The Twitter ad platform has the most laser-precise targeting out of all of the paid social options out there. You can put a promoted tweet in front of the exact 1000 people that you want to see it provided you have a tailored list. This guide will show you how to build, optimize and upload your first Twitter tailored audience into their ad manager.

• What is a Tailored Audience?
• Creating your Tailored Audience from Lists Using Followerwonk
• Cleaning and Sorting Your Tailored Audience in Excel
• Uploading Your First List to Twitter Ads Manager
• How to Set Up Your Twitter Universal Website Tag for Retargeting

What is a Tailored Audience?

A tailored audience is a specific list of Twitter usernames, email addresses, recent website visitors, or mobile app users. Your audience lists files will be saved in either of the supported file formats—.csv or .txt.

Three ways to use Tailored Audiences

Lists

You can use lists to target specific users (existing customers or relevant influencers). This is accomplished by uploading a custom list of either email addresses or Twitter usernames (@handles).

Web

You’re able to target recent visitors to your website. You collect this data either by using Twitter’s website tag (available through Twitter Ads) or by using Twitter’s Official Partner Program.
Here’s a list of partner software platforms that you can integrate into your Twitter ad campaigns.

Mobile apps

You can reach groups of people who have taken specific actions in your app, such as an install or sign up. You can collect data on who uses your mobile app with conversion tracking.

Creating your Tailored Audience from Lists Using Followerwonk

We’re going to focus on building tailored audiences from lists for the purpose of this guide. You might already have decent sources by pulling from your mailing lists, past customers, or potential customers who have shown intent.

You can upload lists of:

• email addresses
• mobile phone numbers
• Mobile Advertising IDs (iOS Advertising Identifiers and Google Advertising IDs or when not available Android IDs)
• Twitter @handles
• Twitter user IDs.

We’ll build and refine a tailored audience using Followerwonk.

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tool that allows us to:

• Search Twitter bios and profiles.
• Search using keywords, locations, names, and URLs.
• Compare multiple Twitter bios by users they follow and their followers.
• Analyze a specific Twitter handle by their followers and the users they follow.
• Track changes in follows and followers for your—or your competitor’s—Twitter account for up to 120 days.
• Sort the follows and followers of any Twitter account by tweets, following, followers, account age, and Social Authority.

I’m building a tailored audience specifically to market my How to Perform a Competitive Analysis in 2018 post via a promoted tweet.

Once I’ve logged into Followerwonk, I’m going to click the ‘Compare Users‘ tab at the top.

First I want to see how many people follow both SEMrush and Ahrefs on Twitter. I choose ‘Compare their followers’ to perform the analysis.

SEMrush has more than three times the followers (76,293 > 23,190) as Ahrefs but an impressive 15,069 people follow both accounts on Twitter.

I download the ‘Followers of both’ report as a CSV file.

You can compare users for up to three different accounts – so the possibilities are near infinite. At the ‘Target‘ paid tier for Followerwonk—$29/month—you can perform 40 analyses per day and download up to 12 reports. More than enough to get started.

I was looking to put my post in front of content marketers who also have a vested interest in SEO. So I tried more combinations.

I ended up comparing followers of Moz, Content Marketing Institute and SEMrush. We arrive at 17,397 Twitter usernames. More than enough to build a tailored audience. Export the list as a CSV. The $29 / month tier will only let you download the first 10,000 Twitter handles, so you can do a bit of sorting in Followerwonk before continuing in Excel or Google Sheets.

Cleaning and Sorting Your Audience List in Excel

We’ll continue on and use the CSV file of the overlapping 10,000 Twitter usernames who follow SEMrush, Content Marketing Institute and Moz.

Delete the unnecessary columns

I like to keep things simple and work with four columns – which means I need to do a lot of deleting.

• Delete Columns B, C, E & F [Full name], [Location], [Friends], & [Created].
• You can now safely delete columns E through L if you only have a list in the 10,000 follower range.
• You’ve now removed [Bio], [URL], [% tweets w/ URLs], [% retweets in timeline], [% tweets w @contacts], [% tweets w @contacts], & [Social Authority].

Freeze the top row

View > Freeze Panes > Freeze Top Row

If you have a Multitask tier subscription to Followerwonk then you can start sorting by some of the other more granular columns. But for our purposes, we’re using a ‘Target‘ account which maxes out at 10,000 Twitter user accounts per report.

Filter out all accounts that haven’t Tweeted in the past 4 weeks.

• In Column D [Last tweet]
• Data > Filter >Date Filters > After.

I performed this task on July 19th, 2018 – so I filtered out all tweets from before June 21st.

This left me with 6457 user handles which are more than enough to get going.

Change the case of all the usernames to lowercase

First, insert a temporary column next to the column that contains the text you want to convert. In this case, we’ve added a new column (B) to the right of the Screen name column.

In cell B2, type “=LOWER(A2)”, then press Enter.

Now, fill down the formula in the new column. The quickest way to do this is by selecting cell B2, and then double-clicking the small black square that appears in the lower-right corner of the cell.

The entire column will then populate with the lowercase results.

At this point, the values in the new column (B) should be selected. Press CTRL+C to copy them to the Clipboard.

Right-click cell A2, click Paste and then click Values. This step enables you to paste just the names and not the underlying formulas, which you don’t need to keep.

You can then delete column (B) since it is no longer needed.

Trim leading and trailing spaces for the entire column. Here’s an excellent post on How to Remove Leading and Trailing Spaces in an Entire Column in Excel & Google Docs.

1. Create your file in either of the supported file formats—.csv and .txt. The maximum file size is 5 GB. Separated your list by new lines or commas.
2. If you wish to pre-hash your file (which is optional), following these formatting instructions. I don’t bother with pre-hashing and let Twitter handle this step.
3. For Twitter usernames, do not include the @, make sure the text is in lowercase with leading and trailing spaces trimmed. (For example: nick_offerman)

Uploading Your First List to Twitter Ads Manager

Go to Twitter Business and click on ‘Start a Campaign‘ in the upper right corner.

If on the next screen you do not see menu items in the upper right [Campaigns], [Creatives], [Analytics], and [Tools] – then you will need to add a payment method.

After entering a credit card number you should have access to the ‘Tools‘ drop-down.

Click on Tools > Audience manager

When the next window opens click on the ‘Create new audience‘ button.

Select ‘Upload your own list‘.

Enter All of Your Details on the Create New List Audience Page

1. Name your audience
2. Audience rules: Specify the type of data in your file. In our case, we’re building a ‘Twitter usernames’ list so check that box.
3. Upload your data file. For this example, I’ve uploaded the .txt file that I created in Notepad.
4. If you haven’t hashed your file then you need to leave the box next to ‘The records in this data file are already normalized and hashed using SHA256.’ UNCHECKED.
5. Agree to the terms and conditions.
6. Click create list audience.

Now prepare to wait a while. It’s going to take a few hours for Twitter to parse all of the usernames that you’ve just fed to the audience manager. Wait for it to upload. Don’t close or minimize the browser window while the file is uploading, and only upload one file at a time. For very large files, make sure that you have a good internet connection. Alternately, you could also break your upload into smaller files (and then target them together in campaigns).

“TBH the platform is just a nightmare to manage & lags in product… So many advertisers have abandoned it because the effort put in (+spend) didn’t produce a good enough return. (IMHO & from advertisers I’ve spoken with over the years)
I still looooove it, (so much potential) but the product needs to get better.” – Merry Morud

The ‘Twitter Audience Platform’ will remain as ‘Pending’ until it’s successfully—or unsuccessfully—uploaded.

Launching your first Twitter Ad With a Tailored Audience

Go to Twitter Business and click on ‘Start a Campaign‘ in the upper right corner.

In the upper right corner click on ‘Create campaign‘ and choose Website clicks or conversions from the drop-down. This will be your objective. By choosing this objective you’re only paying for the number of website link clicks.

You’ll be taken to the DETAILS screen.

1. Give your campaign a name.
2. Set a daily budget. Setting a total budget is optional.
3. Set your start and end times and click Next in the upper right corner once you’re done.

Choose your creatives

Click on ‘Creatives‘ in the upper menu and then choose ‘Tweets‘ from the drop-down.

A list of your tweets will appear in order of most recent. Select the tweet that you wish to promote.

Choose where your promoted Tweets appear

Ad placement locations

• Users Timelines: Promote Tweets into the home timeline of the specific group of people that you are targeting.
• Profiles and Tweet detail pages: Promote Tweets to users when they visit profiles and tweet detail pages on Twitter.
• Search results: Promote Tweets into the search results.

Also, check the box marked Expand your reach on the Twitter Audience Platform. The Twitter Audience Platform which consists of mobile applications and websites on the Twitter Network that may not be owned or operated by Twitter.

Select which category best describes your ad – in my case it was Marketing.

And finally, enter the domain name of the website used for this ad group.

Here are two examples of tweets that I ran promoted campaigns on.

How to Set Up Your Twitter Universal Website Tag for Retargeting

If you’re going to make Twitter a regular part of your paid promotion and retargeting arsenal you should definitely embed their universal website tag on your site. This will enable you to build audiences and retargeting pools based on where visitors are active on your site. You will also be able to create conversion events and monitor campaign ROI.

Go to Tools > Conversion tracking

Click on View code and installation instructions.

Installing your website tag

Copy or download the code snippet and place it at the bottom of all pages on your website before the </body> HTML tag. In my case, I’m using a Genesis theme so I embed the code via the Genesis Simple Hooks plugin.

Make sure your privacy policy is up to date. Twitter’s policy requires that your website provide sufficient legal notice about how you go about using third parties to collect traffic data.

At first your universal website tag status will show as UNVERIFIED.

Your website tag hasn’t sent any data from your website yet. Your tag will be verified the first time a person takes a conversion action on the web page where the tag is embedded.

This is what you want to see.

The post How to Build and Optimize a Tailored Audience for Twitter Ads Manager appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

The terms ‘epic content,’ skyscraper post, and ‘10x content‘ have been thrown around a lot over the past couple of years. And before that, it was ‘flagship content‘ and ‘cornerstone content.’ They all refer to long-form blog posts and articles.

Articles over 1,500-1,800 words are routinely referred to as long-form content. And in the era of snackable content—I hate that phrase btw—that’s a fair definition.

But what about content that truly goes above and beyond? And does word count have to be the benchmark by which epic content is judged?

I’ve been keeping a Google doc loaded with truly outstanding epic content published from 2017 onwards. Once the doc was bursting at the seams, I decided to reach out to some of the writers and editors to get them to break down their process for creating these long-form posts.

I’m truly grateful to Deanna, Joel, Paul, Abraham, and Niel for taking time out of their schedules to answer my questions.

Epic Content Examples

• 1⃣ Complete Oral History of Boutique Hotels | Deanna Ting
• 2⃣ How Customer-Driven Copy Helped HubSpot Increase Conversions by Nearly 100% | Joel Klettke
• 3⃣ Building a Lightroom PC | Paul Stamatiou
• 4⃣ The 100 Pages That Shaped Comics | Abraham Riesman [Editor]
• 5⃣ Ultimate Guide to Creating Original Research Content | Niel Malhotra
• 6⃣ Bettertopia – Panasonic | IC4DESIGN
• 7⃣ No Frills — #Hauler

Complete Oral History of Boutique Hotels | Deanna Ting

Deanna Ting is a writer, editor, photographer, and reporter based in New York City. She’s also the Senior Hospitality Editor at Skift, a media company that provides news, research, and marketing services for the travel industry. Imagine having to research, write and edit eight to 10 weekly news articles. How about taking on a second mammoth project that ends up becoming a 60,000-word piece on the four-decades-long history of boutique hotels?    

Deanna, of all of the pieces that I’m featuring – this is truly the most epic. It’s stood out in my mind ever since stumbling across it in the spring of ’17. Are you an avid fan of oral histories and did any of them serve as inspiration for this project?

I do love reading oral histories. One of my recent favorites is this oral history of what has to be one of my all-time favorite episodes of the U.S. version of The Office, from Rolling Stone.

When it came to putting this oral history together, however, I looked to an oral history that my colleague, Dennis Schaal, wrote in 2016, all about the history of online travel. It’s an incredible piece, and it gave me a framework for how I wanted to craft my own oral history of boutique hotels.

What did the timeline and process look like from idea to publication in March 2017?

Following the success of “The Definitive Oral History of Online Travel,” Skift CEO and founder Rafat Ali asked me and Greg Oates, who was then a senior editor at the time, to work together on crafting an oral history of the boutique hotel movement. Greg is now an editor for Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.

As soon as we were given this assignment, I immediately started sending out interview requests as early as June 2016, and from there, it was just a matter of talking to more and more people who would refer me to other people who’d prove to be crucial to the story.

I think I probably could’ve filed the story earlier if I didn’t also have to juggle my full-time job as a breaking news/analysis reporter on hospitality here at Skift, but the news cycle that year was particularly crazy because of so many big mergers taking place, namely the insanity of the Marriott-Starwood merger, which I covered extensively for Skift. I’m also the only reporter on staff who writes about hotels and Airbnb, so I’m on deadline 24/7.

It was also a challenge to get a hold of certain crucial players, namely Ian Schrager and Barry Sternlicht, both of whom are known for not giving many media interviews. For Barry, my only chance to talk to him was at the opening of his new 1 Hotel in Brooklyn, but right before I interviewed him, I had to file a breaking news story related to an Airbnb acquisition; it was a bit nuts, to say the least. And for Ian, I had to track him down at a hotel industry conference in Los Angeles. Funnily enough, however, I now communicate with Ian every now and then. He emails me his thoughts on my stories from time to time, which I so appreciate and value.

I learned so much during each of the interviews I did–and everyone I spoke to was so knowledgeable, and so many of the interviews were just, well, entertaining. I really tried my best to make sure that each interviewee’s voice was kept in the piece.

By February 2017, however, I felt like I’d gotten to the point where we had gotten all the interviews we needed, so it came time to put it all together. While this was originally supposed to be a joint project between me and Greg Oates, I wound up doing the majority of the interviews (Greg interviewed just 7 subjects). Greg was also unavailable to help with the writing of the oral history, so I decided to just write it by myself. And I wrote all of it in a single week.

You were dealing with a cast of 26 characters and 19 milestone dates on your timeline. What did you use to keep all of that organized?

We kept all the audio files and interview transcripts in Google Drive, but I wrote everything in a Word document on my own computer. I had an outline that I pieced together that I referred to, but to be honest, the writing of the piece is a bit of blur now. I just remember that because I had done the majority of the interviews myself, I think it made it easier for me to remember what each subject said, and helped me put the narrative together more quickly.

Another difficult part of this was trying to get photos and images, but somehow we managed to pull it together.

15-20 years ago, I could see a project like this getting released as a book via a small niche publisher. How did the ‘powers that be’ at Skift feel about the end product? Would your team attempt something this ambitious again?

I think they were very pleased with the end product but, if I’m being totally honest, it was also very clear that they did not invest nearly as much time marketing this oral history like they did for the oral history of online travel. I feel like it didn’t receive the promotion it deserved at the time, but I’m glad to know people are still finding it, reading it, and enjoying it. That’s been the most satisfying part about it.

I would definitely attempt something like this again, but only if I were granted a book deal at this point, or a very sizable bonus. Working on an oral history of this magnitude should be a full-time job unto its own!

Taking a quick look through your bio – travel, reporting, and writing is in your blood. Is there a book hiding within you (or your hard drive) that needs to get out?

There are plenty! I just wish I had more time to actually write them.

How Customer-Driven Copy Helped HubSpot Increase Conversions by Nearly 100% | Joel Klettke

Joel Klettke is a conversion copywriter that specializes in the SAAS and B2B fields. You can find him over at Business Casual Copywriting or at Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case study writing service that gives SaaS and B2Bs an easy way to capture and share customer success stories. He rarely has time for blogging these days – so it was a privilege to get to read both a 3,500-word article and to read about his process.

Joel, I know as well as anyone that a 3500-word post is a different beast than a 750-1500 word post. You’re taking the reader on a (14-minute) journey. How did your outline process work for this one? You’re not wireframing or bullet-pointing features and benefits – but you are hitting beats. Did you lay it out from beginning to end before writing the meat of the piece?

I like that you describe it as taking the reader on a journey — because a lot of companies treat blogging like trying to cram a word salad down a reader’s throat with a plunger.

To be honest, though — writing this post WAS very much the same for me, process-wise, as writing a smaller post.

Assuming I’ve already defined my topic, audience, and the big “so what?” of the piece, my writing always follows four stages:

Research.

• In this phase, I go out and collect all the information I need for a piece. It’s a brain dump where, in an unstructured and loose way, I collect as much information as I can.
• I don’t put limits or restraints on myself, and I’m not writing to be perfect at this stage. I take handwritten notes, and I fill pages up with ideas, references, and must-use points.

Outlining.

No matter how short the piece, the next step is to take another sweep through the research and start categorizing it:

+ What themes are emerging?

+ Which ideas or pieces of information fit together?

+ Which points support others?

Along the way, I’m actively cutting out information that’s nice, but not needed to support the piece.

Then, I take what I’ve grouped and flesh it out with a skeleton of a narrative: what does my audience need to understand, and in what order?

How can I naturally lead them from one idea to another?

Writing.

With the research complete and skeleton mapped, I write. I’ve never been good at the whole “horrible first draft” thing — I constantly hit backspace and try to refine as I go.

And finally,

Editing.

Just because I refine as I go, doesn’t mean the piece won’t need to be tuned up. Most of what I do during the editing phase is cutting things down.

Anything non-essential is eliminated. Anything that speaks over the audience’s understanding is toast. And anything that’s not compelling is quashed.

At that stage, I’m left with what I hope is a great piece.

This was as much a *looking back* article as it was a *this is how we did it* post. Did you have notes that you referred back to? Or was it a case of living and breathing it long enough that it stuck in the back of your mind?

Understand—this was the largest client I’d ever worked on, with the most exciting numbers I’d ever been allowed to publish.

When something looms that large for you, you don’t forget the details.

The process I was writing about is the same process I use, day in and day out, on every project I work on. It was FRESH in my mind because I live it out every single day. It’s what I do.

For me, this post wasn’t theory; I wasn’t just regurgitating research I’d picked up somewhere.

I had dozens of emails to reference from the project. I had Slack conversations. And, of course, I’m still connected to the people I worked on the project with, so they were there to ask questions of.

I don’t think anybody could write a process-based piece like this if they’ve never actually done it. The audience would smell it.

And that’s part of why so many process posts are trash: the people writing them haven’t actually done what they’re writing about.

You’ve previously worked in SEO agency life. And you now have years of copywriting experience under your belt. You’ve been exposed to thousands of mediocre blog posts. What did you set out to do differently with this particular post (and really any blog-type writing that you occasionally do)?

Can I take a second to address WHY there are thousands of mediocre blog posts?

It’s not because people are poor writers. It’s because businesses don’t care. They claim to love and value content, but most don’t.

Just spend five minutes on a job board where writers are hired, and look at the rates companies offer writers. 1,000-word articles for $5? Full websites for $500?

It has yet to dawn on most businesses that what they publish is who they are to their audience. The way you communicate is how you will be perceived.

Your writers are your spokespeople! But companies don’t care.

So you have these small armies of poorly-paid, ill-trained writers spewing out garbage en masse at insane speeds as they just try to keep food on the table.

You have SEO departments defining the content calendar based on keywords to target instead of audiences to engage. Does anybody else see how INSANE that is?!

Ah. That felt good.

Now, to your question: every time I sit down to write a blog post, I start with the “So what?”

• WHY should anyone read this?
• What will make this piece worth their time?
• What am I trying to leave them with once they close the browser?
• How will this piece be different or better than what’s already out there?

If you’ve ever listened to a terrible storyteller, you understand that the worst ones never know their own “So what?”

Once I’ve defined that, the next step is to get RUTHLESS about my opening paragraphs.

Too many blog posts open with the generic, “Such-and-such is an important trend in business” instead of grabbing their reader by the collar and giving them a shake. If your opening paragraph sucks, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your piece is, because it’s pretty unlikely anybody will see it.

In this piece, I extended a personal invitation to the reader: “If you want to make sure your new copy hits a conversion home run, keep reading.”

Who can say no to that? Nobody sane. And then, we were off to the races, and I let the narrative I’d defined spill out and tell itself in a nice, orderly fashion.

Hubspot publishes anywhere from 150-250 posts a month, yet your piece netted 1300 social shares and ~140 links. Did you do anything *extra* personally to push this post to the forefront? Did Hubspot?

I think this post was such a big deal because it dangled some pretty tantalizing numbers.

DOUBLE conversions for a juggernaut like HubSpot? That’s got mass appeal.

