Articles Tagged with Content Strategy

Has Crowdsourced Content Jumped The Shark?

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“We asked these 8 sharks for their opinion…”

Shark montage (a sharktage...?)
Like infographics and guest blogging before it, there are fears in the industry that crowdsourced content – where you ask multiple people to pass on their favourite tip/tool/etc. – may have jumped the shark, in that it has been done-to-death and fallen in quality, making it a less worthwhile content marketing tactic.

I was going to save blogging my thoughts on this until after I talked about CR 25 at BrightonSEO in April, as two of CR 25‘s posts were crowdsourced content (and one of them became one of the campaign’s most popular posts), but following Peep Laja’s tweet stating that if a “list has more than 5 items, it’s shitty curation,” plus the fact that: a) a lot of the replies he received agreed with him, and b) crowdsourced content in particular often contain tens or dozens of participants (or ‘items’), I wanted to give my thoughts…

Crowdsourced content is popular because it’s pure ego-baiting – people love to be asked their opinion on something. And by doing so, they’re likely to share it via social media. Oh and the more people you ask, the more content you get, resulting in a lengthy blog post in the 1,000s of words that’s likely to hit the long-tail like crazy. So if you ask 50 people to contribute to a post, you have 50 potential tweeters at the ready and a long blog post on your hands.

The ‘SEO echo chamber’ strikes again…

The problem with crowdsourced content is that it has been done-to-death… in the SEO/content marketing industry. I won’t link to any real-life examples as I don’t want to come across as a hater, plus I’m genuinely grateful when I’ve been given the opportunity to contribute to them myself (e.g. I recently shared my biggest link building success story of 2014 – and hell, I even did one myself a couple of years ago!), but things tend to get a little overboard when 15 SEOs are asked for their favourite link building tip, or 43 SEOs are asked for their favourite SEO software tool, or 161 SEOs are asked their favourite colour…

But do you know the trick that we’ve been missing, which I didn’t even realise until recently, which may completely change your view on crowdsourced content? Stop asking your peers and start asking your clients/customers.

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The Launch of CR 25 – 25 Blog Posts in One Month

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Happy New Year everyone!

January is going to be a busy start of the year for me…

CR 25 Cake logoI’m really excited and proud to announce the launch of CR 25 today. To celebrate my parents’ company’s 25th anniversary as an IT recruitment agency (which became a recruitment agency in January 1990), Computer Recruiter are publishing 25 blog posts in January 2015: one each day from the 2nd to the 30th, excluding Sundays. It’s been over 6 months in the making, culminating in me running around like a panicked headless chicken in December in order to finalise and sign-off on everything in time…!

Coming up during the month we have guest bloggers, crowdsourced content, interviews, an event list, an infographic (because if you’re doing 25 posts, there has to be an infographic…!), a historical timeline, a live-blogged local event, helpful resources for jobseekers, nostalgic posts… and even a bloody quiz. Guest bloggers and other contributors include Computer Recruiter’s past and present candidates and clients as well as some well-known figures in the IT/Web/tech or jobseeking/recruitment sectors in South Wales.

For me personally, I’m really intrigued to learn what performs well content-wise. What will get the most tweets/RTs? The most Facebook Likes? The most links? Whether the campaign ends up being a successful or a failure, I’ll be talking about it at BrightonSEO April 2015, by which time I’ll have a clear idea of how everything performed a few months on. I’ll probably also write up a case study about it for YouMoz, too…

To find out more, please feel free to read the introductory post (published earlier today – “Post 1 of 25”), the About page and the press release.

Let the fun begin! Wish me luck…!

How Many Times Should You Tweet a Blog Post? Experts Weigh in…

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To tweet or not to tweet (three times)…

A few days ago, I tweeted these two tweets via my Twitter profile (try saying that when you’ve had a drink or two!):

Here’s a recent example:

I was curious to know if people thought tweeting about a new blog post three times (instead of just twice) would be considered overdoing it. On the one hand, it’s very easy to miss a tweet in a busy stream, but on the other hand, if someone does happen to see it three times, is it going to annoy them?

The responses I got back were pretty surprising, which you can see in the Storify Wakelet story below…

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Google Help Needs UX Improvements, A Content Audit & A Better Attitude…

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Help Wanted signAs someone who’s been doing SEO and PPC day in and day out for nearly 5 years, I’m no stranger to Google’s Help sections. While there’s a lot of great search engine marketing advice out there on other people’s blogs, sometimes it’s helpful to see what Google themselves suggest and recommend about Google-y things, especially if it’s a brand new feature or a confusing topic.

Of course, the info isn’t just intended for SEO and AdWords folk: it’s for your everyday webmaster (hence why one of their main Help blogs is called Webmaster Central). Your everyday webmaster (definition: the person responsible for maintaining a website) might be an individual working in marketing, web development or IT, however it might even be the business owner his/herself, especially if it’s a small business. Therefore Google should endeavour that all of its information is sorted in the best way possible for convenience and accessibility and that the sections in general are as easy-to-use as possible in order to reduce frustration.

…But that’s simply not the case.

What Google Help needs is:

  • UX (user experience) improvements,
  • A content audit, and
  • A better attitude…

Why UX improvements?

I had an incident recently that just screamed ‘frustrating user experience’ when I tried to contact the Google AdWords Help team, who – in their own words – are “here” and “love to help.”

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432 Mind-Blowing Article Titles You Won’t Believe Are By Cracked.com

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Mind blown imageFile this under: silly…

I’m a massive, massive fan of Cracked.com – I have been for years. As an online marketer, I’ve always been interested – with sites like these – about how they go about their digital strategy. Given the types of titles Cracked.com tend to use for their regular articles, it’s quite clear that for them it’s all about encouraging click-through rate (a.k.a. the clickbait), particularly from social media sites.

They’re a fan of lists, so they often start with a number. Over the last few years, I started to notice another trend… In just the last month alone we’ve seen:

…And…

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