What is home? Well, in a practical sense, your online home is your web site; maybe your blog. More philosophically, your home is your business and yourself.
Read MoreTone: it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear
Show all of your beautiful colors, Little Rainbow! Even the biggest bro tears up when he’s compelled to give his best bro a Best Man speech; even the steeliest ruffian is oft reduced to tears when delivering his dad’s Eulogy.
Read MoreThe salesmanship of influencer marketing
If you’re doing influencer marketing right, you’ll have a lifetime relationship with your influential. And, like any family member or friend, relationships require consistent and attentive attention. Likewise, if you’re selling high ticket items, especially products and services that require new contracts, new leases, refills, upgrades, or are pricey and powerful but highly commoditized, then you need to go well beyond simply selling widgets. Every sale is an engagement ring that you’ve put on your prospect’s finger. The best salespeople in the world are wed to each and every one of their accounts. And, like marriage, you need to be on board for way longer than the honeymoon.
Read MoreAll your best content is now fake news
It’s time for you to really invest in your own personal or professional social platforms. As lines are being drawn, it’s time to make sure all your hard-wrought creative work lives on your own blog or website instead of on someone else’s.
While we both know you’re not a purveyor of so-called fake-news, if you’re not a proper J-school-certified and verified reporter, you might end up on the wrong side of the social media content filter.
Fake news has been in the real news recently. In order to protect their readers, Facebook and others are considering filtering out the fake from the real in order to slow down or even stop a proliferation of willful and wanton deceit.
At least that’s what they say they’re doing. Looking at it another way, this could be the beginning of a process of licensing and verification that will separate the proper journalists and reporters from the bloggers, propagandists, anarchists, marketers, and dirty, dirty affiliate marketers.
If I were conspiratorial, I might fancy this as an aggressive hearts-and-minds land-grab by the mainstream media to sell more papers and cable subscriptions, and to train us that nothing but traditional mainstream media can be trusted (and in a post Smith-Mundt Act world, who can we trust?)
No matter what your expertise, specialization, experience, or contributions, you may very well end up on the wrong side of the filter. I won’t go so far as to call this censorship, but it surely is an aggressive business plan, a last-gasp push by so-called traditional and trustworthy fact-checkers.
I, myself, have been working very hard to make sure that I have published and copied as much content as I can find — and still consider relevant circa 2016 — to my corporate and personal platforms, Gerr.is and ChrisAbraham.com, respectively. I do this to make sure I don’t lose track of them and to make it easy and simple for Google, you, and me to be able to access them well into the future.
In fact, I always copy these articles over to my Gerris Blog and my Chris Abraham Blog the day after I post them, just to make sure I keep them close, though I always make tribute to Biznology whenever and wherever I cross-post anywhere.
Currently, Gerris Corp runs on Squarespace, which isn’t ideal; however, Chris Abraham runs Plone, an exceptional CMS/publishing platform for sharing content online. When I finally port Gerris over to something, it’ll probably either be to Drupal or WordPress.
If you’re not already experienced with blogging/publishing platforms, I would always start with WordPress.
Even if your raison d’être isn’t extreme like Breitbart, relying only on sites like LinkedIn, Medium, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Instagram, or Snapchat to populate and propagate your brand online puts a lot of responsibility onto the shoulders of platforms that are not only not owned or controlled by you, but might not offer you the best copyright terms.
What’s more, where’s all the stuff I uploaded and shared on Friendster, Utterz/Utterly, MySpace, and Orkut?
For example, the more than polarizing InfoWars.com, founded by alt-right political firebrand Alex Jones, started as a simple message board. While the topic is indeed extreme strangeness, their news isn’t fake, per-se, or intentionally deceptive. It’s consistently painfully earnest, but I honestly believe those folks, including Jones, are true-believers.
Like Coast-to-Coast AM, these alternative news sites reflect very accurately the hearts and minds of their readers.
Now, as a direct result of the firestorm that has erupted against the firebrand, news, content, media and information are allegedly being filtered out of reddit and Facebook. They’re taking it so far as to copy all of their videos and films off of video-sharing sites like YouTube just to make sure, no matter what. No matter how filtered against their sites and properties social networks, search engines, and social media might become, their core membership, readership, viewership, and subscribers will always be able to access content directly, hell or high water.
This has actually been a boon for sites like these. While they still share their content as promiscuously as possible across social media, they’re really just doing this to expand the brand as best they can. What they’re really doing is working to convert — to train — their core audience to go directly to their sites instead of going to Facebook or Twitter to get their alternative news. They’re basically doing exactly what the New York Times hopes you’re doing every morning: setting your browser homepage to your favorite, though filtered, site.
After you’ve sorted out your content, content-delivery, and audience, you can actually avoid browsers and social networks completely by commissioning your own site-specific app for Android and iPhone — it’s really become affordable and deceptively simple if you’re just trying to create an app that will update, download, and nicely render your site’s content. You can be just like the Washington Post.