I pushed the piece heavily in my own networks across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and more. I shared it everywhere I could, and spoke about the work at conferences, referencing the piece there, too.

And because this was such an important “win” for me, family, friends, and followers all got on board and started passing it on, too.

To this day, I keep referencing it on podcasts when I’m interviewed. And it’s pinned at the top of my Twitter — until I get a bigger, better result for an equally awesome company.

Building a Lightroom PC | Paul Stamatiou

Paul Stamatiou is a designer for Twitter and lives in San Francisco. He writes extremely in-depth articles about technology and design over on his personal site. In this case – a 24,000-word guide on how he went about putting together a new computer system to edit his photos.

Paul, your post on building a Lightroom PC received well over 1000 shares between Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, and dozens of links. What was the most surprising reaction to the post?

Not too surprising but there were definitely quite a few folks that were shocked at the price of the whole setup. I didn’t build the PC as a guide for others (though I figured I might as well document it and talk about the importance of certain parts and my decision process so that others could make their own decisions if they built their own PC) so some parts were definitely expensive and tailored for my particular needs (and well, I didn’t really have a budget for the build). But I think that’s also what makes my posts do well — there always tends to be some element of going overboard in some way.

You mentioned the piece taking 4 months of weekends to complete. Any idea of how many hours this added up to?

Oof, I have no idea. It was a lot of work, that’s for sure. From researching and ordering the parts, setting it up and using it myself, and then running into issues or things I wanted to improve as I used the PC over some time.. not exactly the kind of thing you can just sit down and write all at once. But the photography for this one took quite a while. I wanted to do something a bit different, so I ordered a studio lighting kit (backdrop, 2 large flashes, et cetera) and learned how to use that for some shots. And I would go back and reshoot things a few times.

I counted just over 90 accompanying images for the Lightroom guide. How on earth do you organize that many images when you’re in draft mode? And speaking of draft mode – do you write in Google Docs?

I talked a bit about my writing process in the iPad post, but I usually start with some kind of outline that generally covers what I want to talk about for any post. Sometimes I can crank out a 1-page outline at a coffee shop in 20 minutes. Sometimes, it only comes to life as I have begun the project/build/whatever-the-post-is-about and am learning as I go. That outline may live in something like Google Keep or Bear notes app. Then I’ll start writing the post directly inside my blog’s Jekyll git repo with all the HTML markup (while Jekyll is primarily for Markdown posts, I prefer to write in HTML so I can use the custom tags I have for various heading styles and photosets).

The photos for the post are continually added as I write the article—sometimes I go back and add or edit photos that were earlier in the post several times. For the Lightroom PC post, I took in excess of 1,000 shots with my camera. Each time I would import the raws to Lightroom, then whittle them down to the few I’d like to keep for whatever I was focusing with that particular shoot. Sometimes I’ll realize I’m not particularly happy with one of the angles and will go back and shoot it again. When I’ve narrowed down the shots I’ll tweak some basic adjustments to get it to look how I want, then I’ll export the full-size JPGs. Then I run a script to resize them multiple times (my site will pick a photo size variant depending on the width of the browser or how many photos I show in a row to save bandwidth).

Then I run them through XnConvert to compress the JPGs. Then I use XnConvert to also create WebP images (which I try to load if supported by the viewer’s browser to save even more bandwidth and load faster). Finally, I’ll upload them to my AWS S3/CloudFront bucket, set the ACL permissions and cache header. To get the markup for use in the post, I have a Rake script I wrote that takes the directory of images and generates the markup for me. From there I just need to move things around to have the photos show up how I like in between paragraphs, et cetera. Needless to say, it’s a process.

Your most recent post ‘Made on an iPad Pro’ clocked in at a *reasonable* 10,000 words. Any plans to tackle another huge project?

Once I finish a post, I basically never immediately have a plan for the next post. I don’t treat it like I’m on the hook to write about something unless I find something really, really interesting to me. The process of writing in-depth about a subject also helps me learn about it as I have to find ways to describe these topics. My posts tend to be in the realm of interesting angles about some tech product that has woven itself into my daily life, an in-depth how-to guide for something I’m interested in, describing my process for how I do something or telling a visual story with my photosets.

Do you have a word count in mind when tackling each subject – or do you just wait to see where each piece lands?

I never have a count in mind, but I also never have a deadline in mind. When I feel like I’ve fully fleshed out my outline and covered everything I wanted to cover, then it’s ready.. and by that point, the posts tend to be a bit long. Oddly enough, I always start a post thinking it won’t be that long and I can describe things fairly succinctly.. then I keep coming up with things I want to cover or talk about as I go. But for the most part, being in-depth is my writing style. I don’t publish articles on my website often: not including my photosets, I publish maybe ~1.5 posts per year. I’ve been running my website for almost 13 years now. I started by frequently posting tech news snippets (sometimes up to 3x a day) and the occasional how-to guide or product review. But then I got older and had less free time to keep up with the frequent posting and also began to favor the type of content that no one else could write about exactly like how I had in mind, something right up my alley. So that’s how I’ve been approaching it for the last few years or so. I think this tweet sums it up best:

Stammy doesn't run a "blog" – he runs a really great personal magazine that only publishes when they have something good to write. https://t.co/AoECiVjTF3

— Eric Florenzano (@ericflo) June 12, 2018

The 100 Pages That Shaped Comics | Abraham Riesman [Editor]

Abraham Riesman is a staff writer at New York.  He’s previously done writing, video, and audio for The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, Vice, WNYC, NY1, The New York Sun, and WBAI. In April 2018, Vulture published a 32,000-word article chronicling the 100 most important single comic book pages. Riesman and Vulture editorial corralled 10 writers to accomplish this gargantuan task. 

Abraham, you oversaw ten writers and 100 short form writeups. Heidi MacDonald mentioned that there was quite a bit of ‘spirited debate.’ How did you guys conduct these group conversations? Was there a Slack thread?

The conversations were held entirely in either (a) an internal email listserv that I set up or (b) Google Docs that I created for various drafts of the list and its entries. One clarification: not all of the people who had bylines wrote final entries — some of them were just in a brain trust that came up with the list, itself.

What did the timeline look like from the initial idea to the April 16, 2018 publication date?

Y’know what, I can’t remember when the idea was first presented to me by my boss, Vulture’s editor, Neil Janowitz. But it wasn’t all that long before the due date — probably mid-March? After that, we had about a week of recruiting people to join the initial brain trust, then about a week and a half of hammering out the list, then a few weeks of writing entries. After that, it took about a week to do final edits on the entries and build out the site, and voila, there we were.

Once everyone decided on their chosen comic pages did the essays trickle in one by one from each writer? Or were you seeking batches? Could you go into a bit of detail regarding the editorial workflow?

They trickled in one by one. I told our writers to send entries in as soon as they’d written them, so we could get going on editing. Then I’d do an initial pass on them and make additions/deletions/suggestions, the writers would incorporate/approve those, and then it was off to other editors on the Vulture staff for a final round of edits.

For these massive undertakings, does Vulture do anything *extra* for promotion, beyond pushing it out to your various social channels?

Not really. We rely on the fact that our reach is already pretty large and on our confidence that it was a quality product that would receive good word of mouth.

From a technical standpoint, mammoth pieces like this—and the 100 jokes article—on Vulture end up collecting thousands of social shares, hundreds of domains linking back and dozens of page one Google results for valuable search terms. Has editorial expressed the desire to keep doing these periodically?

I’m but a lowly writer, so I’m not privy to those conversations, but Vulture is always thinking of bold and ambitious new ways to present our work to readers, so I’d be shocked if we didn’t have more large projects in the vein of 100 Pages and 100 Jokes in the future.

Ultimate Guide to Creating Original Research Content | Niel Malhotra

Niel Malhotra is the founder of Growista, an agency that helps companies turn raw data into high-quality content that gets shares, traffic, and backlinks. As a programmer, Niel analyzes large amounts of data and turns it into a unique article, complete with charts describing that data. In March 2018, he wrote a 13K-word guide on how he produces original research content.

Niel, you mentioned using Workflowy to build your outlines. Could you go a little more in-depth about your process?

When it comes to content outlines using workflowy for epic content, I had a basic process: Parts and charts and details. So, I created 9 overall parts. Each part had a chapter. Each chapter had an explanation in it.

It looked like:

– Part
-Chapter
– Explanation.

The Creating Original Research Guide has eight chapters, 44 subheads, and clocks in at 13,000 words. How long to outline a huge undertaking like that versus doing the actual writing?

I’m estimating, but the outlining and prep work was about 15 hours. Writing took about 20 hours. 5 hours for editing.

You’re one of the rare creators out there who turns data into content. What tools or software do you regularly use to collect and analyze data before building out a content asset? What resources would you recommend for someone wanting to dip their toes into ‘data storytelling?

To collect and analyze data, I just use regular programming. Sometimes, I do site scraping where I grab the HTML of a page (I have a piece on AirBnB data coming up for a client that involves screen scraping). onomics.com is a great tool for visualizing data. Resources, besides my guide which is the best thing on it on the internet :), I’d suggest looking at the priceonomics site and the priceonomics content handbook: https://priceonomics.com/the-content-marketing-handbook/ I’d also suggest starting with a survey or partnering up with someone who knows how to program (it’s really hard to do this work if you don’t).

I know you’re as fascinated by the *content promotion* process as I am. Once you released this guide onto the web – did you unearth any new promotion or distribution strategies?

Right now, my best promotion strategy is Facebook groups. The thing is, a lot of groups don’t let you post links. That’s okay. You can still just post the summary of what you wrote, and if the content is relevant enough to the audience and good enough, they’ll find their way to your content anyway.

“BETTERTOPIA” – Panasonic 100th Anniversary Global Web site | Illustration by IC4DESIGN

IC4DESIGN is a production team consisting of illustrators and graphic designers based in Hiroshima, Japan. Their strength is fun & detailed illustration work. Their work is included in major international art projects around the globe.

This sixth example of ‘epic content’ is solely visual, by way of a giant scrolling interactive graphic.

IC4DESIGN designed a future city filled with Panasonic’s products and services for this special project. Some of the scenes contain animations. When you find a certain scene and click it, you’ll jump to detail pages.

The idea behind “BETTERTOPIA” was to create a better city for the future. IC4D matched it with their style of illustration. They mixed old-school-future images inspired by 1950’s-70’s aesthetics. Bright-colored buildings, curved shaped vehicles and so on.

Because it’s a WEB illustration, the display size is fixed. The image clocks in at a staggering 1400 x 14674 pixels with a  13.5mb file size.

They go into further detail behind their design process over at the IC4DESIGN Behance page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43QTcH80BKE

No Frills — #Hauler

And finally – it’s time for some Canadian content.

Is it possible for a grocery chain to be cool?

No Frills sure makes a convincing argument with their Hauler project. If you live in a major Canadian metropolis (sorry Montreal) you are probably familiar with the black and yellow branded discount grocery store chain.

In 2018 they launched a limited edition collection of streetwear under the moniker and E-store, Hauler. Several of the t-shirt designs quickly sold out.

You absolutely have to check out this 90-second ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muc_iFP3WVo

I’m pretty sure that’s the most insane (and awesome) commercial that a North American grocery store chain has ever unleashed.

An Instagram account also compliments it – and the campaign picked up mentions in Fader magazine as well as dozens of Canadian newspapers and blogs. The endeavor was a success.

When you cop that new No Frills merch and go grocery shopping like a #hauler #haulhard

A post shared by No Frills (@haulhard) on May 7, 2018 at 4:48pm PDT

So what content has recently blown your mind? Share it with us below in the comments.

The post 7 Extraordinary Examples of Truly Epic Content appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

This guide will show you everything you need to know about performing a competitor analysis.

You’re going to reverse engineer the marketing playbooks of all your competition.

We’re going to use RevZilla.com—an online motorcycle-gear retailer—as our test subject. To get a solid understanding of the competitive landscape, we’d ideally perform an analysis on 3-5 of the top performers.

The tools listed below could easily run you over $600 / month, but there is overlap. You could drop SimilarWeb out of the mix – as SEMrush and Ahrefs can pull a lot of similar data. And between trial sign-ups and month-long engagements, you could get all of your research done in a week or two.

Here are 19 tactics for you to try.

• Take a 10,000-yard Snapshot of a Competitor With Similarweb
• Wordclouds Will Quickly Give You Visual Cues
• Find all of Their Ranking Keywords With SEMrush
• Then Uncover all of the Most Trafficked Pages on Their Website
• Discover Your Competitor’s Most Shared Content With Buzzsumo
• Use WHOis.net to Find Out How Long They’ve Been in Business
• Calculate the Average Content Length of Their Top Posts
• Use ‘View Source’ to Find Image ALT Text Tags
• How to Find the Most Linked to Content With Ahrefs
• Steal all of their Google Adwords Campaigns
• Here’s How to Find All of Their Facebook and Twitter Ads
• Use Adbeat to Grab a Snapshot of all Their Display Ad Campaigns
• Download All of Their Twitter Followers With Followerwonk
• Use This Chrome Extension to Take a “Full Screenshot” of Their Landing Pages
• Use Buzzsumo to reveal their most successful organic Facebook posts
• Reverse Engineer All of Their Marketing Funnels
• Use BuiltWith to Uncover Their Plugins, Tracking Software and Content Framework
• Tube Buddy Will Enable You to View All of Their Video Tags
• This Simple Hack Will Help You Find All of Their Reddit Mentions
• Combine Review Mining and Ngram Analyzer to Discover Word Clusters
• The Number One Tactic to Use Above All Else for Competitor Research

Take a 10,000-Yard Snapshot of a Competitor With SimilarWeb

First, we’ll plug the site into SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb is a market intelligence platform that pulls in data from hundreds of millions of desktop/mobile devices, partners with millions of subscribers, public data sources from over a billion sites and app pages, and from hundreds of thousands of sites and apps.

SimilarWeb delivers a breakdown of Revzilla based on its many sources of data.

Scroll down further, and we get a traffic overview including referrals, search breakdown, social traffic and display advertising. Dig a little deeper, and you get a website content report, audience interests, and a listing of competitors & similar sites.

Wordclouds Will Quickly Give You Visual Cues

Wordclouds.com is a free online word cloud generator and tag cloud generator, similar to Wordle. More than just a pretty diagram – Wordclouds can feed you visual cues as to which topic clusters should be given priority. You won’t be doing deep analyses with this site but give it a shot. Set the shape to ‘square.’

Find all of Their Ranking Keywords With SEMrush

We use SEMrush a lot here. It’s a competitive intelligence suite that I use almost daily for keyword and ranking research.

Next, I’ll drop RevZilla.com into SEMrush’s main dashboard. The ‘Organic Search Positions’ report shows RevZilla pulling in traffic from 305,930 keyword terms from Google’s top 100 organic search results and the keywords it is ranking for.

By applying some advanced filters, we can narrow down the search results to a keyword list that’s more workable.

• ‘Exclude’ + ‘Keyword’ + ‘Containing’ = ‘revzilla’ – to remove all branded search terms.
• ‘Include’ + ‘Pos.’ + ‘Less Than’ = ’21’ – to filter out all keywords on the third page of Google and beyond.
• ‘Include’ + ‘Volume’ + ‘Greater Than’ = ‘100’ – to filter out terms with lower search volumes.

You still end up with a keyword list of 39,629 terms so you’ll have to get creative and add additional filters to refine the results.

If you were only concerned with helmets or ‘women’s helmets’ then you could add another filter such as ‘Include’ + ‘Keyword’ + ‘Containing’ + ‘womens helmets.’

Uncover all of the Most Trafficked Pages on Their Website

While we’re still in SEMrush – we’ll now go and uncover their most heavily visited pages.

Over on the menu on the left, under ‘Domain Analytics’ click on ‘Pages’ just below ‘Organic Research.’

The Pages report lets us know that the top 8 most visited pages bring in 25% of the site’s search traffic. 10.62% of their search traffic lands on the homepage via 1664 different keyword terms.

You can then click on each page and perform in-depth research on each result.

Discover Your Competitor’s Most Shared Content with Buzzsumo

Now over to Buzzsumo do see which content is working best on social media. If you’re not familiar with the Buzzsumo platform – it allows you to analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.

First, we’ll start with ‘Most Shared‘ to view the absolute most successful pages on the site. This report gives us a sense of what has gone viral or captured the hearts and minds of their visitors.

Most Overall shared articles on the site

1. Royal Enfield Himalayan coming to U.S. for 2018
2. Video: Camaro runs red light, motorcyclist just… runs
3. Indian built the bike Lemmy asked for, but is it real?
4. Tuesday was not a cheerful day in the U.S. motorcycle industry

Buzzsumo’s ‘Content Type‘ filter allows you to narrow your search down further. You can zero in on posts categorized as:

• Article
• How-To Article – ‘It’s no secret that “how to” articles and blog posts are some of the most sought-after, linked to, and bookmarked content online. People want useful information, and they’ll reward you by promoting it to others when you provide it.’ [source]
• Infographics
• List
• Videos
• What Post
• Why Post

Most shared ‘How-to’ articles

• How to be a good riding buddy
• How to fix motorcycling: the hardest how-to yet
• How to put together a tool kit for your motorcycle
• Ask the doc: How to handle impalement injuries

Most shared ‘What’ articles

• What is the Motorcycle Advisory Council and how will it affect us?
• What a funeral in Spain tells us about motorcycling in the United States
• What is high mileage for a motorcycle?

Most shared ‘Why’ articles

• Why it should be harder to get a motorcycle license in the United States
• Why angst over the death of the Dyna is nothing new
• Why Max Hazan is your custom motorcycle builder’s favorite builder
• Why motorcycle journalism isn’t journalism

‘What‘ articles give the reader more information on a specific topic, which will often involve comparison type posts. ‘Why‘ articles provide readers with a reason or purpose and details that support a focused conclusion.

A Buzzsumo study concluded that ‘what‘ and ‘why‘ are the two of the top five ‘starting words’ in the headlines of successful B2B headlines.

[source]

Calculate the Average Content Length of Their Top Posts

Next, we’ll calculate the [average] content length of their top posts. This will help us determine the word-count we’ll need to match and beat the top performing posts.

One free tool I often use is Bulk Web Page Word Count Checker, a handy tool created by Jasja ter Horst that lives on his SEO Review Tools site. You can submit up to 10 URLs and the tool will automatically extract all the text/content inside the HTML body tag for every single page.

BWPWCC also averages out all of the word counts by default. This is useful if you’ve inputted 10 URLs from the same category (such as blog posts). This will give you a target to aim for when you research and create your content.

Buzzsumo will also give you article word counts with a paid account.

Use ‘View Source’ to find Image ALT Text Tags

We’re going to look at ‘Alt Text Tags‘ to see if they’ve paired any clever alternate keyword phrases with their images.

‘The ALT tag adds a text description to an image on a Web page and should be used for all images, graphical bullets, and graphical horizontal rules. The alt text within the ALT tag should let the user know what an image’s content and purpose are.

Alt text is accessed by screen reader users to provide them with a text equivalent of images.’ [source]

Go to one of your competitor’s blog posts or landing pages. Right-click anywhere on the page and then click on ‘View page source‘ in the pop-up box. Alternately type ‘Ctrl’ + ‘U’ to view the source code of the web page.

Once you have the view source page open:

1. Type ‘Ctrl’ + ‘f’
2. Enter ‘alt=’ into the search box.

Now you can scan the page for all the Alt tags which will be highlighted in yellow. Make a note of the text contained within quotations. Are they simply copying model names or keyword phrases, or are they attempting to input different variations?

Use WHOis.net to find out how long they’ve been in business

WHOis.net will tell you how long your competitors have been in business, the date they registered their domain, their contact information, server statistics and more.

You can perform a domain whois search, whois IP lookup and search the whois database for relevant information on domain registration and availability. WHOis can help provide insight into a domain’s history and additional information. See who owns a domain name, how many pages from a site are listed with Google and search WhoIs address listings for a website’s owner.

If you are looking for a domain, WhoIs domain lookup can:

• Provide contact information for the domain name owner
• Determine the proper contact for any domain listed in the Whois database.
• Identify the admin contact info

Find a Competitor’s most Linked to Content With Ahrefs

Now we’ll use Ahrefs to find the site’s most linked to content.

For this, we’ll need to use the ‘The Best Pages by Backlinks‘ report which ranks the pages of a target website based on their total number of backlinks. You’ll find this on the left-hand menu under ‘Pages‘ > ‘Best by links‘

The site’s 974,750 pages are now re-ordered by backlink count. Depending on which paid tier of Ahrefs you’re on, you can get very granular with these reports.

You’ll probably want to dig around on both their E-comm pages and blog posts to see which type of content is pulling in the most links and where those links are coming from.

