever before; the thing is, with so much imagery out there – human beings are developing new filters and new expectations.

Images are design

In the same way that your website can no longer look cheap and amateurish, the imagery you use has to be compelling. A standard stock image is now likely to detract from your message rather than add to it.

Do it yourself

The creative commons gives you access to some of the most interesting imagery on the planet but it’s still only around 3% of the total image pool and search still sucks.

The most reliable way to source images for your business is to do it yourself; you’ve got a bloody good camera in that phone of yours – I’d suggest you start using it.

How?

Don’t expect to become the next Alfred Eisenstaedt straight away, but get into the habit of regularly taking photos: of your home, your car, your kids, your dogs, even your food. Work out how to use your phone’s editing tools, how to crop, how to tweak for color, etc. These take 30 seconds to learn and will dramatically improve your results.

I promise you – if you put a little bit of time into this – even just 2 minutes a day - within a couple of months you’ll be able to produce your own imagery for your business. Think how much time and effort that will save you in the long run.

If you want a hand getting started – reply to this email and book a session.