Articles Tagged with Events

Online Influence (Oi) Conference 2016 (#OiConf)

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Oi Conference 2016
Yesterday (21st April 2016) I spent the day at Online Influence (Oi) Conference 2016 (@OiConf / #OiConf) in Cardiff, with Oi and Freshwater UK sorting me out with a blogger pass (thanks guys)! While most people call it a social media conference (and social media marketing is a big part of it), it covers a range of digital marketing elements, including video, content and user behaviour. Even SEO got a mention or two. 🙂

I have a confession to make though: I went last year, but had a bad experience. I think it was rotten luck… While the kick-off keynote was fantastic, I went to a few bad talks (speakers arguing, tech problems, sales pitches, etc.), lunch was a disaster (I couldn’t eat what was on offer due to food allergies), and there was of course the infamous #panelgate, when the awesome Miranda Bishop (@Miranda_Bishop) challenged – and subsequently joined(!) – the all-male panel at the end of the day.

This year though? Much, much better. The calibre of talks was high, and I took a lot away from them – I’d say that each talk gave me at least one or two holy-crap-I-didn’t-think-of-that takeaways that are useful to me.

Here are the talks that I went to, along with the main takeaways I took from them:

Leaping out of the feed (or don’t let your content be an octopus)

Simon Low, BuzzFeedSimon Low, BuzzFeed

The opening keynote was from Simon Low of BuzzFeed. Now I’m not a big fan of BuzzFeed, but 6 billion monthly visits?! You can’t argue with that.

Fair play, it was a cracking talk – a great way to start the day. Some standout make-you-think takeaways for me:

  • Traditionally, most content creators pour their heart and soul into creating great content but make little effort to promote it – Simon argued that it’s a 90/10 split. BuzzFeed however spend 50% of their time creating their content and 50% promoting it. They realise that great content doesn’t just get ‘found’, and that you have to put the effort in.
  • They also take the time to translate stories into multiple languages, which helps to spread their reach further.
  • During the Q&A, someone asked about the times when things don’t go well when BuzzFeed work with brands. Simon replied by saying that the more that the brand is courageous (and that they don’t ‘sanetise’ what BuzzFeed are doing), the higher the chance of success.

SxSW ’17: why you need to go and how to validate the cost

Gabby Shaw, ADLIBGabby Shaw, ADLIB Recruitment

I was interested in the Meltwater talk (“Digital influence: 4 steps towards getting it, guiding it and growing it”), which was taking place at the same time, but a little bird told me that all the Track A (main hall) talks were being filmed and uploaded online at a later date, so I decided to be strategic and visit other talks in other rooms. That said, I’ve always had an interest in going to SxSW, as I know a few people who have gone over the years.

Gabby talked about the benefits of going, but also made it clear that it can be a costly affair – not just the ‘hard’ costs (plane ticket, accommodation, etc.) but also the ‘soft’ costs, which people often forget about (time out of the office, less chance to liaise with colleagues and clients, etc.).

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Introducing… Cardiff SEO Meet

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Cardiff SEO MeetCardiff has a lot of awesome stuff going for it. Meetups and communities for entrepreneurs. Meetups and communities for designers. Meetups and communities for web and software developers. Meetups and communities for digital folk. But there’s nothing specific to SEO. Wait for it… Wait foor ittt… Until now!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Cardiff SEO Meet. A few months ago I asked about a dozen or so SEOs native to South Wales for their thoughts on running an event of this type (a huge, HUGE thank you to everyone who responded – I owe y’all a drink!) and teased on State of Digital that I would put something together in the beginning of the year. Unfortunately I got pretty busy and couldn’t get anything sorted until now, but better late than never eh?

Got questions? Good, ‘cos I’ve got answers!

Topic? Err… SEO. Well, SEO and stuff related to SEO, so I’m happy to introduce elements that aren’t strictly SEO but are closely related to SEO, so other digital marketing topics. BrightonSEO started doing this a few years ago and it went down really well.

Who’s it for? Everyone is welcome. Whether you’re a part-time or full-time SEO working agency-side, in-house or freelance, or a digital marketer with another specialism (e.g. social media, email marketing, etc.) with an interest in SEO, or a small business owner or blogger who wants to learn a bit about how to do it yourself, I’m hoping that there’ll be something for everyone. I’m going to try my best to balance the talks and topics so that nothing’s too beginner and nothing’s too advanced, so that everyone can get the most out of it.