Steal all of their Google Adwords Campaigns with SEMrush

Back over to SEMrush to explore all of Revzilla’s Google Ad campaigns. In the ‘Paid Search’ section, you will find visual information related to the domain’s paid traffic and its cost, ad copies, keywords that the domain appears within Google’s paid search results, keywords ranking distribution, and the domain’s paid competitors.

SEMrush is estimating that Revzilla is pulling in 96,000 visitors a month via 16,000 paid keyword terms. Let’s uncover their campaigns.

In the left-hand menu under ‘Advertising Research‘ go ahead and click ‘Ad Copies.’

At the bottom of each ad you’ll notice a ‘keyword #‘ indicator.

The first ad result ‘Shop Motorcycle Helmets – Shop by Color‘ is triggered by 77 different keyword search phrases.

1. Export the report as a CSV file.
2. Import it into a new Google Sheet.
3. This sorts the ads into four columns – Title, Description, Visible Url and (destination) Url.

Alternately you should also click on the ‘Paid Search Positions‘ report. The PSP report shows positions the queried domain is getting in Google’s paid search results and the keywords ranking positions.

1. Export the paid search positions report as a CSV file.
2. Import the data into a new Google Sheet.
3. Delete column ‘E’ [Previous Position]
4. Delete columns ‘I through N’ [Traffic (%), Traffic Cost (%), Competition, Number of Results, Trends and Last seen]
5. Freeze the top row. View > Freeze > 1 row
6. In Column A – Sort the sheet from ‘A > Z.’

Now you can scan your report for keyword clusters. Not only are these valuable keyword phrases to possibly use in your content and copy. They’re valuable enough terms to pay for!

I won’t dive too much deeper here – as this article is covering competitive research, not keyword research. But you see how things quickly overlap.

For Revzilla’s ‘2017 Best Motorcycle Helmets – RevZilla’s Top Picks for 2017‘ ad they’ve input 15 different phrases.

[best motorcycle helmet]
[top motorcycle helmets]
[best motorcycle helmet speakers]
[top rated motorcycle helmets]
[best full face motorcycle helmet]
[best womens motorcycle helmets]
[best modular motorcycle helmet]
[the best motorcycle helmet]
[best open face motorcycle helmet]
[top motorcycle helmet brands]
[best touring motorcycle helmet]
[best motorcycle helmet under 100]
[best german motorcycle helmet]
[best beginner motorcycle helmet]
[best rated modular motorcycle helmets]

Here’s How to Find All of Their Facebook and Twitter Ads

So how’d you like access to the world’s largest swipe file of Facebook ads???

The good news is that you’ve already got it. And it’s free!

1. Go to the Facebook page of any business – in this case, Revzilla’s.
2. On the left-hand menu go to the bottom and click on ‘Info and Ads’
3. Choose a country if applicable.

Have hours of fun pouring through the FB ads of your top competitors in any industry.

Make a *visual swipe file* of all of their Facebook and Twitter ads in Google Docs or similar. Check back periodically to see which ads they’re running consistently. If you track this over weeks and months – you’ll know which ones are working if they keep running them.

Now let’s do the same for Twitter.

Head over to their Ads Transparency Center and enter any business Twitter handle into the search box. If the company has run any ads in the past seven days – they will be listed in the results.

Use Adbeat to Grab a Snapshot of all Their Display Ad Campaigns

With Adbeat, advertisers can see what direct competitors are doing and how they’re doing it. Besides just seeing ads and the messaging being used, they’re also able to show you the sources of traffic including how the media was purchased and what publishers the ads were running on.

Adbeat delivers us all of the ‘Standard Ads,’ ‘Native Ads,’ ‘Video Ads‘ and ‘Landing Pages‘ that it can locate.

Now your ad swipe file is growing by epic proportions.

Download All of Their Twitter Followers With Followerwonk

I’m a huge fan of using Followerwonk to analyze both a competitor’s followers and who they are following.

To make things more interesting, I’m using the ‘Compare Users‘ report. I’ve entered the Twitter handle of one of RevZilla’s main competitors—in this case, Motosport—to see how much overlap there is.

From here I click on ‘followers of Revzilla’ and download the CSV file for later sorting. If I were looking to build out a huge Twitter list to put a sponsored post in front of – I’d also grab the ‘followers of MotoSportInc‘ and ‘followers of both’ lists.

Use Buzzsumo to reveal their most successful organic Facebook posts

You can analyze individual Facebook pages in Buzzsumo.

Enter the name of the page you would like to analyze.

Check ‘Analyze Facebook page’

Buzzsumo will show you the posts from this page that have gotten the most engagement.

Analysis and list views are also available for FB pages. The analysis section gives you a helpful rank of the performance of the page compared to others in its category on Facebook.

Reverse Engineer All of Their Marketing Funnels

Now that you have all of your competitor’s Facebook and Google ads it’s time to go further. Spend some time clicking through the ads both while logged into Google Chrome and through an ‘Incognito Window.’

Dissect the landing pages that you end up on.

Sign up for their email and newsletter lists and make a swipe file of their sequences.

Use Feedly to subscribe to their blog. Feedly is a news aggregator app for various web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android. Feedly is pretty good at estimating how often a site publishes content.

Use This Chrome Extension to Take a “Full Screenshot” of Their Landing Pages

We’ve already mentioned dissecting a competitor’s landing pages. Here’s how to do that. Take a “full screenshot” of their landing pages so that you can mark them up with your notes.

With the Chrome extension Full Page Screen Capture, you can capture a screenshot of a web page in entirety.

While on the target page in your current browser window.

1. Click on the extension icon (or press Alt+Shift+P)
2. Watch the extension capture each part of the page
3. A new tab of your screenshot will open where you can download it as an image or PDF (or drag it to your desktop.)

I’ll use Revzilla’s ‘adventure touring’ [ADV] category page as an example here.

I save the .PNG file that Full Page Screen Capture outputs to a folder.

Then it’s over to Adobe Creative Cloud—specifically Photoshop and Illustrator—to mark up the landing page with notes, scrawls and comments.

Use BuiltWith to Uncover Their Plugins, Tracking Software and Content Framework

The BuiltWith Chrome extension will uncover what plugins, tracking software and content framework they’ve built their site on.

BW is a site profiler that will slice and dice a web page and will return all the technologies it can find on the site. You get:

• Analytics and Tracking (Monetate, Hotjar, Kenshoo, Google Analytics)
• Widgets (LiveChat, YouTube IFrame Upload, Sitelinks Search Box)
• eCommerce (Cart Functionality)
• Frameworks (Ruby on Rails)
• Content Delivery Network (GStatic Google Static Content, Cloudflare, jsDelivr)
• Mobile (Viewport Meta, iPhone / Mobile Compatible)
• Audio / Video Media (YouTube)
• JavaScript Libraries and Functions (jQuery, Facebook SDK, Modernizr)
• Advertising (Google Adsense, DoubleClick.Net, Facebook Custom Audiences)
• Email Hosting Providers (Sendgrid, Google Apps for Business)
• SSL Certificates (Comodo SSL)
• Name Server (Cloudflare DNS)
• Web Hosting Providers (Cloudflare Hosting)
• Web Master Registration (Google Webmaster MSN/Bing Webmaster)

You can also use Wappalyzer or Whatruns to perform the same tasks as BuiltWith. Wappalyzer is a cross-platform utility that uncovers the technologies used on websites. It detects content management systems, e-commerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and many more.

Tube Buddy Will Enable You to View All of Their Video Tags

If your competition has an active presence on YouTube, then you’ll want to sign up for TubeBuddy’s channel management browser plugin.

We’re going to make heavy use of its ‘View and Copy Video Tags‘ function.

• Reveal what your competitor is tagging their videos with.
• Look for ideas around what tags to use in your videos.
• See why particular videos are rankings higher in search results.

If you’re inputting all of the tags into a spreadsheet, click on the ‘Copy To…’ box. Or build ‘Tag Lists‘ within TubeBuddy.

Use This Simple Hack to Help You Find All of Their Reddit Mentions

Use “reddit.com/domain/yourdomain.com/” [replace ‘yourdomain’ with your target URL] to find where your site (or your competitor) has been shared or mentioned on Reddit.

This tactic is excellent for finding subreddits to promote your content on, feedback on your company, and questions that need answering.

Combine Review Mining and Ngram Analyzers to Discover Word Clusters

I saved one of the best tactics for last. Here, we’ll mine Amazon (or Google or Facebook) reviews and build out an immense text document with large clusters of customer feedback.

Once your document is cleaned up, we’ll drop it into an Ngram analyzer to find multiple occurrences of bi, tri, 4, and 5 grams.

What’s an n-gram?

An n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus. When the items are words, n-grams may also be called shingles

Mining Amazon Reviews

If you happen to be working in E-commerce, Amazon can be a great place to find powerful consumer feedback on products.

In this case, Revzilla doesn’t ship products through Amazon, but you could head over to ResellerRatings to find a gold mine of over 97,000 reviews.

If Amazon does turn up pages of reviews, you can start building out your mined review document by mass cutting and pasting. If you want to do it faster – you could scrape the product reviews in Python, Pip, with several packages.

Actually that sounds a little daunting.

Luckily, Feedcheck built an Amazon Review Exporter for the 99.8% of us who don’t know how to scrape AZ reviews with Python. They give the first ten reviews for free and charge $39 for each complete job.

$39 per product could add up fast. If it’s not in your budget, copy the rough layout you see above into Google Docs using the ‘Insert Table’ function and do a bunch of cutting and pasting by hand for smaller review mining projects.

Full credit to Wil Reynolds and SEER for this tactic.

How to Write Better Ad Copy Using Reviews + Ngrams | SEER

The Number One Tactic to Use Above All Else for Competitor Research

Before you do anything else – talk to your customers. And talk to your competitor’s customers.

• Review chat logs.
• Scan customer emails.
• Set-up one on one phone calls or meetings.

And when I say, ‘talk to them’ I mean listen.

The post How to Perform a Competitive Analysis in 2021 – Try These 19 Tactics appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

Table of Contents

• • Let’s Talk About Photo-Syndication
  • Which Photos Should You Use for Free Stock Photography?
  • Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License
  • Flickr: Revisiting Web 2.0
  • How to Search for Your Images online
  • Link Reclamation and Outreach
  • Outreach to Foreign Language and International Sites
  • Skip These 5 Types of Sites When Doing Your Image Link Building Outreach
  • Re-Indexing Pages That Have Placed Your Link
  • Things You Could Do to Take This Even Further

What if I told you there was a way for you to get you own free stock photo library up and running in 60 minutes or less? And with no hosting charges or coding knowledge required.

There’s a huge demand for royalty free images which is why free stock photo sites have exploded over the past half decade.

In March, 2017, Ross Hudgens of Siege Media posted a Slideshare deck on link building strategies and one slide in particular stood out.

It stuck in the back of my mind for a couple of months. I had been doing well with my photos on Instagram and figured I should probably give this tactic a shot.

On July 5th, 2017 Search Engine Land posted Andrew Dennis‘ case study on taking a site from Zero to 100,000 visitors in 12 months. In the third section of the post he detailed out establishing passive link acquisition channels. Specifically using high-quality, original photography with a Creative Commons license “that allowed others to use the photos as long as they linked back to their original source.”

I had sat on this for long enough – so that very same day I messaged Andrew on LinkedIn for further clarification. He wrote me back.

I now get between 1-5 links a month from photos that I’ve taken with my smartphone and GoPro. Image link building nicely rounds out my backlink profile. It is not a replacement for obtaining powerful links from high-authority domains. But it does provide you with an additional—and diverse—set of sites sending signals back to your website.

I’ll show you a few of my photos in action.

Here’s a photo of Montreal’s Biosphere picked up by Westmount Mag, a bilingual urban lifestyle site.

This is a photo of wall art near The Plateau in Montreal that I snapped on the way to meet a friend for some beers. Spot.ph based out of Manila, Philippines featured it in their round up of international wall art.

Jay Banks, a successful realtor based out of Vancouver, has featured several of my photos in the ‘Vancouver Photo Gallery’ section of his website. I snapped both photos when I was walking around the city.

And finally, here’s a photo captured down by the tracks at Main and Terminal in Vancouver. It was used as a feature image for an article posted on E-International Relations, the world’s largest open access site for students and scholars of international politics.

All four of these photos were snapped randomly on my way to or from some other activity. I posted each of them on Flickr and set them to be syndicated across the web under a CC BY 4.0 License. (more on this later).

And more importantly – the majority of them link back to this site.

Let’s Talk About Photo Syndication

I’ve written at length about content syndication. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2017 that I discovered the power of photo syndication.

What is photo syndication?

Photo syndication is the process of uploading your photo on to powerful social content platforms—namely Flickr—which then, in turn, gets distributed across the web via search engines and feeder sites.

We add rocket fuel to the mix by attaching a Creative Commons license to each of the images that we push out. The CC license helps the photos get indexed into even more image databases and found by specialized search bots.

Infographics and free high-resolution images have been an excellent way to build ancillary backlinks for over a decade. Some brands have even used free commercial use images as a primary backlink builder.

Hubspot and Shopify’s ‘Burst’ host proprietary stock photo libraries. But there’s no reason to let them have all of the fun.

If you’re a *pretty decent* photographer and you’re looking to build out your brand and gain some backlinks that your competitors will have a hard time acquiring – you’ve come to the right place.

I’ve been using my pictures as backlink generators for the past eight months. Now I’m going to detail out step by step how you can go about doing the same.

Which Photos Should You Use for Free Stock Photography?

For your photos to get picked up for use on other sites, they’ll need to fulfill one of 6 different functions/themes.

People: child, old lady, a police officer
Places: the beach, Laguna Beach [specific], Laguna Beach sunset [more specific]
Objects: circuit board, old typewriter,
Actions: surfing, drinking coffee, jogging
Specific Events: Coachella 2018, New Years Eve in Times Square,
Moods: excitement, anxiety, stress, melancholy, happiness

Take a look at Shutterstock’s homepage to see what type of images they’re featuring.

Then go deeper and do a search on a theme. Click on ‘Popular’ to get a sense of what photos businesses are paying for. Do you have anything similar in your inventory? Or do you have the capability of taking a picture at or near the quality on display in this image set?

Now click on one of the images in the set or category, and I’ll show you what else we can uncover.

Underneath the photo, you get the image title, categories, and around 50 tags.

When you upload your photo to Flickr, a lot of work has already been done for you. Flickr allows up to 75 tags per image, so if you’re posting photos of cityscapes, you can certainly ‘borrow’ a lot of the applicable ones that you see here.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License

Once you’ve decided which photos you’re going to release out into the wild – you’ll need to affix it with a Creative Commons license. The Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) version to be specific.

“This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.”

There are six main CC licenses, but the *Attribution* version is the only one you need to be concerned about. For further clarification – here’s a handy chart breaking down the differences between each of the license versions. You *could* get away with using the Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, but I would recommend you stick with CC BY 4.0.

You can read up on the legal code to fully understand the licensed rights that you’re giving up.

Now we’re going to set everything up on Flickr.

Flickr: The Social Network That Time Forgot

Flickr???!!! “I haven’t visited my Flickr page since 2008!!”

Yes, Flickr. Despite Yahoo’s best efforts to decimate every property that it scooped up in the mid-2000s, Flickr still thrives. It’s a DA98 platform and remains the 357th most visited site on the web.

Flickr may pale in comparison to Instagram when you’re talking sheer traffic numbers. But when you want to syndicate a photo across the web, Flickr is “the business.”

It took a couple of months to get momentum on my Flickr account – but now I average 2-3,000 views/day on my photos.

Sign up for the service and name your Flickr account something memorable and easy to search for in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. You would preferably name it after your company, or site name. Something catchy and fairly unique.

“MassiveKontent” is an easy search both in the universal and image search engines – so that’s what I went with.

Choose your first set of photos that you want to use to create your free stock image library. Now upload the first one. I keep the dimensions of each photo at 2250 pixels across. That’s more than what’s required for any blog post or header image – but too small to make high-quality prints from.

Title / Description: Give it a good descriptive title. In the description, you can feel free to add any other pertinent details – but this is where you’re going to drop in your CC BY 4.0 license wording.

My standard text is:

-You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute this photo in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the photo
for any purpose, even commercially.
Please give credit and link back to massivekontent.com/

Add to Album – If you’re going to be uploading a sizeable quantity of photos, you’ll want to create albums based on the topics that you’ll be focusing on. It makes for easy organization.

Add License – From the drop down menu of license choices you’re going to choose ‘Attribution’. Alternately you can set the default of your entire Flickr profile to automatically apply an Attribution license to every photo that you upload.

Geolocation – “Add This Photo to your Map” if it is relevant to a location. You want to give searchers as many opportunities to find (and use) your photo if they’re looking for a specific location image. If you have the GPS function enabled for your photos on either your smartphone or camera – Flickr will automatically geo-locate your picture.

Add Tags – You get 75 tags. Where Instagram uses hashtags, Flickr is all about tags and groups. I’d recommend searching through 10 or 20 popular photos in each of the categories that you want to place your images in. The popular images will give you a feel for which tags work best. It’s not any different than choosing the right hashtags for your Instagram uploads.

Groups: You’ll want to join several groups in your categories – and search out the larger ones as well the hyper-niche focused collections. Groups will help spread your photo 10x faster across Flickr.

A free account lets you place images into 30 groups. Flickr Pro doubles that limit to 60 groups. Most of the quality Flickr collectives will only let you place one or two photos into their groups each day.

After you’ve uploaded your initial collection(s) you’ll need to sit back for a few weeks and wait for your images to spread and populate the search engines. Remember – this is meant to be passive link building.

via GIPHY

Fast forward 30 days.

Now it’s time to find all of the sites who are using your images. I’ll go in order from longer and more involved to easy and automated.

How to Search for Your Images online

The Hard Way: Manual Google Reverse Image Lookup

Go to your Flickr albums and zoom in on the image that you’re trying to track down online.
Right-click on the picture and click on ‘View Page Source’ in the drop down menu or simply hold down on the Ctrl + U buttons.

Then click Ctrl + F and enter “jpg” into the search box.
The first result that shows up *should* be your picture.

Highlight the jpg URL [example: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4645/24275057017_a9eb4bba09_b.jpg] and copy [Ctrl + c}] it onto your clipboard.

Now head over to Google Images and click on the camera icon to ‘Search by image.’

And then paste the image URL.

Scroll down to ‘Pages that include matching images.’

Start manually searching for potential link reclamation targets-sites that have used your image(s) without properly crediting you.

A Slightly Easier Way to Track Down Images

For this technique-it’s helpful if you keep copies of your free stock photos in a few easy to access folders.

Go back to Google Images ‘Search by images’. This time click on the ‘Upload an image’ tab and click ‘Choose file.’

Choose your target image and click ‘Open.’ Also, take a moment to admire my fantastic file naming abilities.

Give it a second and Google will deliver you results similar—or an exact match—to the ones you arrived at when you input the URL in ‘The Hard Way.’

Now start combing through the results manually and see if there are any sites that you can reach out to.

Tineye Reverse Image Search

You can repeat the exact two processes that I laid out above – but by using Tineye Reverse Image Search instead—or in addition to—Google Reverse Image Search.

Tineye has a database that will soon cross 26 billion images indexed from across the web.

How to use Tineye

• Upload an image from your computer or mobile device
• Copy and paste a page or image URL address into the search box
• Drag an image from a tab in your browser and drop it in a browser tab where TinEye is open.

Or if you want to speed things up even more – you can use a Tineye browser extension and search for web images right from Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Opera.

With an extension loaded into your browser, you can right-click directly on images that you find on the web and trigger a Tineye page search.

A page will load with every image that Tineye fetched from the URL that you sent it. Choose the image from the menu and wait for the results.

In a few moments, Tineye will search through its database of ~26 billion images to see if there are matches.

You’ll have the options-Best match/Most changed/Biggest image/Newest/Oldest-to choose from the drop-down menu.

But there’s a better way. And it’s called Pixsy.

Automate Your Image Search Using Pixsy

Pixsy was founded in 2014—by photographer Daniel Foster—as a way to combat online theft of his images.

“Pixsy is an online platform for creatives and image owners to discover where and how their images are being used online.”

Pixsy’s main utility is to help creatives uncover and resolve copyright infringement claims. Luckily the only thing we need it for is to find image matches. It’s free for monitoring up to 500 images which should more than suffice. The next tier up is $20 / month for up to 2000 images.

Sign up for an account and then synchronize the images in your Flickr profile.

After Pixsy has gone through your photo library it will list out the ‘Matches’ that it has found on the web.

I maxed out on my 500 free photos – so I ended up signing up for a paid Personal account. This moves me up in the queue providing me with ‘high priority match scanning’. I also get a weekly email listing out the new photo matches that they’ve found.