Mainstream media has been fighting irrelevance since the early 90s. The real bloodbath started in 2009. Information wants to be free and newspapers, basic cable, and broadcast radio and television rely on subscriptions and advertising to support their top-heavy and laborious 19th century business models.
Blogging leveled the playing field when it came to producing news for readers. There has always been zero barrier-to-entry when it came to blogging, at least when it came to your particular niche.
And who knows? In a few high-profile instances, consumer-generated media sites have been able to rise to become bona fide feared and respected news sites in their own right.
Via Biznology
The more the messier for content marketing SEO success
You need to spend only 20% of the time you do on your content marketing and marketing SEO than you’re doing — at least for now. Be quick, be messy, be pedestrian, maybe even turn off your Grammatik and your Autocorrect. Churn out five-times the amount of content you’ve been writing then hit publish and walk away for a couple days. Then, feel free to get all anal retentive on your content — but only with the stuff you plan to add to your portfolio. Leave everything else as close to as-is as possible. Please.
America voted Donald J. Trump 45th president of the United States. To many, Trump’s campaign was a mess — but it worked because it spoke directly to so many people right under our nose and in their own language. Away from school marms and hall monitors. For better for worse, the internet reflects the way people search and write and speak when they’re on their own, away from the grammar police and your thesis advisor.
When I was recruited into the elite digital team at Edelman Public Affairs, they made me take a grammar test. It was an HR requirement even though I was brought on board by an EVP. To this day, our reports, our memoranda, even our emails need to reflect exceptional professionalism.
Unfortunately, all this esprit de corps is mostly wasted in your pursuit of search engine optimization (SEO) ranking and in your content marketing campaigns. Trump speaks at a 6th grade level, and should we all. In fact, weren’t we all trained to aim at the 6th or 7th grade Flesch–Kincaid readability?
As I have said many times before, Google is mostly literal. Google is not your book editor or your doctoral advisor, Google is your everyman. Google is mostly populist. Actually Google is whatever and whomever you want Google to be; however, when it comes to money, you’re more likely to get 20,000 nickels than one thousand-dollar bill. Everyman is where it’s at.
When I wrote for AdAge, back in the day, circa 2008-2009, they did the most delightful thing, though I don’t know how SEO-aware or SEO-focused they were about this. They published whatever I wrote for them immediately upon receipt and then, a couple-days, if not a week later, they went back and put it through the full archive, for perpetuity, let’s not embarrass the Advertising Age reputation, editing.
I always knew that my work would enter the world fully-flawed just like me. With the kind of mistakes that everyone, including me, makes all the time, especially during search. The genius of letting a few days go by before the first deep editing is that all the mistakes, all the informality, and the colloquialisms of we the rabble, pre-spit-polishing and detailing.
And then Google gets in there, indexes, and maybe gets lazy, doesn’t come back in a couple-few days later, doesn’t care too much about the diff between initial draft written by a PR and marketing professional. The final article worthy of consideration is restored to a perfection there never was, by a hyper-vigilant school marm cum hall monitor cum editor.
In my previous life, I used to be a professional film photographer. 35mm slides through Nikon bodies and Nikkor glass. The creative process only took up 20% of my time while developing, sleeving, editing, sorting, labeling, logging, packing, mailing, marketing, selling, and waiting took the other 80%. No, I am not missing a piece. Since I was a slide shooter, I rarely spent too much time in Photoshop doing post-production. I only had light, film, glass, and filter. Someone else did their magic in the darkroom or on a Macintosh Quadra 950.
Same with blogging or any other type of creative behavior. When I was shooting, I was giving 100% but it was still only 20% of the work required to deliver a finished product to the client.
I have upwards of 100,000 slides in archival sleeves in my storage area — but only 4,000 have made me any money and only 400 of those slides made my portfolio: 20 sleeves of 20 slides per.
But back in the day, all 100,000 of those images sat in tall steel file cabinets at Corbis (née The Stock Market) and Pacific Stock, filed away and indexed. While only 4,000 made me royalties and only 400 made me money, 100,000 were always in play.
While only 4% of all my work was considered profitable — and that’s high — nobody ever knew which 4%. And though only .4% ever made it into my portfolio, 250x that had potential.
I want you to write at least five times as much content as you are. Blog content, not ephemeral tweets or facebooks.
Populism 2017 — stop trying to appeal to your Headmaster or the Yale Law Journal, the future’s in that other bubble, a bubble where your choice of words and how you write them color your writing as much as does the content.
Each and every telegraphist has his or her own unique style and pattern when transmitting a message, called their “fist,” identifiable to other telegraphers. The same can be said about your and your words and your writing. Allow your content to become as unique in style and pattern as possible. Your flaws will become your own personal style and you will actually begin to attract people who are outside of Phi Beta Kappa and the National Honor Society — were they ever your perfect customers in the first place?