When? Once a quarter, with the first one starting in May. I’m hoping to finalise and confirm the date in the next few days, so keep an eye on the Meetup page for the details. I’m aiming for either a Wednesday or Thursday evening towards the end of the month. Then the same again in August, then November, then February, and so on…

Once a quarter? Why not monthly? Honestly? I don’t know if there’d be the demand for monthly. Plus I don’t want to be a position where I struggle to find speakers for the events (which is what happened to Unified Diff). If I’m wrong though then I’m happy to bring it up to bi-monthly, and then monthly. But let’s see how the first few go first, yeah?

Where? The upstairs of the mighty Urban Tap House in Cardiff city centre, which is fairly close to Cardiff Central Station and various car parks (including St David’s 2). I adore their burgers (they even have tasty gluten-free options!) so it’s a delight to be able to host it there.

How much? It’s free entry.

What’s the format? In addition to talks, I have the idea to run public site reviews, where people volunteer their sites to be audited and we (as the audience) offer advice on what to do. I don’t think anyone’s ever done it before – and I completely realise and admit that that might be because it’s an absolutely horrendous idea…! But we’ll give it a go in May and see how it goes. The survey suggested that a lot of people are interested in the idea, and I think that it’d be a good way to learn a few handy SEO tips as a group.

Who are the sponsors? Well, seeing as I’ve set it up and have been paying for all the costs myself… me (or Morgan Online Marketing to be exact). And Computer Recruiter.

How do I keep updated? A dedicated website* is on its way (when I have time to throw them together), but in the meantime, please join the Meetup page and/or follow @CardiffSEOMeet on Twitter.

* For the time being, cardiffseo.events redirects to www.meetup.com/Cardiff-SEO-Meet/ – yes, with a 301 redirect (I double-checked)…

I have more questions! Tweet me, leave a comment below or start a discussion on the Meetup page, my friend. 🙂

Lastly, I just want to say a big thank you to the event organisers and communities in South Wales for inspiring me to run something myself, especially Cardiff Start, Unified Diff and Cardiff Blogs – you guys rock. I used to put on events at uni and wanted to get into event management when I left uni but accidentally stumbled into SEO as a career path instead, so it’s good to be able to do this again. Feels weirdly full-circle, y’know? Anyway, I should probably end this blog post because I get philosophical or something…

See you in May!

Have We Reached Awards Event Overkill?

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Disclaimer: This post isn’t intended as a dig at any awards event organiser, whether mentioned in this post or not. On the contrary, I’m a fan of awards events and have submitted (and will continue to submit) campaigns to them, now and in the future, on behalf of myself and my clients. This post is simply an observation on the current status of the awards industry as a whole.

Trophies imageRecently I’ve been submitting one of the campaigns that I created for a client to various SEO/marketing awards events – the first time I have ever done so. While we sadly didn’t get through to the finals of Canmol 2015 (the Wales Marketing Awards), we were shortlisted in two categories in the UK Search Awards 2015, which took place in London last week. I also have my sights set on a few awards events taking place in 2016 – we’ve submitted the campaign to one of them (shortlist TBC) and there are at least two or maybe three others that I’m considering in the New Year.

One thing I’ve noticed though? I thought that there would be only one or two awards applicable to me. With this campaign alone, I have found at least half a dozen. And it seems that – in South Wales at least – a few more have sprung up really recently, only in the last year or so.

It has me a little concerned… Are we reaching a point of ‘peak’ awards do? Are there too many of them out there, which are in turn devaluing the status that a person obtains when he/she wins an award and becomes “award-winning?” Honestly, I don’t know – I don’t have the answer, but I thought that I’d air my views and potentially start a discussion on the topic…

The “new car” phenomenon in play?

I’ll happily admit that the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon could be in play here. You know when you buy a new car, and then you notice other people driving the same make/model more often than you did previously – maybe even in the same colour? As mentioned above, this was my first time submitting something to awards shows, so it makes sense that I’m simply more aware of them now. Let’s also not ignore the fact that many of my fellow Welsh ICE members have been up for awards recently, with multiple members shortlisted in the Caerphilly Business Awards 2015. Many of them were tweeting about it, so it could be the case that I’m seeing more tweets about awards, leading me to believe that there are more awards out there than there actually are…

Then again… New awards in just the last few months include the Entrepreneur Wales Awards, the Cardiff Business Awards, The Regional Awards (which includes Cardiff), the Cardiff Music Awards, and various offerings from The Drum, including The Drum Content Marketing Awards (in fact you can see the full list of The Drum’s different awards events here). And while I deliberated about writing this post over the weekend, I was casually browsing Twitter and noticed that the Business Growth Awards South Wales had just been announced. That’s a lot of new awards events all of a sudden – especially those originatining from and/or having a focus on the Cardiff/South Wales region.

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5 Ways That Bloggers Can Get Links Back To Their Blogs

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This post is a repurposed HARO request – to find out more about this process, check out my post on State Of Digital all about it.