Link Reclamation and Outreach

Alright – let’s go out and claim those links that should rightfully be pointing at your site. This method of outreach is nearly identical to link building via unlinked brand mentions or uncredited infographics.
It has a high ROI as you’re not pestering the webmaster or begging for links. You’re merely reclaiming what’s yours.

98% will just link directly to your Photo on Flickr. NOBODY will bother to read your CC 4.0 specifications in each description box of your photos. It’s just the way things are.

But you’ll be 80-90% successful in reclaiming your links, as you’re in the right. But approach everyone in the most pleasant manner possible. It absolutely works.

I typically batch my image link outreach and spend an hour—once a month—firing off emails. This is a task that you could get a virtual assistant or employee to perform.

Image Link Building Outreach Template

Here’s a template you can use that has worked out well for me.

Hi there,

Thanks so much for including one of my picture of a [insert subject] on your [insert topic or headline] page. I/We love seeing my/our work featured around the web.

The page:
[target page URL using your image]

And my photo
[exact Flickr URL of the image used]

Could you please link to [YOUR WEBSITE URL] as per my Attribution credit request on each image (instead of linking to the photo on Flickr)?

Thanks very much and have a great week!
-Jay

Occasionally when you’re trying to get a webmaster to switch out the link from Flickr over to your site, you’ll get pushback. Not often—but because you’re dealing with humans—it will happen.

I never like to get into a long drawn out debate with anyone-so I’ll attempt one more follow up email and leave it at that. Remember, these Creative Commons image links are ‘secondary’ backlinks. You want to spend the bulk of your content promotion campaigns building editorial links from relevant authority sites. This is just ‘cherry-on-the-top’ link building.

So don’t burst a blood vessel or hit full rage mode if someone won’t attribute proper credit to your image. At worst-it’s still a link to your Flickr page. It builds out your brand-and grows link equity to one of your ‘second-tier’ sites.

Outreach to Foreign Language and International Sites

You’re going to come across (many) international sites using your images. You’re going to have to make judgment calls here as you’ll need to take a few extra steps to get your link. Especially if the site is not in English.

I’ve successfully placed a link on a French travel site due to how far along Translate.Google has come. I took my outreach template, ran it through translate and then sent them a message through their contact page.

And voila-they responded shortly after that despite the time difference. Most people want to do the right thing.

And another link placed!

For outreach to international sites—but still in English—take note of a few details.

• Be incredibly polite – i.e., use my outreach template. The respondent might not *get* your humor if you try to be funny. Keep it simple but respectful.
• Be aware of the-sometimes drastic-time zone differences. People often won’t get back to you right away.

And here’s a link to the Google Sheet that you can use to track your outreach.

Skip these 5 Types of Sites When Doing Your Image Link Building Outreach

Reverse image search will yield a lot of returns for five types sites that you won’t be able to reclaim links from. Don’t even bother trying. Just look at them as additional branding for your company. And hundreds of additional backlinks pointing towards your Flickr profile that you didn’t have to build.

The 5 Site Types to Skip

1. Flickr feeder sites

Hiveminer (Flickr Hive Mind), Photopin, Stockpholio. Picssr, Flickriver
Flickr Hive Mind is a data mining tool for the Flickr photography database, allowing search by: tags(keywords); Flickr photography groups; Flickr users, their contacts, and favorites; free text; the Flickr Explore algorithm for interestingness. Flickr Hive Mind can also be an effective tool to identify photography with licenses that allow non-commercial (and sometimes) commercial use.

Flickriver is an alternative Flickr viewer, and as such, it displays Flickr photos using the official Flickr API – similarly to hundreds of other alternative Flickr viewers and tools.

PhotoPin is an image search engine that uses the Flickr API and searches creative commons photos to use for your blog.

Picssr is an experimental website that lets you browse Flickr photos in large thumbnail format.
This project is largely inspired by how photos are displayed on 500px. Picssr uses the Flickr API to fetch and display photos from Flickr

Stockpholio is a search database of over 1 million free stock photos for commercial use.

2. Weebly sites

Weebly—the extremely popular site builder—makes heavy use of Flickr Creative Commons photos. They have the function built right into their dashboard image finder. When a Weebly user selects one of your images from Flickr for use on their site (either in a post or as a header image), Weebly automatically inserts a link to your Flickr image into the footer.

I quickly found 39 Weebly sites using my images just by typing “Photos used under Creative Commons from Massive Kontent” into Google Search.

Just to triple-check I signed up for a Weebly account—took all of 3 minutes—and tested out their ‘Free Image Search.’ While going through the various steps in ‘Edit Site,’ I hit the Images section.

I went to ‘Select images from: Search, and then clicked on the Free Photos tab. For fun – I entered ‘Montreal’ into the search box, and sure enough, five out of the first eight photos were mine [all of the black and white ones].

At the bottom right of the search frame, you’ll note that it mentions – “Free photos are available via a Creative Commons license requiring attribution. An attribution link will be automatically added to your website footer.”

So if you come across your CC photos being used on a Weebly site don’t bother contacting the site owner to swap out the Flickr link. People use Weebly because they DON’T want to bother with HTML and CSS coding. 99% of the webmasters won’t know how to remove or change the link that Weebly has injected into the footer.

3. Travel and City Tour Sites

Sites like Traveladvisor, MapCarta, Tripcarta and Easy Resv pull in creative common images straight from Flickr’s API. If you’ve uploaded and tagged a photo in a city that one of these sites cover, your image might get pulled into their feed.

Don’t even bother trying to contact a site like this—as I naively did—to switch out the link. You probably won’t reach anyone, and you definitely won’t get a response. Just appreciate these as well-trafficked second tier links back to both your Flickr page and to each of your photos.

Note: Don’t mistake these tour sites for travel blogs. A popular and well-trafficked travel blog can be a goldmine for backlinks to your site.

4. Dictionary Sites

Wordnik shows definitions from multiple sources so that you can see as many different takes on a word’s meaning as possible.

5. Big City Informer Sites

Big City Informer sites are one of the more unique types of sites that I run across when hunting down my images. The sites are set up in WordPress—built on the SuperNews WP theme—that pull in feeds from a variety of sources. The sites are set up to pull in local news, videos, job listings and of course pictures.

Flickr CC photos figure heavily into the Pictures section. MontrealInformer is the only Canadian city covered in the BigCityInformer family of sites – and my photos often show up there. What I love is that the entire description from my Flickr photo is also pulled in.

The accompanying text sends a link back to my site, my Flickr page and the photo.

What I don’t like is that the link to my site is no-followed, and these types of pages are dogshit for both domain authority and traffic.

Re-Indexing Pages That Have Placed Your Link

Now that your target site has swapped out the Flickr link for yours – you’ll want to send a quick signal to the search engines that the page has now updated. You don’t need to do anything as drastic as using the ‘Fetch as Google’ tool in Search Console. Just Tweet out the URL or post it as an update on Google Plus.

Things You Could Do to Take This Even Further

• If you’re a marketer – the first thing you’re probably thinking is – how can I take this further?
• Add Instagram to the mix to push your photos out to an audience 20x the size of Flickr.
• Pin every photo to both your topical own Pinterest boards and other relevant group boards.
• Create a Tumblr blog specifically to distribute your photos.
• Utilize photo syndication for hyper local niches and local SEO. Take a tour of your city/town and take interesting photos of every significant landmark. Capture regional events and post the photos in a timely manner for local bloggers that need images for their write ups. Better yet make connections with these bloggers and journos.

The post How to Build Your Own Free Stock Photo Library appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

Logo graphics. You’ve seen some version of them on the internet. They’re unavoidable. A wall of corporate branding. Logos are exploding out from every corner of the page, or mapped in quadrants or adorning a flower. What is it about them?

First, there was the “Social Media Starfish.” Then came “The Conversation Prism,” “LUMAscapes” and finally the “Martech Supergraphic”. There are hundreds of others, but these four are the standouts.

I contacted several of the original creators and designers to get a sense of the impact these info/logo graphics/scapes had on their brands and businesses at the time.

And I can’t thank Darren Barefoot, Jesse Thomas, Scott Brinker and Anand Thaker enough for their help and patience in putting this (obsessive) piece together.

Table of Contents

• What Are Logo Graphics?
• The Social Media Starfish
• The Conversation Prism
• LUMAscapes
• Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic
• Logo Graphics Out in the Wilderness
• Further Reading

What Are Logo Graphics?

So what defines a “logo graphic”? Well – you know one when you see one.

They look like this.

Or how about this?

Either the logos help accent the point. Or the logos are the point.

The Social Media Starfish | Robert Scoble and Darren Barefoot

On November 2017, we passed the 10th anniversary of the “Social Media Starfish.” It emerged and made its way across the web back in 2007. It quickly captured attention due to “logo association.” I tracked down fellow Canadian, Darren Barefoot, who put Robert Scoble’s vision into a highly shareable graphic. Darren has been a partner at Capulet Communications since 2003.

I just realized the 10th anniversary of 'Scoble's Social Media Starfish' was last week @dbarefoot @Scobleizer
Are you aware of the chain reaction that happened over the years? pic.twitter.com/r9rz6EuFhn

— Massive Kontent (@MassiveKontent) November 10, 2017

MK: Darren, when you put together the Social Media Starfish, what inspired the graphic and what moved you to drop in the logos as representations of the companies?

DB: I remember that Robert had recorded a video (now apparently lost to the Internet ether) describing how he explains social media to people. He was sketching it out on a whiteboard. I thought it would be useful, both for myself and the wider tech community if there were a tidier version that could be shared.

MK: Doing a Google reverse image search – I’m coming up with hundreds (thousands?) of placements for the S.M.S. Did you realize it would go viral? Or was that an assumed outcome of the ‘Robert Scoble’ factor?

DB: I was a prolific blogger back then. I started very early, so I was connected to a lot of influential folks like Robert. But I also work in marketing strategy and understand how unpredictable the prospect of ‘going viral’ is. I thought it would be a useful resource, and I probably figured that other folks would blog about it. As with most new communications technologies, the first few years of adoption tend to be focused on the tools themselves. A lot of early email was sent that was basically “isn’t this email thing cool?”

MK: Were you aware of the downstream effect that your graphic had? ‘The Conversation Prism’ was directly influenced by it, then ‘Lumascapes’ showed up and finally the Marketing Technology Landscape ‘Supergraphic.’

DB: I was aware of the Conversation Prism, which looked so much fancier and tidier than mine. It was kind of Brian to mention me (I’ve always believed in citing your antecedents). I’m not specifically aware of the subsequent ones, though I have seen similar graphics.

MK: Have things gone too far?

DB: “Overkill is Underrated” seems to be a common refrain in marketing. Also, I’m not an expert in advertising tech, but that space looks ridiculously cluttered and overbaked. There’s lots of fungible dollars swimming around that sector, though, so I guess it’s tempting for people to try to grab a slice of it.

I’m a marketer, but honestly, the thing that kind of bums me out is that the focus shifted from ‘these are cool technologies to tell stories and talk to each other’ to ‘these are many technologies to sell products to people.’ That is, it’s no surprise that the later graphics are so explicitly focused on marketing and making money. It’s silly to presume otherwise in a world of many-billion-valuations for social tools, but I do miss the naive early days of these tools.

MK: Are you ready to be named the ‘Godfather of Logo Graphics’? Or should I be looking further back in history?

DB: Hah, I imagine there’s some predecessor, but feel free to call me that if it works.

The Conversation Prism | Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

The Conversation Prism was the first major logo graphic that caught my eye almost 10 years ago. I was elated when Jesse Thomas, CEO and founder of creative interactive agency JESS3 agreed to answer a few questions about the Prism.

MK: Jesse, when Brian and yourself began discussions about building the Conversation Prism – what lead you to choose logos as representations of the various platforms? What is it about clusters of logos that grab our attention?

JT: Things move quickly in silicon valley, companies get acquired, they go out of business, they change their logos often. Do you use the full-color logo or the one color logo? Where do you get the eps file of a logo back then for a random startup? These were things we were thinking about back then. Logos were at the time being used on our phone as jump buttons to get to software (apps back in the day were just called software). We had tried a word cloud typography option and didn’t think it worked as well. We later did a sort of follow up called the geosocial universe and explored more abstract approaches for a similar situation.
jess3.com/geosocial-universe/
jess3.com/geosocial-universe-2/
jess3.com/geosocial-universe-3/

MK: And what inspired the actual design of the Prism itself?

JT: Our friend Brian Solis had done a blog post with links in categories that was super popular with the marketing world. He came to me wanting to do an infographic type graphic that could be used for reference by a broad audience. At the time we were focusing on data visualization using social media API’s and doing marketing work for silicon valley brands, so this was all very familiar to us. A sort of road map to the internet. Something that others could use to share the idea.

MK: The Conversation Prism is probably the most ubiquitous infographic on the web.

• Version 1.0 from 2008 has almost 400,000 views just on Flickr alone.
• You’ve given out thousands of printed editions at SXSW.
• Google Reverse Image Lookup reveals a jaw-dropping amount of results for the graphic.

Did you have a grasp of how popular the infographic was when you published it? Do have any fun stories from that time?

JT: I started seeing the graphic utilized as a sort of template, which is super cool and awesome to be a part of. Brian has this incredible energy, and I did have an idea that people would be into it because this blog post was very popular, and it had a name already, but also because the web then and now is so void of cool graphics. We wanted to do something bright and fun and ended up doing something pretty safe design wise (check the original designs on our case study on jess3.com/projects). I remember being at a conference and seeing multiple people use the graphic and shout me out in the crowd and everyone looks at me, that was cool. So many random moments that made me smile.

MK: As an agency, have you ever seen another infographic get cited across that many websites before?

JT: Haha and you are so good looking too, yeah no I’ve not seen such success with other infographics. I attribute this to Brian’s ability to speak to the internet/marketing tribe, and the tribe’s ability to respond with what they wanted. More people should use this success story as inspiration to make their own graphics explaining their ideas on the world. Infographics are fun people!

MK: What did The Conversation Prism do for the JESS3 brand?

JT: Brian is a genius. The timing of all this was so perfect; back then the internet was a more intimate place, this graphic was so brilliantly utilized by so many people, I am constantly blown away by the whole thing.

MK: Were you aware of some of the ‘logo graphics’ (LUMAscapes, Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, etc…) that followed later on?

JT: Yes, of course, so many cool remixes going on. When I look back at these logo graphics, I’m reminded of the inspirational project The Million Dollar Homepage.

MK: And finally, did you catch the French short film Logorama back in 2009-10? Thoughts?

JT: No, but just watched it and loved it! I love seeing abstractions of commerce and culture. What do you think of the EBOY city works? EBOY has always had a brilliant way of utilizing logos as characters in a story. [JT Edit: For the record, I think they’re great!]

LUMAscapes | Terry Kawaja, LUMA Partners

LUMAscapes are some of the industry’s most widely referenced resources. They organize the ecosystem across all critical categories and provide clarity to a complex digital media and marketing landscape.

“First debuted in 2010 by the ad tech banker Terry Kawaja, the LUMAscape has been through many iterations at this point, adding companies, changing categories and noting acquisitions over the years. From the very beginning, this image was a hit with the digital marketing set as it provided a way to understand a complex industry, as well as a symbol for how difficult it is to work in a space so complex!

The LUMAscape was a great way for ad technology people to explain the growing industry within their own companies in a visual way, as well as understand how new companies were aligned and fit together.” – Ben Kneen, Ad Ops Insider, THE DISPLAY LUMASCAPE EXPLAINED

“Think about Luma Partners. They are an investment bank that targets the technology & media sectors. They basically help companies get sold and help buyers determine which companies to buy.
…everybody knows Luma Partners in our space. Why?

Because they produce the “LUMAscapes” which are essentially visually guides to all of the major players in a technology market. It’s brilliant.

And every time a new LUMAscape is published it is newsworthy. Why?
A journalist has a visual chart they can use. That chart has information on it. Some people were added to the chart. Others were removed. There’s drama. Intrigue.”
– Mark Suster, Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks

“Why is a bunch of logos in boxes on a PowerPoint slide so popular?
The LUMAscape satisfies two fundamental human needs:

1. The need for order
2. The need for validation

The LUMAscape is to adtech what the periodic table is to elements. The LUMAscape brings order, however imperfectly, to the chaos that is the digital advertising ecosystem. And for that, I am very thankful.

Regarding our pride, the LUMAscape provides a “shock & awe” approach to explaining our line of work to others. We can smugly think, “Oh, you think you’re world is complicated? Get a load of this. How do you like them apples?” – Joel R Sadler, Why People Love the LUMAscape

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: Martech 5000 | Scott Brinker & Anand Thaker

Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic has definitely been the most prominent logo graphic of our current era. It landed in 2011 and has grown by 2 orders of magnitude over the past 6 years. Scott brought on Anand Thaker as a collaborator for the 2017 update as it blew up in size by an additional 2000 companies. If there’s a martech company that exists – they’ve heard of it.

Scott Brinker

MK: Scott, when you were compiling Ver1.0 of the Marketing Technology Landscape in 2011, what lead you to go with ~150 logos as representations of each company? What were your influences?

SB: I had seen the adtech LUMAscape that Terence Kawaja of LUMA Partners had produced back in 2010, and I thought it was a great way to illustrate that space. I wanted to do something like that for the martech sector. I’ve also liked using logos because, in some way, they share a little bit of the character of the companies on that landscape. Each company brings its own imaginative ideas to a crowded market, and I think their logos give a tiny hint of that diversity

MK: In 2017 the supergraphic grew by ~40% to 5,381 companies. This meant adding over 2000 companies (logos) to the graphic. How many hours do you estimate that Anand and yourself spent on this update?

SB: It’s a labor of love, so I don’t clock the hours very carefully. I’m sure it’s in the hundreds. That’s why I always have a bit of an ironic laugh when, after hearing from so many people that the landscape was going to consolidate, we turn around and publish a new one with even more growth and diversity.

MK: Which various software did Anand, and you use to collaborate, build, and share the files for this project?

SB: Google’s G Suite and Dropbox. Simple but effective. Oh, and one massive PowerPoint file.

MK: What has the MTL infographic done for chiefmartec.com and your brand over the years?

SB: The landscape has certainly been the most popular piece of content I’ve ever worked on in my career. I’ve always been a bit surprised by how much it resonates. But I’d like to think that it’s helped make a lot more people aware of marketing technology, not just as an industry, but as a profession — why it’s valuable to have marketing technologists and tech-savvy marketing operations leaders in the modern marketing organization.

MK: And finally, you’ve given your blessing to some of the graphics heavily influenced by the MTL –  But what about the others out there? Flattered?

SB: Always flattered. I’m certainly not the first person to organize logos on a slide. As I mentioned earlier, Terence Kawaja was one of my inspirations. For that matter, I remember the conversation prism graphic that Brian Solis put together — that was a fascinating logo-infused infographic. Everyone borrows from everyone else — combinatorial innovation at its finest — and I think that’s great.

Anand Thaker

“This year, I was fortunate to have Anand Thaker collaborate with me on this project, from the research through to the origami-like folding of thousands of logos into a single slide. I’m incredibly grateful for his contributions.”-Scott Brinker

MK: Anand, what made you want to take on this massive project? How daunting was it to add ~2000 additional companies to last year’s supergraphic to arrive at the 2017 edition?

AT: It was threefold reason. 1. Complete my full view of the entire vendor landscape: sales, marketing, customer, data, etc… 2. Begin to expand the landscape beyond a narrative into a resource. 3. Help Scott, help the industry. There are many who are only a megaphone for themselves and rarely for the benefit of the community/industry. On the other hand, Scott speaks softly and carries a big landscape. It was an honor to be asked to work alongside with him on this year’s project.

It wasn’t daunting at all. While we had tedious moments, the insights from the process were unmatched. With the two of us working well together and the motivation to expand the landscape, it really wasn’t hard to put much of my 15 years in the space to good use. Having come from an investor (finance) and system dynamics (energy) mindset, I saw the complexity as more of an opportunity rather than a challenge.

MK:  Do you have any idea how many hours were involved in putting together the current edition of the Martech landscape?

AT: For the direct tasks related to the landscape, I’m sure it’s in the hundreds. Even with the extra time in my exploratory research, the setup for a more data-driven, fully cataloged, and unique insights was well worth it. I was happy to take my years of experience and eclectic knowledge in marketing, sales, customer, data and intelligent systems to put to good use.

MK: Were you using any Adobe software to compile the final image? What was the final file size (pixels/megabytes) of this behemoth?

AT: As Scott mentioned, we kept it simple. Microsoft Powerpoint was amazing at handling both the complexity and clarity of the final graphic.

• Powerpoint Slide — 4.6MB
• JPEG — 37.7MB
• PDF — 61.2MB

MK: Doing a reverse image lookup on Google, the Martech 5000 slide shows up in a staggering number of results this year. Not many graphics (or infographics) get that kind of distribution. Were you satisfied with the result? Are you planning to be involved in the 2018 edition?

AT: Astounded and humbled. I hope the massive distribution represents Scott’s reaching a milestone in his building and expanding the awareness in the space. Careers, companies and billions of dollars were created/invested a result.

The final result both qualitatively and quantitatively was most gratifying to complete. 5000 is still a marathon of a number of companies to research. I’m really pleased that we’ve started to offer more utility beyond the slide in a form of a spreadsheet of companies and categories (found at the end of the post)

I will absolutely be involved moving forward.

MK: Do you chuckle to yourself when you see a “LogoGraphic” with a mere 2-300 company logos on it?

AT: Imagery is powerful and visceral. If I’m chuckling (and nodding), it’s only out of respect of how difficult it can be to create a simple image/graphic with a meaningful narrative. The number of logos doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the audience take away.

Logo Graphics Out in the Wilderness

Here’s a look around the web at some other notable logo graphics. I’ll add to the list as I come across others.

These Ten Companies Make a Lot of the Food we Buy | Oxfam

Oxfam used a logo supergraphic to demonstrate how 10 companies control most of the food and drinks that you find in the grocery store. To the tune of over 1 billion dollars a day in food sales. They launched their Behind the Brands campaign to try to keep the corporations accountable to fairness and sustainability.

Logorama | H5/François Alaux

Logorama is a 16-minute French animated film written and directed by H5/François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, and produced by Autour de Minuit. The film depicts events in a stylized Los Angeles, and is told entirely through the use of more than 2,500 contemporary and historical logos and mascots. The film won the Prix Kodak at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. [source]

Funnel.io‘s front page and retargeting campaign.

As you scroll down the front page of Funnel‘s site you’ll be greeted midway by a hero graphic featuring 40 logos pouring through a funnel. Spend any amount of the time on the site and you’ll be retargeted by logo clusters on Google’s display network. It’s a brilliant and portable use of logo graphics.

See How Many Logos You can Identify | Hooniverse

I still haven’t been able to track down the designer for this vintage automobile logo graphic – but it’s been haunting the web as desktop wallpaper, and even sold as a poster since the early 2010’s. Here’s the original high-res version.

Industry Research Infographics | CB Insights

CB Insights releases industry research infographics at a prolific rate (8 between January 2-11, 2018). And some of them are the most beautifully designed within the ‘logosphere’. Nobody has released more logo infographics and they’ve started to experiment with the presentation and layout to avoid repetition fatigue. Kudos to their designers.

Grapeless Wine And Cowless Milk: 60+ Synthetic Biology Startups In A Market Map

Unicorn Hunters: Investors Ranked by # of Portfolio Companies in the Global Unicorn Club

Metal Festival Posters
Brand identity for heavy metal bands has been a mainstay since metal’s origins. An instantly recognizable logo is of paramount importance to a band (and fan). Heavy metal festivals have long capitalized on this with their posters. Take this Maryland deathfest 2018 poster as for example. ~40 band logos, one graphic. Works well for both print and the web.

Old school punk flyers

And finally if we want to journey back to the late 70’s and early 80’s we arrive at old hand-crafted flyers for hardcore punk concerts. Through the use of photocopiers, exacto knives, glue and tape, DIY designers would meticulously layer band logos onto gritty and transgressive black and white illustrations to advertise the latest show featuring local (and out of town) hardcore bands.

Further Reading

Branded in Memory – 10 iconic logos. 156 Americans. 80 hours of drawing from memory. | Signs.com

Logo Integrity | Jim Nielsen

10 logo design trends that will dominate 2018 | The Next Web

Brands, Logos, and Sigils | Logomancy

The post What is it About Logo Graphics and Why Do We Love Them? appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen a conference that got so many well-respected SEO’s and digital marketers genuinely excited.

On November 30th, 2017 – Paul Shapiro and Catalyst Digital hosted TechSEO Boost, the industry’s first conference dedicated solely to technical SEO in Boston, MA. Below you’ll find all 11 videos, 10 slideshare presentations, notes and every referenced link that I could track down.

And a HUGE shout out to Ruth Reedy Burr (site / Twitter) of Upbuild, who also presented at this event. She was a live tweeting machine that day, posting copious notes and references.

Wanted to genuinely thank @fighto for putting together what was easily the best SEO Conference I’ve ever been to. To all the brilliant folks I had the opportunity to meet at #TechSEOBoost thank you. Can’t wait for next year.

— nick Ξubanks (@nick_eubanks) December 1, 2017

Caught a bit of #TechSEOBoost yesterday and it's exactly what a conference should be. Focused, insightful and actionable. Definitely the way forward for marketing conferences.

— James Whitelock (@jwhitelock90) December 1, 2017

Hopefully marketing event organizers are watching #TechSEOBoost. This is what nailing the programming looks like. (cc: @fighto)

— Ronell Smith (@RonellSmith) November 30, 2017

Table of Contents

• • The State of Technical SEO
  • Working Smarter: SEO Automation to Increase Efficiency & Effectiveness
  • SEO Best Practices for Javascript-Based Websites
  • How Machine Learning is Shaping Google and Technical SEO
  • Everything That Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong
  • Enhancing Your Local Presence With and Without Physical Locations
  • Amping Airbnb.com
  • Implementing and Tracking Semantic Markup with Google Tag Manager
  • Technical Tips & Success Strategies from Engineers
  • Your Search Universe: Links, Log Files, GSC, and Everything in Between
  • Making the Web Fast
  • Further Reading

The State of Technical SEO | Russ Jones, Moz

“Leading vs. Lagging: filling out a technical checklist is not a career!”

What is Technical SEO?: Any sufficiently technical actions undertaken with the intent to improve search results.

 Most SEO’s are working somewhere in the technical stack, whether in the server, the code, the DNS, etc.

 Technical SEO is wholly focused on results, not interested in one-upmanship – it’s about innovation.

 Adoption rates: The top 1000 sites are using AMP heavily, while rates decrease as you go further down the list.

 Technical SEOs are the “R&D wing of our industry.”

 Highly performing sites are early adopters of new technical SEO.

 The industry follows the technology. Interest in JSON-LD drives interest in technical SEO.

 “The difference between technical SEO being a job and being an industry is when people have a career doing it”.

 DistilledODN vs Cloudflare for tech SEO benefits. The WP plugin allows a low barrier to entry. Industry theme: Specialty vs. Scale, e.g. DistilledODN (specialty, $) vs. Cloudflare (scale, free).

 The bad news: If your knowledge scales, it will be automated. To be successful, you have to stay on top of the latest and greatest – or create it yourself. Have a specialized clientele – people who can afford & adopt new tech.

 Developers: convert specialty to scale. It’s your job to put consultants out of their jobs with scaling & automation.

 Researchers will find opportunities and new techniques even when Google is silent. Invest in research; it is the future of technical SEO…and SEO in general.

 “If I had one word of advice it’s that consultants, and developers should be looking to invest in research. Your researchers are the future quite literally of your industry. They will produce for you what you can sell, and if you aren’t, then you’re only reselling what Google has told everybody else to put on their shelves, and that’s only going to last a year or two. We know it well because we’ve seen the graphs that prove it.” – Russ Jones

Working Smarter: SEO Automation to Increase Efficiency & Effectiveness | Paul Shapiro, Catalyst

“We love this tool called KNIME, that you can get that through KNIME.com. It’s free and open source and what I really like about it, is it’s literally this drag-and-drop interface, so the barrier to entry is very very low.

Even some of our non-technical staff can get their feet wet and start playing around with it. It’s completely free, and there’s this huge library of things already built into it.”

 Nodes are pre-built modules designed to complete a task. String them together to automate more complex tasks.

 To automate you’ll also need a scheduling system like Cron, to schedule recurring tasks.

 You can automate keyword research: add your seed keywords and automate pulls from keyword tool APIs.

 Instead of just spitting out your research into a spreadsheet, use simple visualizations to make dynamic decisions. Use interactive data visualization like @tableau or Google Data Studio to make decisions on the fly.

 Automate reporting. “The most obvious thing you should be thinking about automating is reporting. I remember my first SEO job, and we spent hours upon hours making reports in Excel. That’s really dumb because this is literally something that should take you five minutes.”

 Any procedure that can be broken down into smaller tasks that a computer can do can be automated.
What can we automate for SEO?

• Reporting
• Data collection
• 301 Mapping – Automate 301 redirect mapping from old URLs. [see graphic]
• Test javascript rendering
• Performance testing with lighthouse
• Anomaly collection
• Content ideas – Reddit data mining
• AMP validation
• Link building
• Tech audit

[source]

Links

How to Automate Your Keyword Research | Paul Shapiro

Automatically Download Google Search Analytics Data Every Month [Updated for New API] | Search Wilderness

Script to extract performance metrics

Crawler with node.js to test rendering

Alert! Abnormal organic CTR detected. Automatic detection of poorly performing metadata | Search Engine Land

Fixing historical redirects using Wayback Machine APIs | Search Engine Land

SEO Best Practices for Javascript-Based Websites | Max Prin, Merkle

 Search engines are not just crawling anymore – they’re rendering. Google is a headless browser now.

 Crawl > Index > Rank has become Crawl > Render > Index > Rank.

 “Google is working on updating their Web Rendering Service (WRS) that they use when they crawl your site based on the latest version of Chrome (currently Chrome 41)”.

 We don’t build websites for search engines; we build websites for users and make sure search engines can understand them.

 APIs won’t be activated/used by a web rendering service. Crawlers and platforms that don’t render the page won’t see things that are in the DOM but not the code. Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. aren’t rendering as well.

 Twitter cards/OG tags that are dynamically rendered via JS may not be visible to Twitter/Facebook.
Bing is yet not rendering JS at scale, though there are signs that they can do simple things like follow JS redirects.

 A single-page application should not be a single-URL application. Content has to live somewhere.

 If the content changes but the title/stays the same, that’s a crawler issue. A lot of websites change the main content that’s rendering, but don’t change the. Lots of important SEO signals get lost that way.

 URL structure: escaped fragments don’t always load for search engines. Google is deprecating the hashbang – they’ll stop requesting the escaped fragment altogether. Leverage pushState to serve a clean URL instead of using a #.

 Internal links: onclick + window location doesn’t mimic a classic HTML link as far as a search engine’s concerned.

 Internal linking is a big deal. It can overwrite canonical tags. Just make sure it’s done via traditional The 5-second rule for loading content. The 5-second rule: Google might not see things that take 5+ seconds to load on your page.

 Chrome Dev Tools: Console – Lighthouse check for JS rendering errors.

Links:
Nozzle
TechnicalSEO.com

Fun with Machines. How Machine Learning is Shaping Google and Technical SEO | JR Oakes, Adapt Partners

 TF-IDF sounds very fancy, but it’s not the magic elixir to dominating on Google.

 Wikimedia released their MjoLniR model on GitHub last month. Look at information retrieval mechanisms to get insight into how Google might be handling it.

 Machine learning is significantly more effective as an information retrieval mechanism than BM25.

 BM25 beats TF-IDF as an information retrieval algorithm because it considers more factors like page length. Wikipedia transitioned to BM25 in 2016 – now they’re using machine learning models.

 TF-IDF won’t work because it looks for related phrases, but is a frequency, not a relevance metric.

 Content loading on the page after 5 seconds? Probably not going to be indexed.

 Instead of just clicks, Google wants to use (e.g., mouse) movements to gauge user satisfaction. Google is interested in click data and is thinking a lot about how to extrapolate value from user activity.
Google Search Quality Guidelines is the ground truth for Google’s Search machine learning problem.

 You may not need to “optimize” your meta descriptions anymore because Google will figure out the “best” story for you. Google could take all of our content and make a better page out of it.

 LSTMs pick up referential information in documents and tie that information together. Focus on: query disambiguation. When the query is vague, Google gives a nudge via suggestions.

 Use Google’s query disambiguation (“don’t hit enter”) to disambiguate your own site, e.g., your navigation. Understand how Google uses content/semantic relationships to improve your content’s internal relevance.

 Google knows the frequency with which words co-occur on the internet. They can use that knowledge to determine whether or not content is expert-level.

Links

Duplicate detection with shingling notebook / Semantic Relevance & word vector notebook

Research at Google

Incorporating Clicks, Attention, and Satisfaction into a Search Engine Result Page Evaluation Model | Research Paper

Learning to Rank with Selection Bias in Personal Search | Research Paper

Everything That Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong | Patrick Stox, IBM

 Noindexing pages via meta robots won’t do anything to remove pages from the index if you’re blocking them with robots.txt. Disable caching of .txt files unless you want to flirt with accidentally blocking everything from being crawled.

 Google is processing up to 5-6 hops on redirect chains. Redirecting based on browser language can result in Google indexing English pages instead of other languages.

 Bing does process JavaScript when crawling pages.

 React JS can result in unfriendly URLs / uncrawlable links – but it’s very customizable so just educate the dev team on what needs to be done.

 “You’ll never get things exactly as you want in enterprise technical SEO. Pick your battles.”

 Thinking of changing all the links in your CMS (including canonicals) to relative? Don’t do that. Create an exception for canonicals and use their absolute paths.

 Custom 404 page returns a 200 – redirecting all 404s to that 200 page. DON’T DO THAT.

 Using UTF-8 characters in your URLs? Check your whole stack. Just because the CMS supports it doesn’t mean everything does.

 AMP is really hard to implement on an enterprise site. (see Airbnb presentation for more on this). Companies’ legal requirements for hosting content is one of the big barriers to AMP adoption.

 Look at any new system that’s on the way in – try to get ahead of any problems.

 You will never fix everything as a technical SEO. Sometimes it’s actually cheaper to not fix stuff.

Links:

You’re Going To Screw Up International SEO | Patrick Stox

Host A Website Inside Robots.txt | ohgm

HTTP to HTTPS: An SEO’s guide to securing a website | Search Engine Land

What you need to know about Referrer Policy | Search Engine Land

The AMP is a Lie | Search Engine Land

Enhancing Your Local Presence With and Without Physical Locations | Joe Esposito, Rio SEO

 “You don’t necessarily need physical locations to rank well at the local level. You don’t necessarily need physical locations to have any kind of impact effect on local, conquering the local space, and ultimately ranking at the local level.

SERP’s are all local.All the ads that are coming through from AdWords, all the organic listings, everything is tied back to local. There’s no modifier, there’s nothing geo about the actual search, but the results all end up being tied back to local” – Joe Esposito

 “When you lack local content, it takes the user too much time to find what they are looking for… make sure you have content across the hierarchy.”

 Use breadcrumbs with a site with a store locator to send stronger location signals.

Amping Airbnb.com | Gil Birman, Brian Ta, Airbnb @gilboxme @fanfavorite_bta

 30 different teams work on Airbnb’s core search landing pages.

 AMP pages were timing out about 16% of the time. They implemented CDN caching to get around it.

 New features like horizontally-scrolling image containers broke AMP implementation.

 AMP is displayed in an iframe – no custom JavaScript, no custom styles.

 AMP doesn’t support inline styles – only style tags which appear in the.

 Use an ERB template that calls render_react_component & send to Hypernova AMP to render there.

 User flows for AMP work well for 1st-time/logged-out users, but it’s a confusing experience for logged-in users.

 Use logic and reason to reduce CSS that mucks up AMP.

 Deeplinking – Google does NOT open a deep link when clicking on an AMP result. Users have to click again to get to the app.

 Implementing AMP targeting a limited audience increased bookings from SEO by 6%.

Links
AMP For Retailers: Is It Worth It? | Smashing Magazine

Implementing and Tracking Semantic Markup with Google Tag Manager | Mike Arnesen, Ruth Burr Reedy

“Semantic markup should be SEO101 these days. As basic as title tags.”

 Rich snippets are evolving into rich cards on mobile. Search engines are doing more and more and using markup to extract that data.

 Schema.org ‘s latest version (3.3) includes “how-to” markup. This means no more using the recipe markup for your non-food how-to content.

 Structured data in RSS 2.0 helps assistants like Google Home play and understand information about your podcasts.

 “There are early signs that Bing will support JSON-LD markup too.”

 “Structured data is driving voice search.”

 JSON-LD is faster, easier, cleaner and better in every way (vs. inline)

 Upside of dynamic JSON-LD: unlimited power and flexibility. Downside: it takes some persistence.

I absolutely love how @Mike_Arnesen and @ruthburr are breaking down this code example. That’s not an easy thing to explain in a presentation. #TechSEOBoost

— Paul Shapiro (@fighto) November 30, 2017

Links
Implementing Semantic Markup with Google Tag Manager | Upbuild

Key Structured Data Events

The Search Marketer’s Guide to ItemRef & ItemID | Moz

Using Google Tag Manager to Dynamically Generate Schema/JSON-LD Tags | Moz

Technical Tips & Success Strategies from Engineers | Moderator: Andrew Ruegger, Catalyst

Moderator: Andrew Ruegger, Head of Data Science, Catalyst/GroupM
Panelists: Gil Birman, Software Engineer, Airbnb; Derek Perkins, CEO & Co-Founder, Nozzle; Tanner Linsley, Co-Founder & VP of UX, Nozzle; Mike Atwood, Lead SEO Engineer, Wayfair

We’re all working towards the same goal, but may not be speaking the same language. Here’s a panel of engineers sharing insights and ideas that will advance your technical knowledge and
facilitate better collaboration with your engineering counterparts. This panel will provide you with strategies and tips for how SEOs and engineers can work more effectively together to accomplish business goals.

Your Search Universe: Links, Log Files, GSC, and Everything in Between | Sam Marsden, DeepCrawl

 Log files will show you where search engines go on your site, and how frequently.
Look for:
– non-indexable pages with Googlebot requests
– indexable pages w/o Googlebot requests

 Look at backlinks to nofollow pages – where is link equity evaporating?

 Duplicate pages can split your backlinks. Canonical/redirect to consolidate link equity.

Making the Web Fast | Patrick Meenan, Google

“sprinkle machine learning on everything and magic comes out” @patmeenan

 Performance metrics are the biggest contributors to bounce rate – DOM Content Loaded was the biggest predictor.

 Over the years Google has been evolving more toward user-facing metrics like First Paint. Try to get real performance data in w/your biz metrics, including Time to First Paint

 If your website loads too fast, your conversion rate will start to drop.

 Don’t optimize towards a full page load. Instead, give them the most important stuff immediately and worry about the rest later.

 By focusing on visual metrics, chrome drove a faster visual experience but regressed on interaction. Get more content in front of the user as soon as possible – Speed Index explained

 Time To Interactive: The time it takes before a user can actually do something.

 First interactive looks toward the beginning of the waterfall, TTI looks to the end. If you see a lot of red at the bottom of your waterfall, look at how much code you’re running: do you need it all?

 Your experience with a high-end phone won’t match that of users with slower phones. Get a couple of Moto G4s or other $100-ish phones and use them to test your mobile site to compare.

 Averages suck – look at the histograms. What is the distribution of your performance?

 Weekend/weekday variations – people are on fast computers at work, slower ones at home. When measuring UX, look at real user data.

 When trending performance, lab data works better because of fewer variables.

 Every web developer should frequently be testing their site with the “Slow 3G” network setting.

Links

High-Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers | Steve Souders

Case study: Mobile pages that are 1 second faster experience up to 27% increase in conversion rate | SOASTA

WebPagetest Documentation

Chrome User Experience report

Easiest place to get started w/recommended parameters

Page Speed Case Studies – Case studies and experiments demonstrating the impact of web performance optimization (WPO) on user experience and business metrics.

Reducing Domain Sharding | Code as Craft

Chrome User Experience Report | Google

Leveraging the Performance Metrics that Most Affect User Experience

Why Marketers Should Care About Mobile Page Speed | Think With Google

“Don’t A/B test with JavaScript. Do it server side unless you hate yourself and your site” paraphrased.

Further Reading

Data-SEO blog

All of the #TechSEOboost tweets

The post Technical SEO: Getting it Right – [87] Takeaways from TechSEO Boost 2017 appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

[image credit]

7,292. That’s how many articles have been posted on EliteFTS.com as of Monday. November 13th, 2017.

But the title of this post is a bit misleading. If you add on the 2,000 monthly Q&A posts, 500 monthly blog posts, the library of 14,000 videos you’re actually looking at content that numbers in the tens of thousands. And we haven’t even touched the archived material from 1998-2014.

Apparently, there’s a crisis in content marketing – but somebody forgot to let Dave Tate (founder and CEO of elitefts.com Inc.) know. EliteFTS has been educating & outfitting the strongest athletes around the world for almost 20 years.

It wasn’t called content marketing when Dave started 20 years ago, and he’s never stopped writing since.