Linking diagramAs bloggers, we often get very fixated and carried away with our blogs: making sure that the content that we produce, the blog’s design, etc. are all absolutely perfect. SEO often enters the mix as well (in a do-it-yourself capacity), but it’s not simply a case of adding the WordPress SEO plugin – which is, admittedly, great – to your blog and thinking that that’s all you need to do on the SEO front…

On the contrary… On the link building (a.k.a. off-site SEO) side of things, the possibilities are endless and the fun never ends. It’s not a quantity game, but the more high quality, relevant and natural links that you get pointing to your website (or your blog, as is the case here), the better that it’ll perform from an SEO standpoint, resulting in a likely increase in visibility from organic search – i.e. when people are Googling content relevant to your blog, they might stand more of a chance of finding it, resulting in more traffic to it. So while you can tinker and tweak your site’s internal workings to improve its on-site SEO, you can also improve its off-site SEO by acquiring inbound links.

But how do you go about getting links? Where do you start?

As an SEO who’s also a keen blogger, here are a few ways of getting links back to your blog that have worked for me:

1) Guest blogging

StOD guest posting bio screenshot
Although this tactic has lost some of its impact due to people spamming it too much (although it’s not all bad – you can read my views here), there might still be some good opportunities to guest blog on other bloggers’ websites in your niche, so it’s worth looking into. In addition to the link back to your blog, the hosting blogger is likely to promote it via their social media profiles, too.

It’s worked for me. Beyond recently becoming a regular contributor on State Of Digital, I have also written posts for Moz, SEMrush and other industry blogs. In addition to getting some good industry exposure, getting links from such high profile websites to my blog has helped with its SEO.

2) Attending blogger meet-ups

Going to local blogger meet-ups simply to get to know other local bloggers and to offer advice can be a good way to get links. I’ve seen people get links because someone’s published a write-up of the event and they’ve included links to all the bloggers that they met there. I’ve even been added to a few bloggers’ blogrolls simply due to taking the time to get to know them.

Cardiff Blogs used to be the big player a few years back, but they run less events now than they used to. Despite this, there are a few blogging-related events that seem to crop up every now and again in the South Wales area – so it’s worth keeping an eye out.

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CR 25 Revisited – My SEMrush Webinar

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In late May I was approached by the team at SEMrush about hosting a webinar, going into more detail about the CR 25 campaign that I ran in January. I’d already given a talk about it at BrightonSEO, but with only 20 minutes available, I left out a lot of useful information surrounding the ‘content blitz’ campaign, where we published 25 blog posts in one month (pretty much one each day during the month). I had toyed with the idea of creating a YouMoz post (and had in fact started to draft one), but when SEMrush approached me about the webinar, I thought that it would be a better way to get across all the info.

The webinar took place in early June. In addition to relying on PowerPoint slides, I jumped out of the slides, jumped into my browser (all while the audience were still watching) and quickly ran through all 25 posts as live examples. I thought that this was a good way to demonstrate the many different types of content – especially those with an interactive or particularly visual element to them (such as the custom Google Map, the 25-year timeline, the multiple-choice quiz and one post that featured an embedded tweet containing an autoplaying Vine video).

The video of the webinar is below, with a transcript below that.

Video Transcript (including slide stills)

Slide1-560
Hi, thank you very much for the introduction. I’m Steve Morgan, @steviephil on Twitter, and today I’ll be talking you through a big campaign I ran back in January earlier this year. I actually talked about this campaign at BrightonSEO in April, but I was only given about 20 minutes to talk on-stage and I was only able to talk about a couple of examples of content we did – we had 25 blog posts in one month – and just talk about how much it all cost, so it’s great to have the opportunity… a big thank you to SEMrush for having me. And it’s great to be able to talk about the campaign in more detail and run through more examples than I did when I presented at the conference.

Slide2-560
The webinar is split into three sections. I’m going to jump out of the slides a third of the way through and show you real examples of content, because I thought: “why bother showing you slides of examples when I can actually show you the examples on Firefox?” But before that, I’ll talk you through a bit of an introduction to the campaign and how we prepared for it. And then after I’ve shown you examples, I’ll give you some insights into what performed well, what didn’t, what worked well on certain social media networks, and talk you through how much everything cost, which – even though we had 25 posts created and we tried to avoid just having bog-standard, 400-word advice articles – we did lots of varying types of content and we tried to have interactive content as well. We managed to keep the budget very low by sourcing guest blog posts, by using free or cheap WordPress plugins – things like that really. I’ll tell you more as we go along.

Slide3-560
First, some background for Computer Recruiter.

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