“Today we are still adding more than 1,000 pages of top quality content each month and have refined an even more robust credentialing system to ensure we are providing you with trusted content. In the coming year, we will continue to expand our wide range of free educational articles, blogs, Q&A’s, videos and more. We will keep adding columnists who are well-respected professionals in the field.”

EliteFTS is a company that utilizes video (both amateur from the gym floor and pro quality), a Q&A forum, blog posts, training logs, long-form pieces and even a suite of books to educate the public. If there’s a medium that exists, Dave Tate has probably experimented with it.

Contents

• Dave Tate is Serious About Content
• They Publish Dozens of Coaching and Training Logs
• They Host an Immense Q&A Section
• They’ve Made Video Content a Huge Priority
• Their Long Form Content is Loooooong!
• An Interview with EliteFTS Managing Editor, Sheena Leedham
• Did I Mention Dave Tate Also Writes Books?
• They Dipped Their Toes Into Long-form Journalism
• Live Seminars and Events
• They Host and Champion a Special Needs Section
• HTTPS, Site Migrations & Featured Rich Snippets
• What I’d Improve On
• Your Content Marketing Takeaways

Introduction

Dave Tate is serious about content. Like really serious. Maybe more so than any other CEO I’ve ever come across in a midsized business.

And more importantly, as a lifter he’s walked the walk. Check out this impossibly long list of injuries he’s incurred over a 3+ decade lifting career.

[Source]

So what about the content? Let’s take a look…

Content Production

• Over 700 articles per year are published. A rate that’s been maintained for over a decade.
• Around 500 blog posts/month for the past 15 years.
• With the Q&A, EliteFTS publishes close to 2000 pages of content per month.

SEMrush Stats:

• Number of Ranking Keywords Phrases: ~57,900 keyword terms
• Monthly Search Traffic Volume: 78,600 monthly visitors via Google search. This only accounts for search traffic estimates. Add in social, newsletter, referral and direct traffic and the number would climb much higher.
• Monthly Search Traffic Value: $46,900 – A competitor would need to budget approx. $600K in annual PPC spend to buy the valuable traffic that EliteFTS fetches organically.

Social Media Stats

• Facebook – 432,374 Followers
• Instagram: EliteFTS – 12,800 Followers / Dave Tate – 272,000 Followers
• YouTube – 45,861 Sunscribers
• Twitter – EliteFTS – 51,400 Followers / Dave Tate – 260,000 Followers

Personal admission:
Confession. I’m a long-time fanboy. Here’s a pic of my stash of EliteFTS accessories. I’ve “battle-tested” them in various gyms. I’m a true convert. And I found them through their content.

So call this a love letter to a fitness company if you will – or admiration for a decades long commitment to educational content. This whole article is dedicated to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose’s ‘Rants & Raves’ section from their PNR With This Old Marketing Podcast.

They Publish Dozens of Coaching and Training Logs

There are currently 17 coaching logs and 15 training logs on the site, running and updating simultaneously. Read motivation and theory from pro coaches or follow along with every set and rep from powerlifters and bodybuilders.

They Host an Immense Q&A Section

“With the QA EliteFTS publishes close to 2000 pages of content per month.”

EliteFTS long-running Question & Answer section has over 50 experts answering thousands of questions a year. Nobody waits long for an answer. The answers are located and archived in a searchable database.

They’ve Made Video Content a Huge Priority

EliteFTS has amassed over 45,000 subscribers and almost 9 million views on their current YouTube Channel as of this writing.

They’ve made great use of playlists to organize their growing archive of videos.

And if you want to see how granular they get – here’s a playlist of 33 short videos demonstrating their cable grenade ball attachments.

And 38 more for resistance bands.

You get the point.

Rather than overwhelm you with a 20-30 minute video, you can simply watch clip after clip. And it worked. Do you have any idea how much it cost me (exchange rate, shipping, and duty) to have those cable grenade attachments shipped from Ohio to Canada? I don’t care – it was worth it.

Their Long Form Content is Loooooong!

EliteFTS has been a progenitor of long-form articles for years. When it comes to the writing – Dave Tate handles a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ himself.

And these articles are hefty. The word counts and depth-of-knowledge in these pieces wouldn’t be out of place in a Texas Monthly feature or NYTimes Weekend read. We’re talking 9, 16, 23, and 26-thousand word tomes.

And admittedly it was these epic posts that made me want to write this piece about them in the first place.

Take his 12 Tips for the Advanced Lifter piece from July 2015. It clocks in at over 9,000 words. Because that’s how many it took to get the job done.

He dropped a free ‘Dave Tate’s Free Squat Manual’ on the world in late 2013. It now sits as a 16,000-word article on the site.

Not to be outdone, he then published the 26,000-word Benchipedia: – Dave Tate’s Free Bench Press Manual as a follow-up.

“We are an education company that happens to sell the highest quality equipment, accessories, goods and services to lifters (our target market) who place training as one of the highest priorities in their life – so as long as we keep putting out content for free like we do now we’re gonna have people that are going to support us because it’s through that content or through those products that we sell that allows this content to be given out for free.

So it’s one hand feeding the other, and that’s that’s the business model that we have. That’s the philosophy of live, learn, pass on. That’s why this company was founded.”

And the deadlift manual is also clocking in at 23,000 words. These are educational novellas.

“The company wasn’t founded to compete with company ABCDE. I don’t give a shit about any of that. What I want to do is to educate and help people to become better, to break PR’s and learn that those same skills that they have in the gym can be applied to their own life or their business and become better there as well.

That’s what drives me. That’s why I do this.”
-Dave Tate

An Interview with EliteFTS Managing Editor, Sheena Leedham

EliteFTS’s managing editor, Sheena Leedham was kind enough to take some time out to break down their editorial process for me. As you’ll see, managing the tidal wave of content that they publish is a very involved process.

MK: Dave Tate wrote earlier this year – ‘There are 7859 articles live on the site (We deleted thousands of others with the site migration a few years ago). All of these run through our editorial staff from vetting > concept > check > edit > format > publish. It can take up to 6 weeks for some articles to publish.’

What does that process look like in more detail? How chaotic does it get when you’re looking down the barrel of coordinating 50-70 pieces of content from dozens of contributors each month?

SL: The schedule comes together very organically believe it or not. As our foundation, we have 34 columnists that follow monthly writing schedules with submission deadlines and publishing dates. Therefore this gives our monthly schedule cadence.

To supplement the schedule and based on the columnist topics, we consider sponsored coach and athlete submissions, including outside submissions. We want a mixture of what’s trending in the industry and what our readers come to our site to read daily: topics including powerlifting, bodybuilding, strongman, motivation, nutrition, training programs, strength and conditioning, coaching, special needs, and more.

The typical editorial path that each and every submission takes begins with a review by Dave and myself. At this point if it needs more clarification or development the article is sent back to the writer — this process takes as long as it needs until the piece is what we’re looking for. Once the article is complete (initially or through further development) it then is assigned to our associate editor for an edit.

Once edited, the article is reread, formatted (includes collaboration with Creative Director and/or Digital Media Editor ), and published on its appropriate date.

MK: Does the Editorial team at EliteFTS take SEO, keyword & topic research into consideration when you’re planning out your editorial calendar? Or is it more by gut instinct?

SL: We’re not choosing articles solely based on SEO. Instead, we package each article picked for the month to be SEO appropriate.

MK: EliteFTS.com appears to be a marriage of the Magento Commerce platform – for the online store – and WordPress acting as the content management system for all of your educational content. I realize there was a massive site migration a couple of years ago. How does your current setup compare with the old site?

SL: Our current setup, after the initial site migration, is much more customer-friendly and internal-friendly, comparatively. Just based on the new site’s configuration, we were able to provide a lot more options (sales and editorial) that we couldn’t provide before. We still have a lot of room to improve and are securing ways to be more mobile responsive — continuing to best serve our customer experience.

MK: EliteFTS has several hundred thousand backlinks pointing at it from close to 2000 different website domains. Does your team do any outreach to other sites? Or do sites just link out naturally to EliteFTS as a result of years of posting quality information?

SL: We don’t pay any sites to link out. I’d imagine it’s a combination of both. We’re an established company that has always produced quality information. Our customers, staff, and team members (past and current) allow this outreach to continue to evolve and stretch without limit.

MK: What does your distribution process look like these days when you publish new content? Is it simply a matter of posting it on your various social media channels and e-newsletters? Do you add anything else to the mix?

SL: We distribute our content via the website, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (occasionally), and Flickr. Our authors share their content through their social media channels and websites of choice.

MK: Dave Tate, Louie Simmons, Westside Barbell, John ‘Mountaindog’ Meadows, Rogue Fitness, etc.…
What’s in the water in Ohio?!??

SL: When boiled down to rid of all the chemicals, bacteria, and other microorganisms, it’s passion. Passion is contagious.

EliteFTS Book Collection

Speaking of long-form content…

The EliteFTS team has been writing and publishing books for many years. I get the feeling Dave would be writing no matter what his station in life was. The man has put out too many hundreds of thousands of words for me to think otherwise.

Here’s some brief synopses of select books that he’s penned.

Raising the Bar

“In Raising the Bar, Dave tells his entire story, warts and all. From a troubled childhood, passed off from one special education program to another and labeled “stupid” and “learning disabled,” to the pitfalls of success, Dave takes the reader through the entire experience, demonstrating and teaching the strategies he’s used throughout his life to prepare, perform and prevail in even the most hopeless situations imaginable.”

Under the Bar

“The book is not about training, but it is. This book was not written about business but it was. This book was not compiled to help you better your relationships, but it could be. This book was not written as a road map to help you achieve your goals, but it ended up that way. This book was written to show you that you already have all you need to achieve success in anything you choose to do. You just need to know where to look.”

Dave Tate’s Iron Evolution

“This is the story of his life. Originally published in multiple segments on www.t-nation.com, reprinted on www.elitefts.com, and read by thousands of aspiring lifters, it is now compiled into one ebook. This is as close to a Dave Tate autobiography as you will ever get. It is his life and training story, with an uncensored chapter for every step of the way.”

Gym Talk 5: Business Tips from a Mashed Up Meathead

“If you are a business owner, the chances are strong that you’ve read a few guides on how to operate a successful business. The chances are even greater that each of these guides has gone through a stringent editorial process that leaves the final product as a watered-down collection of ideas that includes roughly 50% of the original author’s message. The information that isn’t fun to hear gets cut, and empty encouragement replaces it.”

And They Dipped Their Toes Into Long-form Journalism

EliteFTS experimented with long-form journalism with ‘Price of the Platform‘ back in 2014, when Bryan Krahn was enlisted to research and write an expose on the long-term effects of powerlifting on the body and mind. It’s a powerful piece and one of the best on the site.

As I said, if the format exists, Dave Tate has tried it.

Guest Columns

Dave Tate has been a guest columnist on sites like T-Nation enabling him to educate other audiences. He has 65 entries on there dating all the way back to July 2000. It’s actually on that particular site where I was first exposed to his writings, as were thousands of other EliteFTS customers.

Live Seminars and Events

Over the years EliteFTS has hosted and planned various live events such as:

• Sports Performance Summit
• Learn to Train Seminar
• Powerlifting Experience
• Open Underground Strength Session

And recently they just held the Strong(er) Business Summit 2017 at the Ohio State University – geared to helping others create the strongest businesses possible.

They Host and Champion a Special Needs Section on the Site

“Elitefts is the only strength site I know of that has an article category for Special Needs. While most the articles published are about Autism, there are also articles on Suicide, Addiction, Depression, PTSD, and others. Autism is much easier to write about as the others are “taboo” for those who have real-world experience to write”

How did migrating the entire site, killing off thousands of old pages and switching over to HTTPS affect search traffic?

The EliteFTS website underwent two major projects in 2016. First was the major site redesign. Second was the migration over to the more secure HTTPS.

From what I could see – other than a brief dip in the summer-fall of 2016, it looks like things only improved for them after. I’ve attached a graphic that tracks (estimated) search traffic. It looks like it absolutely skyrocketed around April 2017 – and then settled back down to a new high this past summer.

So from my take – the migration, switch to HTTPS (recommended by Google) and the EliteFTS editorial content workflow have only continually improved things for the site/business. In other words – they’re winning!

Featured Rich Snippets

EliteFTS is ranking on the first page of Google for 100 ‘How To’ search phrases.
[how to use lifting straps] – Volume: 1,300
[how to get yoked] – Volume: 880
[how to hit harder in football] – Volume: 880
[how to open a gym] – Volume: 720
[how to use a weight belt] – Volume: 720
[how to get into powerlifting] – Volume: 720
[how to sumo deadlift] – Volume: 590
[how to become a powerlifter] – Volume: 590

And they’re starting to capture a lot of those coveted featured rich snippets (position zero) in Google. They currently show up in the top search box for 2,841 keyword terms according to SEMrush.

Recommendations For Improvements

I know. I just spent 2500 words telling you how awesome EliteFTS is. But when you’re running such a juggernaut of an operation, small things either get back-burnered or de-prioritized.

My minor recommendations:

1. Fix the broken links on the older videos on YouTube. It would be thankless and grueling work – but a lot of the links to products and articles (under the descriptions of the videos themselves on YT) now lead to either 404 pages or nothing. And some of those videos have tens of thousands of views and continue to find new viewers.
2. Initiate an internal links campaign, directing traffic to under-performing pages with a lot of potential. With such an incredible inventory of articles, I’d run the content portion of the site through an audit with software like Screaming Frog (or similar) and find candidate pages to funnel link equity to.
3. Make those deadlift, bench press, and squat mega-guide pages into ‘super powerhouses’. They deserve to rank much higher. Reformat them (table of contents, H2’s, H3’s, <ol>’s and <ul>’s to capture more rich snippet rankings, and I’d also layer in some videos throughout the sections.
4. Remove that ‘Elitefitness.com’ link from the footer – or at least rel=”nofollow” it. That’s quite a powerful backlink being delivered from the footer of thousands of pages.
5. Build an actual one-page super index for your Exercise Index – possibly broken down into categories (powerlifting / bodybuilding / programs / body part). The current index is a great start – but it runs 18 pages deep.

Your Content Marketing Takeaways

So what can we learn from this company who has basically delivered you a masterclass on content marketing over the past decade?

• The author(s) of your content should be writing with deep knowledge and passion for the subject. Authority matters!
• Go all in on a platform or format. Don’t shoot 10 videos. Shoot 200. Keep shooting videos until you’ve covered all your bases.
• Answer every question! Be the go-to resource of your industry. Be the answer to the search query entered into Google.
• This is a long game, not a campaign. Show up every week, for months, for years. It’s the accumulation of the info that you publish over time that will reap compounding benefits.

Alright – that’s it for tonight. I have to go attempt one of Mark Dugdale’s workouts in the morning.

The post How Dave Tate & EliteFTS Used 7,292 Pieces of Content to Outlift the Competition appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

SEMrush is an SEO tool that has proven itself to be worth its weight in gold over the years. I first started using the software after buying Nick Eubanks’ Master Keyword Strategy course. Both SEMrush, and Nick’s teachings paid for themselves many times over when I went freelance.

Many other SEOs “in the know” also went through that same course, and then eventually developed their own tactics.

Late last year, and earlier this year, some of marketing’s best and brightest created tutorials diving deep into SEMrush’s capabilities as a competitive intelligence tool and topic generator.

And what good is a tutorial if you don’t put it to use? Below I’ve put each of them to the test, and I was quite impressed with the results. I feel like I’ve attended master classes on keyword topical research – and now you can as well.

Contents

1. SEMrush Keyword Research Tutorial: Two Effective Methods!
2. Finding SEO Opportunities with SEMrush
3. How to Come Up With Topics for Content Marketing – SEO Topical Research
4. Further Reading

Dan Shure [Evolving SEO] SEMrush Keyword Research Tutorial: Two Effective Methods!

First, we’ll dive into Dan Shure’s [Evolving SEO] video. We’re going to use SEMrush for keyword research to come up with blog content ideas to grow our organic search traffic.

The idea is to generate blog topics to create “10x content” that will result in better organic search traffic. We’re working on the assumption that we’ll be creating the best and most authoritative piece of content around that topic on the web. Half-assing the content creation aspect of this will NOT work.

I’m going to use the brand new site coolcoldbrew.co.uk as a guinea pig for this strategy. Cool Cold Brew is a brand new start-up in the UK who offer up a range of healthier chilled coffee drinks. They’ve currently raised over £151,650 on Crowdcube and have already generated both blog posts and videos. Content is top of mind for this company.

I’ll start off by typing ‘Cold Brew Coffee’ into Google search. It’s a little too broad for our purposes here – but I just want to get a feel for what is out there.

Starbucks Nariño 70 Cold Brew grabs the top spot in the paid ad slot.

The top four organic posts are all ‘How to’ posts. That’s incredibly interesting and helpful for our future content endeavors. And the fifth spot is a ‘Why’ post.

1. How To Make Cold Brew Coffee At Home | Kicking Horse Coffee
2. How To Make Cold Brew Coffee | SimplyRecipes.com
3. How to make cold brew coffee | Jamie Oliver
4. How to Make Cold-Brewed Coffee | Food52
5. Why Cold Brew Coffee? | Toddy Coffee Maker

When we take a look at the ‘People also ask’ box – I see the potential for at least 4-5 articles/videos that Cool Brew Coffee as a brand could create content for.

• Why cold brew coffee is better?
• How long does cold brew coffee need to steep?
• Is cold brewed coffee good for you?
• Is there more caffeine in cold brew coffee?

While there is a lot of high-ranking posts for ‘how to make cold brew coffee’ there are also a lot of queries that cross over to the pre-bottled cold brew industry. Cool Cold Brew could and should aim the be ‘the answer’ to a lot these questions.

The Dan Shure SEMrush Method

Find popular sites (with high domain authority) that have written about your topic. We’re choosing high DA sites here for a number of reasons.

1. Often sites with a high domain Authority are publishing a lot of content – across a wide variety of niches and subjects.
2. They’ve been around for a long time and might not be publishing the most authoritative content. They might have been ‘dropping the ball’ and posting inferior ‘me too’ content.
3. Their content that might be outdated or lower quality and that’s where you can come in and create something even better.
4. This means that there’s a Content gap opportunity for you to fill.

So let’s fill it.

We’ll start out by inputting the site food52.com into the SEMrush dashboard.

Over on the left click on ‘Pages’ to get the Pages Report.

This initial report isn’t extremely helpful is it gives us a huge list 59,402 pages which are ranking. We’ll need to filter it down further.

In ‘Advanced filters’ we’ll use the ‘Include’ “URL’ ‘Containing’ blocks and enter ‘coffee’ into the blank field.

This gives us a much more manageable 426 results. Just scanning the list by eye – the ‘How to Make Cold-Brewed Coffee‘ article is right at the top and responsible for 1.44% of the search traffic to the entire site. This is a well-regarded article!

If we click on the result in SEMrush, we can drill down much further.

Now we can see that:

• The post is ranking for a staggering 1808 keywords
• Worth about $32,000 in monthly search traffic.
• Driving almost 20,000 visitors a month via search.

Let’s check what it’s ranking for on the first page of Google – and if there are any terms we can tackle with our own content.

Underneath ‘TOP ORGANIC KEYWORDS’ at the lower right click on ‘View full report.’

Now we’ll sort it by position and volume. We want to see all of the first-page keyword rankings.

Click on ‘Advanced filters’ and then set the three blue fields to ‘Include’, ‘Pos’, and ‘Less than.’ Enter 11 into the blank field to the right. Click ‘Apply.’

If the Volume column isn’t already sorted from high to low, click on the down arrow.
Now we have a list of the high volume keywords that the article is ranking for.

This is quite an intimidating list to go after. The keyword difficulty scores range from 64.66 to 86.

While Cool Cold Brew would certainly want to rank for a lot these terms and their variations down the road, the DA (domain authority) of their newish site sits at 11. Food52 (an independent food publisher) has been around since 2009, has 1 million registered contributors, tens of thousands of indexed pages and a DA of 80.

One possibility for an article stands out. Cold brew coffee ratios.
[Cold brew ratio] – Volume: 4,400
[Coffe to water ratio] – Volume: 3,600
[Cold brew coffee ratio] – Volume: 3,600

Most of the terms containing the word ‘ratio’ appear to have a lower Keyword Difficulty score. The difficulty index while still high, landing in the in the 59-70 zone, seems more attainable than the broader terms.

And a quick search in Google shows me that the majority of the top posts don’t have ‘ratio’ in the title or meta description. This could be a content gap opportunity.

If we re-filter the keyword list to only include terns with the word ‘ratio’ some more possibilities start to emerge.

[ratio for cold brew coffee] – Volume: 320
[coffee to water ratio cold brew] – Volume: 260
[cold brew coffee to water ratio] – Volume: 260
[cold brew concentrate ratio] – Volume: 260
[coffee brewing ratio] – Volume: 140

People want to know the ratio between coffee grounds and water in cold brew. And there’s a lot of variations of search terms in the query. Might be worth it to create a video, article (with accompanying graphics and diagrams) around this topic.

If we refer back to the ‘People also ask’ queries…

• Why cold brew coffee is better?
• How long does cold brew coffee need to steep?
• Is cold brewed coffee good for you?
• Is there more caffeine in cold brew coffee?

We could repeat this process for each of the questions.

1. Enter each one into Google.
2. Investigate who is ranking on the first page for each query.
3. Place the URL’s into SEMrush and start mining for more terms and topics that you feel you might have a chance of ranking for with an authoritative piece of content.

If we put enough of these authoritative articles on the site and start to rank them, the potential for search traffic to increase 5x, 10x or 20x becomes a real possibility.

Reinforce these informative posts with videos on the same subject matter, embedded in both the articles as well as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. and it won’t be long before the brand is THE go-to place for all things Cold Brew.

And before we move on – be sure to watch Dan’s new video utilizing both Quora and SEMrush as a potent combination.

Cory Collins [Page One Power] Keyword Research: Finding SEO Opportunities with SEMrush

Next up Cory Collins [Page One Power]shows us “how to find keywords that your website already ranks for, but not well enough to secure the traffic it deserves.”

We’re going to find which keywords are driving traffic to your website and identify SEO opportunities where these terms are already sending traffic to your site but your rankings could be improved.

If you improve the rankings for those keywords you will drive a significant increase in traffic to your website.

So how do we do this with SEMrush?

I’m going to drop in the URL for the site of Jeffalytics.com

I happen to be taking a couple of Jeff Sauer’s courses (more on those in a future post) so I’ve been spending a lot of time on his site(s).

Let’s go into SEMrush to look at what keywords are driving traffic from organic search to Jeffalytics.

Click on ‘Organic Research’ from the left-hand menu and then scroll down to ‘ORGANIC SEARCH POSITIONS’

This is a list of the top organic keywords that are driving traffic to his site.
I then re-order it by ‘Traffic %’ to see which keywords are already driving the most search traffic website sorted by percentage.

Right off the bat, I note:
[google partners]
[google analytics certification]
[google recovery account]

He’s ranking on either the first or second page for these higher volume terms. So we see some possibilities here – but let’s dig deeper.

Let’s go back resort this list by search volume.

Head back over to volume and click the lower arrow – to list out all of the ranking keywords by search volume (the average number of times users have searched for a given keyword per month).

We’re going to ignore the irrelevant (read: overly broad) and extremely competitive keywords here. Terms such as [periodic table] and [google plus] won’t suit our needs here so we’ll move on.

Apply Advanced Filters to the Organic Keyword List

Now we’ll drill down into more granular detail and find the real gold in this keyword list.

We’re going to isolate all of the keywords that are ranking from the lower half of the first page of Google all the way down to the fifth page. Positions 8 through 50.

Go down to ‘Advanced Filters’

1. Click the middle blue button that says ‘keyword’ and select ‘Pos.’ from the drop-down menu.
2. Then click the third (right) blue button that says ‘Equal’ and select ‘Greater than’ from the drop-down.
3. Enter ‘7’ (or whatever you wish) in the blank white field to the right.

1. Now click the ‘+ Add one more’ on the row below. A new row of 3 blue buttons will appear.
2. Repeat the above process by clicking the middle blue button that says ‘keyword’ and select ‘Pos.’ from the drop-down.
3. This time when you click the third blue button (‘Equal’) on the 2nd row select ‘Less than’ and enter 51 into the blank white field.
4. Hit ‘Apply’ and we’re ready to roll!

Now we have a much more concise list of keyword opportunities.
Ones that immediately stand out:
[google account recovery] – Position: 44; Volume: 110,000
[google accounts recovery] – Position: 43; Volume: 49,500
[google partners] – Position: 10; Volume: 14,800
[google analytics login] – Position: 16; Volume: 12,100
[google analytics certification] – Position: 19; Volume: 9,900
[what is google analytics] – Position: 45; Volume: 2,900
[google partner] – Position: 8; Volume: 1,600
[google training] – Position: 20; Volume: 1,300
[google analytics account] – Position: 12; Volume: 1,000

Now with just a few minutes work, we have a strong base list of higher traffic keywords that we can improve the rankings on.

The entire filtered list contains 2,647 keywords. With another hour’s work, we could build up a rock solid that contains dozens and even hundreds of long-tail keywords that we could potentially move the needle on. Longform articles and in-depth guides are especially good for this.

If we go back to the left menu on the SEMrush dashboard and hit ‘Pages’ we’ll see which pages and posts on Jeff’s site are receiving the most search traffic.

According to this report, six of his blog posts are generating nearly 50% of the search traffic to his site.

His ‘How To Recover Google Analytics Account’ is responsible for 10% of the search traffic going to Jeffalytics via 598 keywords that are ranking on the first ten pages of Google. 36 of those keywords are first page rankings.

So with SEMrush, we can drill down on ranking keywords, for the entire site and page by page. We can create mini-campaigns for each of the top ranking pages and boost the winners.

Ryan Stewart [Webris] ~ How to Come Up With Topics for Content Marketing – SEO Topical Research

Now we’re going to learn how to do topical research for SEO to hack traffic.

Topical research is a tier higher than typical keyword research. This technique that Ryan [Webris] shares allows you to do this very quickly with SEMrush and without a lot of skill.

For this tutorial, we’ll use the EliteFTS site as a test subject. EliteFTS is a seller of Professional Rated & Custom Made Strength Equipment, Accessory Products, Apparel – for those who take their training seriously.

The reason I chose them (apart from being a customer) is that they’ve created thousands of pieces of content over the years – so it’s in their DNA to compete and win in the search engines as well.

So we’ll enter elitefts.com into the dashboard and then hit ‘Organic Research’ in the left-hand menu.

Then we’ll click on ‘Competitors’ to get the ORGANIC COMPETITORS report. This report lists the domains that the queried domain is competing against in Google’s top 20 organic search positions.

Now we’ve got a list of sites that EliteFTS is competing against for hundreds and thousands of keywords on the first two pages of Google.

We’ll use RogueFitness.com – ‘an American manufacturer and distributor of strength and conditioning equipment, including weightlifting bars, plates, racks and other fitness related equipment for CrossFit boxes.’ Not only do they sell a lot of similar equipment, but they’re also located in the same state.

EliteFTS and Rogue Fitness are currently competing for 1766 keyword terms on the first two pages of Google.

For this example, we’re just going to go through the steps with just one competitor – but you’ll want to repeat this process with 3-5 more afterward to build out a comprehensive topic list. If I were making a ‘mega list,’ I’d go back and run sites like t-nation.com, powerliftingwatch.com and jtsstrength.com through the same process to ensure I don’t have any topical gaps in my content.

So we’ll go ahead and click on RogueFitness.com

Then below in the ‘TOP ORGANIC KEYWORDS’ click on ‘View full report’ button.

Using ‘Advanced filters’ we’re going to apply Exclude / Keyword / Containing ‘rogue’ as we don’t intend to compete with Rogue Fitness for their own branded keywords.

Once you’ve filtered out the branded terms click ‘Export’ on the right and grab the report in CSV format.

Open up the CSV file in Microsoft Excel for clean up and filtering.

Highlight columns G and everything to the right of it. Delete all of those columns.

We also want to highlight column C – ‘Previous Position’ and delete that as well.

Now we’re left with six columns: Keyword, Position, Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, CPC & Url.

Now highlight ‘Row 1’ and click the sort and filter button.

We’re going to work on Column B (Positions). We want to filter out any results greater than 20.

To accomplish this, we use the ‘Number Filter’ and ‘Less Than.’

Enter ‘20’ into the field next to Position ‘is less than’ in the Custom AutoFilter box that pops up and click ‘OK’.

Next, we’ll work on Column C (Search Volume) and filter out all searches under 100.

Using the ‘Number Filters’ again we’ll click on ‘Greater Than’ and input 100 into the field and click ‘OK.’ Ryan (& Webris) like to work in Google Sheets, so for the sake of this tutorial, we’ll do the same.

Copy all of your filtered data in the Excel file and paste it into a brand new Google sheet.

After you’ve got your Google sheet set up to your liking, we’ll need to ‘Freeze’ the top row to better organize the data.

In the top menu – click on View > Freeze > ‘1 row’, and you’re ready to go.
Now we can filter by page. This will help us discover all of the keyword groupings that Google is ranking for each page. By doing this, the topics will start to present themselves.

Over at the top right locate the filter icon and click it to enable ‘Filter Views.’

Go over to Column F (URL) and Sort from A -> Z.

Now manually scroll down and start identifying the topic groupings.

When I scroll down to https://www.roguefitness.com/lifting-straps-wraps, I hit a large payload of keyword terms.

Rogue’s STRAPS, WRAPS & SUPPORT page is ranking in top 5 positions in Google for terms such as:

[elbow wraps for weightlifting] – Volume: 140
[elbow wraps] – Volume: 590
[weight lifting elbow sleeves] – Volume: 140
[weightlifting wrist wraps] – Volume: 170
[weight lifting elbow sleeve] – Volume: 210
[elbow brace for weightlifting] – Volume: 170
[weight lifting wrist straps] – Volume: 720
[wrist support for weightlifting] – Volume: 170
[weight lifting wrist support] – Volume: 320
[wrist straps for weightlifting] – Volume: 260
[wrist brace for weightlifting] – Volume: 110
[wrist straps weightlifting] – Volume: 110
[knee support for lifting] – Volume: 260
[elbow sleeves weightlifting] – Volume: 170
[weight lifting knee brace] – Volume: 110
[elbow sleeves for weightlifting] – Volume: 880
[elbow compression sleeve for weightlifting] – Volume: 480
[weight lifting wrist brace] – Volume: 110
[weight lifting wraps] – Volume: 170
[lifting elbow sleeve] – Volume: 590

Just with those terms alone, you’re approaching 6000 monthly searches. And don’t forget – we filtered out all terms which receive less than 100 monthly searches. Those longer tail keyword terms could number in the dozens or hundreds and also add up to a significant amount of search traffic.

Back over in our Google sheet we’ll add another column on the right and call it ‘Topic.’ Then we’ll color-code the cells containing similar keyword clusters and topics.

Looking at the URL http://www.roguefitness.com/lifting-straps-wraps/protection-supports/knee-sleeves I can see the Google is ranking that page for multiple terms.
weight lifting knee sleeves]
[powerlifting knee sleeves]
[knee bands]
[neoprene knee sleeves]
[knee support gym]

Further down I notice their page – http://www.roguefitness.com/rehband-7751-knee-support – is also ranking for:
[knee bands]
[best knee sleeves for squats]
[knee support gym]
[ladies knee support]

So you’ll keep scanning down the page and identify the various keyword clusters until you build out 10 or 20 different topics. Then you’ll enter each of the topic terms into Google and assess the competition to see if you have a fighting chance at the first page of Google.

Robbie Richards modeled some of Ryan Stewart’s strategies and templates and came up with his own method for performing topical keyword research which is also worth a look.

How to Perform Topical Keyword Research (and Scale Organic Growth)

And here’s a quick look at his Google Sheet template that contains all of the stages of his topical keyword research. It took three screen shots – but I got it all. I love how it’s organized.

Further Reading

The above 3 tutorials go quite deep – but there is so much more to SEMrush. Below are some of the best of the rest.

SEMrush Review – 68 Ways To Take Your Site To The Next Level | Matthew Woodward

“In this guide, I want to give you the complete guide to SEMrush to get the data you need.
That means that every single tool you could possibly need to get the data, and the advantage, necessary to make a difference to your rankings.
There’s no fluff here… Instead, it’s just the information you need to get the results you want. If it doesn’t need to be here, it isn’t.”

40 Ways to Use Semrush to Get the Seo Data You Need

https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/semrush/

SEMrush is a powerful tool for collecting crucial SEO data. Seer shares 40 quick & easy ways to use the tool to gain SEO insights in no time.

SEMrush Review & Tutorial: 34 Ways to Level-Up Your SEM in 2017 | Robbie Richards

Summary: SEMrush is the swiss army knife of online competitor research. Find profitable keyword opportunities, pinpoint high-converting ad and landing page copy, dissect competitor content strategies, audit backlink profiles, identify new site monetization opportunities, track metrics in real-time…and a lot more.

How To Do Keyword Research NOW | From the Future

Learning SEMrush: The Latest Guides and Tutorials | SEMrush

SEMrush is always developing new features for their users. These are the latest reports.

The post I Took 3 of the Best SEMrush Tutorials for a Test Drive – Here’s What I Learned appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

Twitter. The social platform where Titans duel to the death.

Delete your account. https://t.co/Oa92sncRQY

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 9, 2016

“I’m bullish on Twitter remaining the most powerful way for publishers and influencers to connect, share, and converse. The platform’s open systems (versus the closed ecosystems of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) and its huge media presence give it a hard-to-catch lead in this field. “
-Rand Fishkin [source]

I’ve been on the Twitter for over nine years, according to my profile. I remember the good old days of ‘08 & ‘09, where you could tweet something out and get dozens and even hundreds of reactions with a fraction of the followers that you’d need to accomplish that now. It was a high engagement platform.

But Twitter can still be a very powerful tool if you apply a little bit of creativity.

Before diving into the advanced tactics below – I want to give a shout out to four people who inspired this post. First, Dennis Yu, Jordan Frank & Derric Haynie for uncovering these hacks.

It wasn’t easy finding tactics that haven’t been broadly discussed online, but these gentleman unearthed some good ones.

Contents

The Hacks

1. Secret Twitter Ads Feature [Borrow an Influencer’s Authority]
2. Create an Endless Firehose of Journalist Requests with Hootsuite
3. Add Retargeting Capability to Your Links using Rebrandly

Additional Reading

1. Marketing Using Twitter
2. More Awesome Twitter Hacks
3. Additional Twitter Tips
4. Twitter Analytics
5. Twitter Advanced Search and Research
6. Twitter Security
7. Advanced and Super Advanced Tactics

1. Secret Twitter Ads Feature [Borrow an Influencer’s Authority]

via GIPHY

Hack: Use paid promotion to boost someone else’s tweet
Tools – A Twitter Business Account
Cost – An influencer’s permission and an ad budget ($1 – ???)

It’s common knowledge that you can run promoted (paid) tweets on Twitter. But did you know that you can also promote someone else’s tweet?

**Note – you’ll need to be already be spending money on Twitter’s ad platform before being able to unlock this feature.

It’s a little-known feature that can lead to big wins. You’re essentially ‘borrowing’ the authority of the individual who has tweeted about you.

Look it at is a hybrid of influencer marketing and paid social promotion. And it’s win/win as you’re also promoting the person or brand who originally tweeted.

Let’s say I wanted to promote this tweet by Andy Crestodina.

How to Grow Your Audience w/ Content Syndication Like James Altucher ~ @massivekontent https://t.co/HJs3SA1oUp pic.twitter.com/T4nLXgohlM

— Andy Crestodina (@crestodina) December 9, 2016

Or this one by Loz James of the Content Champion…

https://twitter.com/contentchampion/status/827560660691214336

I’d reach out to them via email – asking for written permission to put this into play.

Once you’ve secured that – head over to ‘Advertising on Twitter,’ and hit the ‘Start a Campaign’ button on the upper right.

Now you’ve landed on the ‘Welcome to Twitter Ads’ landing page.

Click on ‘Tweet Engagements’ under ‘Promote Your Brand’ on the left-hand menu.

Now – click on ‘Create Campaign.’

Step 1: Setup Your Campaign.

1. Name your campaign.
2. Set your start and end dates.

Step 2: Select an Audience

This is the step that will determine the success of your campaign.

Here you’re targeting by four main parameters: Followers, Keywords, Tailored Audiences or Remarketing.

Step 3: Set Your Budget
If you want to run this over a longer period you’d probably want to set the budget to a lower amount per day ($1-2 / day).
If you need the promoted tweet to get in front of a lot of eyeballs quickly – you’ll need to ramp up the daily ad spend.

Step 4: Choose your creatives.
If you’ve gotten the properly written permissions, the applicable Twitter account name should now appear in the drop down menu.

Click on the Twitter handle and click on ‘Organic Tweets’ in the second box. A list of all of their tweets will appear below.

Choose the one you want to promote and let the fun begin.

Source:
Twitter Has a Secret Feature, Dennis Yu, February 22, 2016

#Bonus Tip: If you want to accomplish the same as above in both Facebook and Instagram – go through Ian Lurie’s brand new Slideshare Deck below. He takes you through the process, step by step.

2. Create an Endless Firehose of Journalist Requests with Hootsuite

via GIPHY

The tactic: Use a customized Hootsuite Stream to feed you a constant flow of journalists who are looking for quick sources.
Tools: Hootsuite (free for a limited account or $10/mth for PRO level)

How would you like to log into Hootsuite every day and find a new list of journalists looking for your help with their stories?

Log into your Hootsuite Dashboard

Located in the upper left corner – click on ‘+ Add Stream.’

You want the social platform to be on ‘Twitter, ’ and then you’ll select ‘Search’ as your stream type.

Here you can click on ‘Show Examples’ for an index of search combinations that you can type into the ‘Enter Search Query’ box.

Before drilling down into a more granular search let’s enter “#URGHARO OR #JournoRequest OR #prrequest” to bring up all instances of HARO (Help a Reporter Out), journalist, and public relations requests. ‘for a story’ is another option.

This result will be a little too broad for our needs – as you’re going to be fed every single instance of a HARO or Journalist request on Twitter. Let’s refine this a bit.

How about typing in “(#URGHARO OR #JournoRequest) business owner.”

Now your stream is getting more interesting.

Play around with various word groupings and search combinations and you’ll have a perpetual feed of potential opportunities for you or your clients.

Make one for each category.

Another powerful secondary benefit to this hack will be the consistent making of new relationships with journalists and other bloggers.

There is a huge variety of search operators you can use in both Twitter and Hootsuite.

Source:
The Top 16 Free Digital Marketing Tools to Help Identify & Reach Your Customers, Jordan Frank, SEER, Sept 2, 2016

3. Add Retargeting Capability to Your Links using Rebrandly

via GIPHY

The Hack: Use the Rebrandly link shortener to ‘rebrand’ your link also allowing you to inject your Facebook retargeting pixel.

Tools: Rebrandly and Facebook Business (or Adwords) accounts. Chrome browser (for ease of use).

I send out curated tweets all day (and night) and have done so for years. Sometimes those tweets blow up and garner thousands of impressions along with a great deal of engagement.

The bulk of my most popular tweets sends my followers to other people’s sites. And that’s traffic that’s benefiting someone else. Now I don’t have any problem showcasing other people’s amazing content – that’s my job as a curator – but what if I could benefit from it as well?

Did you know there’s a way to retarget audiences who click a link that you’ve sent out via Twitter? Even if the link is to a page you don’t own or control? I didn’t either.

Enter: Link retargeting with Rebrandly.

Rebrandly offer individuals and companies the possibility to brand and shorten the links they share using their name or brand through a specific domain name – via ‘rebranded’ links.

They also allow you to do one other amazing thing…

You can add your retargeting pixel to the link.

Let’s say you ran a photography blog and regularly tweet out helpful Adobe Lightroom tutorials and examples of awesome photographs to your followers.

You want to tweet out this article about ‘Creating the Desaturated Urban Look’ in Lightroom from Petapixel.

First, you’ll want to head over to Rebrandly and sign up for an account.

Next, you’ll want to head over to the chrome web store and grab the chrome extension. Now you can ‘rebrand’ links right from your browser.

In your browser, click on the Rebrandly chrome extension and ‘rebrand’ the Petapixel article link.

In the upper right corner of the Rebrandly box, there is a gear wheel. Click on it to expand the box and then click on ‘Retargeting.’

Head over your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard and grab your retargeting pixel. It’s over on the right side of the panel. You can find it by clicking the ‘eye’ icon.

Copy the FB pixel code and head back over to your Rebrandly link shortening box.

Paste the code into the ‘Script’ field inside the ‘Retargeting’ drop down box.

Give the Retargeting Code a ‘Name’ and then click ‘Create.’ That retargeting code will now be saved in your Rebrandly account under the name that you saved it under. You can now reuse it at will – without having to redo all of the above steps.

Click ‘Save, ’ and now you’re ready to go! Your link has been rebranded, and you can share it at will – with your FB retargeting pixel piggybacking it.
Now you have the ability to retarget people on Facebook who clicked the link that you tweeted out.

Note: If Facebook Ads aren’t your preference – you can also utilize the above tactic with a Google Remarketing Pixel from your Adwords account.

***Bonus Points*** – “If people clicked on the link from Twitter, run Twitter retargeting ads, if Facebook run Facebook. This converts better because they’ve already seen you on that platform, so they aren’t shocked to see you again.” – Derric Haynie

Source:
Content Curation on Twitter: How to Quickly Find and Grow Your Twitter Following (Part 2), Derric Haynie, August 9, 2016 & What is Link Retargeting, Derric Haynie, September 14, 2016

Additional Reading

1. Marketing Using Twitter

Before diving deep into specific hacks and tactics, it’s helpful to get a 10,000-foot view of the Twitter marketing ecosystem. Here are three valuable guides to quickly get you up to speed on Twitter’s capabilities.

Everything You Need to Know: Open Graph, Twitter Cards & Rich Pins | Warfare Plugins

https://warfareplugins.com/open-graph-tags-twitter-cards-rich-pins/

The Complete Ecommerce Guide to Twitter Advertising | BigCommerce

How to Make a Splash on Twitter With Visual Marketing | Peg Fitzpatrick

2. More Awesome Twitter Hacks

I only went into detail on three hacks that I wasn’t previously aware of. Here is a few dozen more for you to discover. Use them wisely.

How to Recover Your Social Share Counts If They’ve Been Lost | Warfare Plugins

How to Recover Your Social Share Counts If They’ve Been Lost

10 Totally Life-Changing Twitter Hacks | Seventeen

Five Twitter Hacks to Skyrocket Your Engagement | MarketingProfs

8 Easy-To-Follow Twitter Hacks to Get Your Tweets Seen | Sprout Social

9 Awesome Twitter Hacks That You’re TOTALLY Not Using (But Should!) | Post Planner

3. Additional Twitter Tips

Still not enough hacks? Here’s a few more for you to check out.

10 Twitter Tips Most Pros Don’t Even Know | MakeUseOf

10 Twitter Secrets You Should Know | Social Media Today

4. Twitter Analytics

Now it’s time to do a deep dive into Twitter Analytics. You can gain quite a bit of insight from the Twitter dashboard. To shorten your learning curve – here are some of the best analytics posts on the web.

How to Use Twitter Analytics: 17 Simple-to-Find Stats to Help You Tweet Better | Buffer

How to Use Twitter Analytics to Increase Your Audience Engagement | Constant Contact

http://blogs.constantcontact.com/twitters-new-analytics-dashboard/

How to Use Twitter Analytics to Improve Your Engagement | Social Media Examiner

How to Use Twitter Analytics: The Complete Guide for Marketers | Hootsuite

2024 Guide to X (Twitter) Analytics: Essential Tools and Tips

6 must-have metrics for Twitter Analytics | Klipfolio

5. Twitter Advanced Search and Research

Over 500 million tweets per day are sent out on Twitter. There are dozens of search filters you can use order to wade through billions of tweets quickly. Time to put on your researcher/journo hat and use this vast search engine like a pro.

Top Twitter Tips for Research Impact | Project Maya

How to: Advanced search on Twitter | Twitter Blog

The Superhuman Guide to Twitter Advanced Search: 23 Hidden Ways to Use Advanced Search for Marketing and Sales | Buffer

6 Ways to Use Advanced Twitter Search for Increased Influence | Social Media Examiner

6. Twitter Security

Time to Lock Up Your Twitter Account With Two-Factor | Wired

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/twitter-hack/

5 Tips For Staying Safe on Twitter | Lifewire

How to control your data on Twitter | Me and My Shadow

7. Advanced and Super Advanced Tactics

Here is where we venture above and beyond my pay grade. Scraping Twitter? Building your own ‘Sentiment Engine’? Programmatically following and unfollowing accounts? It’s all in here.

To execute on some of these tactics, you’ll need to put on your data scientist and technical marketer hats.

You’ll be merging the Twitter API with R Studio, running Python scripts and doing text analysis with word2vec and doc2vec algorithms.

The following posts are for the courageous and experienced.

How to Scrape Data From Twitter Profile Pages | URL Profiler

How to Scrape Data From Twitter Profile Pages

Gathering Twitter data with the TwitteR2Mongo package | R bloggers

Twitter sentiment analysis with Machine Learning in R using doc2vec approach | AnalyzeCore

Mapping Twitter Followers in R | R bloggers

The post 3 Advanced Twitter Hacks That I Didn’t Know About appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.

I’ve spent the last 25 years living in Montreal and Vancouver (currently). In June I’m making the trek back to Montreal to live there for a third time.

Montreal has always been a great city of photography and photographers. I have fond memories of learning in the darkroom and photolab at Dawson College in 2000-2001. And Unsplash – one the internet’s best ‘free (do whatever you want) hi-res photo’ repositories – has their main headquarters located in the heart of the city.

I’ve previously written about a better way to do Instagram. All of the photographers that you’ll find below embody this. I love seeing my once and future city through their eyes.

I reached out to each photographer through email and DM on Instagram for more commentary on their art and their relationship to the city itself.

And please – if you follow (or happen to be) an awesome Montreal photographer that’s not on this list – drop their/your Instagram profile into the comments.

Nicolas Abou @conspicuousnicolas

Rooftop Games –⊛– I have been living in Montreal for 5.5 years now, and want to say it’s been even better than I could have expected. Thanks to all of the people who make it awesome! #montreal #somontreal #livemontreal #mtlblog #montreal_gallery #citykillerz #visualambassadors #createexplore #streets_vision #vibesofvisual#mtlpromos #nikon_canada #artofvisuals #thegoodvisual #justgoshoot #watchthisinstagood #mtlmoments #fm2mag #narcitymontreal #houseoftones #eventphotographer #freezfram #imagesofcanada #awesome_earthpix #illgramers #canadaworld #killergrams #vscogood_ #explorecanada #vzcomood

A photo posted by Nicolas Abou – NA Photography (@conspicuousnicolas) on Feb 2, 2017 at 2:03pm PST

“Montreal has been my home for over five years, and I have had the chance to discover it with eyes of a newcomer. I came here as a student and now work here. I believe Montreal is a truly unique city in how it makes you feel at home so fast.

I started to take pictures of Montreal in order to have memories of all the great moments I have in this city and by doing so, I discovered a great passion for photography. I strive to capture a particular emotion or highlight the city with a twist to infuse my personality into the photographs.” – Nicolas

www.nicolasabou.com/

WarpSpeed –⊛– Hitting a photography slump so here’s an older shot of mine re-edited What do guys do when you have a slump? #montreal #somontreal #livemontreal #mtlblog #montreal_gallery #citykillerz #visualambassadors #createexplore #streets_vision #vibesofvisual#mtlpromos #nikon_canada #artofvisuals #thegoodvisual #justgoshoot #watchthisinstagood #mtlmoments #fm2mag #narcitymontreal #houseoftones #eventphotographer #freezfram #imagesofcanada #awesome_earthpix #illgramers #canadaworld #killergrams #vscogood_ #explorecanada #vzcomood

A photo posted by Nicolas Abou – NA Photography (@conspicuousnicolas) on Jan 25, 2017 at 1:48pm PST

Adam Cumas @mtlperspective

St-Laurent

A photo posted by Perspective (@mtlperspective) on Feb 11, 2017 at 2:19pm PST

“I chose to start my photography account @MtlPerspective because I really think that more people need to appreciate the true beauty of our city. Montreal is so diverse with its cultures, and I just wanted to share my love of it with not only other people in Montreal but the world!

Locations like China Town and the Old port are influenced by other places in the world and Montreal finds a way to bring all of these cultures together! I started a video production company @deeprockproductions which helps local artists and small business show off their talent within the city!

Montreal needs to be more known around the world because there is so much talent and beauty that needs to be spread and shared. In the end, I am really just proud to be from Montreal and hope that more people appreciate this amazing city the same way I do!” – Adam

Montreal is such an Amazing city!

A photo posted by Perspective (@mtlperspective) on Feb 7, 2017 at 1:45pm PST

Cédric Servay @cservay

No, @vollelver, you can’t become a car… Even if you pray for it

A post shared by Cédric Servay (@cservay) on Apr 21, 2017 at 3:01pm PDT

‘I started photography because I loved my city, but photography opened my eyes and made me love it even more. You learn some good spots that are accessible to the public but relatively unknown. You also have the chance to discover places that are not accessible to the public.

You also learn to look. It sounds stupid, but a lot of people (And in that I include the old me), simply don’t know how to look. Or maybe more appreciate what they are looking at? I try to put the emphasis on those things in my pictures. The beautiful ignored things. ‘ – C. Servay

www.cservay.com/

Never be scared to create

A photo posted by Cédric Servay (@cservay) on Feb 6, 2017 at 4:34am PST

Polygon Forest – @polygon_forest

. . . #way2ill #illgrammers #createcommune #imaginatones #agameoftones #shuttervictims #fm2mag #streetmobs #moodygrams #createexploretakeover #artofvisuals #thecreatorclass #fatalframes #streetactivity #visualambassadors #theimaged #heatercentral #jj_urbex_ #kings_abandoned #ig_urbex #urbexmontreal #ic_urbex #sombrexplore #ig_asylum #all_is_abandoned #abandonedafterdark

A post shared by Joey Gutierrez (@polygon_forest) on Mar 5, 2018 at 2:12pm PST

. . . #way2ill #illgrammers #justgoshoot #shoot2kill #createcommune #imaginetones #agameoftones #shuttervictims #fm2mag #streetmobs #moodygrams #artofvisuals #polygon_f #montreal #mtl #streetactivity #mtlregram #livemontreal #mtlblog #mtlpromos #montreal_gallery #somewhereinmontreal #somontreal #made_in_mtl #narcitymontreal #streetsof514

A post shared by Joey Gutierrez (@polygon_forest) on Jan 24, 2018 at 3:51pm PST

Montrealiste @montrealiste

Ne jamais sauter d’étapes !

A photo posted by @_made_IN_mtl_ (@montrealiste) on Feb 11, 2017 at 5:30am PST

#made_in_mtl @_made_in_mtl_ #fm2mag #mtlblog #livemontreal #somontreal #montreal_gallery #shoot2kill #justgoshoot #urbex #illgrammers #downtown #yngkillers #dontwait #killyourcity #exploreeverything #way2ill #mtlshot #exploring_shotz # #why_i_explore #livemontreal #montreal #mtlmoments #art #downtown #autumn #streetsof514 #rooftop #chasing_rooftops #snow #rooftop #urbanandstreet #downtown #goodtimes

A photo posted by @_made_IN_mtl_ (@montrealiste) on Feb 5, 2017 at 5:53am PST

Alex Jodoin  @ajshotz

Air Burst

A post shared by @ ajshotz on May 16, 2018 at 3:56pm PDT

“I do street, and urban photography and Montreal has a lot to offer on that level. I’m hugely inspired by 80’s sci-fi movies like Terminator, Blade Runner, They Live and Escape from NYC. I always loved the way the film makers of that era were able to convey the mood, anonymity, and dystopia of big cities, especially at night and in a sense, this is what I’m trying to reproduce.” – Alex

Ajshotz.com

Lucky You.

A post shared by @ ajshotz on May 10, 2018 at 3:55am PDT

Jason Chan @jason.can

Me: How much is it to rent this gorgeous apartment? Sir, this is a liquor store . . Fuji xt2 x Samyang 8mm . . #freeyourcamera #ic_architecture #icu_architecture #jj_architecture #creative_architecture #arkiromantix #tv_architectural #lookingup_architecture #unlimitedcities #arquitecturamx #excellent_structure #sky_high_architecture #architecture_greatshots #minimal_lookup #diagonal_symmetry #art_chitecture_ #tv_leadinglines #rustlord_archdesign #srs_buildings #ptk_architecture #archi_features #mtlmoments #made_in_mtl #montrealmoments #liveinmontreal #montrealphoto #montrealminute #fujifilm #fujifilm_xseries #fuji

A post shared by Jason Can (@jason.can) on Mar 19, 2018 at 11:29am PDT

“My escapades into photography first materialized when I ventured to Hong Kong in 2010. The imposing architecture was such a sight that it inspired a spark within me. My style is street, with a dash of portraiture. My best shots are candid – to truly capture the moment.  Now, allow me to use photography to share my story.” – Jason

What does a tofu and a dildo have in common? They’re both meat substitute . . Fuji xt2 x Samyang. 8mm . . #freeyourcamera #fm2mag #mtlmoments #made_in_mtl #montrealmoments #liveinmontreal #montrealphoto #montrealminute #fujifilm #way2ill

A post shared by Jason Can (@jason.can) on Feb 22, 2018 at 11:20am PST

Keon Lai – @redpanorama

It was for the picture

A photo posted by Keon Lai (@redpanorama) on Jan 30, 2017 at 3:59pm PST

Royal flush

A photo posted by Keon Lai (@redpanorama) on Dec 7, 2016 at 2:26pm PST

FM2Mag @fm2mag

An endless artistic exploration by a content creation collective
www.fm2mag.com

VOL.2 Featured Shot by artist : • @emileseguin – Use the #fm2mag hashtag in order to be featured here on IG or on coming up volumes. – #fm2mag

A photo posted by FM2Mag (@fm2mag) on Jan 12, 2017 at 4:17pm PST

Stay warm fam, the cold today plays no games. – Photo courtesy by artist : @gsvisions #fm2mag

A photo posted by FM2Mag (@fm2mag) on Dec 16, 2016 at 3:28pm PST

Eric Branover @ericbranover

When the lights look like stars #lovemycity #createcommune #heatercentral #visualsoflife #igworldclub #neverstopexploring #shoot2kill #mobilemag #theimaged #fatalframes #theimaged #weekly_feature #streetdreamsmag #hsdailyfeature #jaw_dropping_shots #vsco #hypebeast #visualambassadors #createexplore #houseoftones #imaginatones #createandcapture #portraitcentral #cbviews #infinity_worldshoot

A photo posted by Montreal | Canada (@ericbranover) on Feb 9, 2017 at 10:47am PST

“Freelance photographer, born and raised in Montreal, Quebec. I have poutine, bagels and the Montreal Canadiens running through my blood. Living in a city that has a blend of European and modern architecture, festivals that run all year long, and is a multicultural hub for the culinary arts, it’s no wonder I carry a camera around my neck.

My parents taught me early on about the joys and pleasures of traveling, history and culture, and how to simply appreciate my surroundings. My passion for capturing moments might as well be attributed to these valuable lessons. Through my photography, my goal is to immortalize images that are captivating, timeless and tell a story.” – Eric

www.ericbranover.com

Keep your head up high • #createcommune #heatercentral #visualsoflife #igworldclub #neverstopexploring #shoot2kill #mobilemag #theimaged #fatalframes #theimaged #weekly_feature #streetdreamsmag #hsdailyfeature #jaw_dropping_shots #vsco #hypebeast #visualambassadors #createexplore #houseoftones #imaginatones #createandcapture #portraitcentral #cbviews #infinity_worldshoot

A photo posted by Montreal | Canada (@ericbranover) on Jan 30, 2017 at 5:44pm PST

Jonathan Gaudreau @jo_f0o

Light is in every shadow.

A photo posted by Jonathan Gaudreau (@jo_f0o) on Jan 27, 2017 at 4:17am PST

“Pour moi, Montréal est une ville de découvertes. Lorsque j’étais plus jeune, elle représentait le nouveau, le différent, les possibilités. En vieillissant, elle m’inspire toujours la même chose. Il y a sans cesse des lieux à arpenter, à explorer. Je suis perpétuellement à la recherche de visages uniques et de la diversité culturelle qui habite Montréal ; c’est d’ailleurs ce qui vient me chercher quand je fais des photographies. Cette ville est le centre de ma créativité, car elle m’a permis, dès le commencement, de grandir à travers mon art.” – Jonathan

[Roughly translated]

For me, Montréal is a city of discovery. When I was younger, she represented the new, the different, the possibilities. As she gets older, she always inspires me the same. There are always places to be surveyed, to be explored. I am perpetually looking for unique faces and the cultural diversity that lives in Montreal; This is what comes to me when I make photographs. This city is the center of my creativity, because it allowed me, from the beginning, to grow through my art.

Are you the one who follows or the one who leads?

A photo posted by Jonathan Gaudreau (@jo_f0o) on Jan 13, 2017 at 4:26am PST

Nicolas Gagnon – @nicolas_gagnon_

Réalisateur/Monteur/Directeur Photo À la quête de tableaux du quotidien. Montréal, QC Filmmaker/Editor/Cinematographer Seeking daily life scenery

Non je n’ai pas croisé Cyrano de Bergerac ni Alex de l’Orange Mécanique. Sculpture #vieuxmtl. . . . . . #mtlblog #mtlshot #made_in_montreal #somontreal #bnw #monochrome #bw_photooftheday #bw_society #bnwplanet #bnw_planet #building #downtown #city #architecturelovers #cityscape #modern #archdaily #officebuildings #archimasters #sky_high_architecture #architecturephotography #lookingup #composition #perspective #minimal #skyscraper #cities #lines #nicolasgagnon

A photo posted by Nicolas Gagnon (@nicolas_gagnon_) on Jan 17, 2017 at 5:40am PST

Humm, j’hésite entre prendre le métro ou un téléporteur pour revenir à la maison… Impression de #sciencefiction #bladerunner #luminotherapie #montrealmoments #montreal #mtl #mtlblog #livemontreal #mtlshot #made_in_montreal #ilovemontreal #somontreal #montréal #urbanlife #ilovemycity #modernlife #urbanexploration #pixelteam #teampixel #pixel #urbanlife #ilovemycity #highbuildings #streetdreams #createexplore #urbanart #urbanromantix #urbanism #urbanexploration #urbanfantasy #urbanroll #MoodyGrams #nicolasgagnon

A photo posted by Nicolas Gagnon (@nicolas_gagnon_) on Jan 11, 2017 at 2:33pm PST

Felix Bouchard Tremblay @felixbouchardtremblay

A photo posted by Felix Bouchard Tremblay (@felixbouchardtremblay) on Sep 27, 2016 at 2:21pm PDT

A photo posted by Felix Bouchard Tremblay (@felixbouchardtremblay) on Oct 23, 2016 at 1:14pm PDT

Cast.one @cast.one

digital underground

A post shared by MONTREAL (@cast.one) on Feb 2, 2017 at 6:29pm PST

that come back tho #superbowl

A post shared by MONTREAL (@cast.one) on Feb 5, 2017 at 9:54pm PST

guimz.visuals (Alexandre) @guimz.visuals

Moody night – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – #AOV #artofvisuals #justgoshoot #visualsgang #thecreatorclass #superhubs #thecreative #FM2MAG #mobilemag #caligrammers #exklusive_shot #way2ill #killeverygram #hsdailyfeature #illgrammers #vzcomood #meistershots #fragmentmag #huffpostgram #visualarchitects #createexplore #citykillerz #createexploretakeover #theimaged #moodygrams #createcommune #exploretocreate #fatalframes #visualambassadors #visualmood

A post shared by Alexandre Guimont | Montreal (@guimz.visuals) on Nov 14, 2017 at 4:29am PST

Night shift. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – #wildernessculture #artofsystem #peoplecreatives #canon_photos #sombrexplore #yngkillers #Heatercentral #shoot2kill #primeshots #getoutstayout #huntgram #forbiddenart #keepexploring #instamagazine_ #liveadventurously #agameoftones #sombresociety #neverstopexploring #creativeoptic #uncalculated #killyourcity #visualsoflife #SubliminalMag #Streetmobs #Urbanandstreet #StreetDreamsMag #CityUnit

A post shared by Alexandre Guimont | Montreal (@guimz.visuals) on Mar 14, 2017 at 9:39am PDT

Jason Thibault @jaythibs

OK – I’m not quite living in Montreal yet – but I’ll be there soon. And I’ve posted quite a few Montreal photos in 2015 and 2016. Hopefully you like what you see.

Crossroads.

A photo posted by Jason Thibault (@jay_thibs) on Sep 2, 2016 at 7:19am PDT

And I’ve been slowly posting photos from my stockpile of old 35mm black and whites taken during 2000-2001.

#tbt to Fall, 2000. An alleyway in downtown Montreal. Shot on a NikonFm on 35mm bnw film.

A photo posted by Jason Thibault (@jay_thibs) on Feb 1, 2017 at 9:16pm PST

Further Reading

Why Street Photography Matters in 2017

https://petapixel.com/2017/02/10/street-photography-matters-2017/

Storytelling in Street Photography

https://petapixel.com/2017/02/24/storytelling-street-photography/

The post 17 Montreal Photographers You Should Absolutely Follow on Instagram appeared first on Massive Kontent | Done-For-You Content Promotion and Distribution.