Average pages per visit

Average Visit Duration

Bounce Rate

The Results are in, publishing steady content through you blog leads to a continual gain in website traffic. The below screen shot shows a segment from one of our clients analytics accounts. The image shows that over a three month period visitor entry through the blog went from 40 visitors per day to well over 80 visitors per day. A 100% increase in visitor generation.

Google Analytics was used to to segment visitors that website from the blog.

I’m pleased to report that I had the change to present our content marketing theory to a few people and received positive feedback. Motivation for us! Now its back to the start up office for a few weeks! We are looking forward to the next Kreate event coming up in June.

Left to Right: Gabriel Gervelis, Philip Stanlnaker, Julian Michael, Stacy Spelman, Amber Peters

Bottom: Master networker, entertainer, and magician GG Greene

GG Green

Below: An evening of wine and business at Gene Juarez

Bottom: The one and only Julian Michael (Left) with Andrew Vest and Sasha O’Leary

I’d argue to say that the best way to keep people on your website is to keep them engaged. Content is a powerful method of achieving this. Have you ever followed a link that you found on twitter to someones blog?  Next thing you know 20 minutes have passed and you have bookmarked the site? A perfect example of how social media and content marketing work together!

Let’s put the theory to the test using advanced segmentation in Google Analytics. The below image shows a comparison of three segments of traffic in our clients website.

Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation

• The “All Visits” segment show the average time on site from all of the website visitors
• The “Viewed Blog” segment shows the average time on site from all visitors that viewed blog content
• The “Did Not View Blog” segment shows the average time on site from visitors that did not view the blog

This second image shows the same segmentation. However, it shows the amount of visitors that came to the website, how many viewed the blog, and how many did not view the blog.

Lets look at this data as a casino manager might. Here are some of the key takeaways that he might have

• People that go in the casino spend more time and money with us
• More then 23,000 people entered the hotel last month. 18,000 walked by the casino.
• The casino is working! When people come in they stay in!

At this point in time I’d do my best to answer two questions.

• How do we maintain the current casino performance, if not make it better
• How do we get the 18,000 people that walked by the casino to enter?

Guest blogging and guest authorship on sites other than your own is all about getting your brand out into the Interwebs, positioning yourself in people’s minds and earning links back to your own site. This leads to recognition from all sorts of different online communities which will open doors to strategic partnerships and marketing opportunities.

But all too often guest blogging becomes spammy and low quality.  Bush-league guest posts won’t return very much value to the host page or to your own site.

Being a rock-star guest blogger is all about producing high quality content that will create a buzz and attract more people to your site. Rand Fiskin at SEOmoz has some great tips for creating top-notch guest content.

Find Good Guest Blog Targets

Step one of any sort of guest blogging is to identify valuable targets. You want a high profile blog that will get your content seen by hundreds or better yet, thousands or readers. A blog with only a handful of subscriber isn’t going to bring much value back to your own site so it’s important to know the difference between the big fish and the guppies.  Do a Google search for blogs in your wheelhouse by using a broad keyword. If you’re writing about consumer electronics for example, use something like “gadgets”, “home electronics” or “consumer tech”. Combining your search topic with a phrase like “guest post” or “guest contributor” inside of Google or Bing can turn up some very interesting results and opportunities.

Google Reader is an excellent tool for identifying the top blogs by subscriber count.  Their search functions lets you actually search by name or topic and find the best of the best.  You want to contribute to a blog with a high value audience.  This is also a valuable research tool in your blogging adventures.

The Four Week Rule

Guest blogging is as much about building relationships as it is producing content. You have a much better chance of getting your guest blog published if you spend some time building a relationship before you request that they post your content.  Once you’ve identified a good target for guest blogging, take about four weeks to engage with them via comments on their blog, and activity on their Twitter and Facebook. Establish a positive presence in their online community so that as they’re approving comments, they’re getting to know you.

You can even go above and beyond by trying to help them with something.  Look for tweets or blogs with some kind of request and reach out to help them.  This creates n great first point of contact.  Now; when you reach out to them and say, “Hey I have this great piece of guest content, will you post it on your site?” the answer will come back “Yes!”

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

Ok, you know your target and you’ve spend your four weeks building a relationship; now what do you write about? Start by asking, “What do the readers like?”  Look at past posts and get a feel for what the community cares about and what kind of topics they want to read. The more you know about your audience, the more effective your content. Effective content gets published and shared.  You want people to share your content, visit your site and follow your Twitter and the farther those ripples spread, the more return will come back to your site. Open Site Explorer is a great tool to see what the most successful content on a blog is and what will grab the attention of your audience.

This is a place where a little research goes a long way. What gets the community excited? What earns comments and likes and shares? Learn those answers will give you the edge and spread your content far and wide.

Advanced Tactics

A little creative thinking can create new opportunities and really super-charge your guest content.  Once you’ve established yourself in an active blog community, ask if you can write a series of guest posts. Write three or four guest posts to really establish your brand and spread your presence.

Don’t limit yourself to just one target. Identify multiple targets for guest blogging and as you’re building content, link back to these sites! Now you’re creating relationships for the future and doing these other sites a favor by linking to your content.

Last but not least, pay attention to your SEO and take advantage of your secondary and tertiary keywords. Look for keywords that you wouldn’t normally target.  Maybe they’re not as high volume or lower in your keyword priority. You still want to own the search results for those keywords, so do some research and identify guest posting opportunities among those secondary and tertiary keywords.  Good quality guest posts on high traffic sites will earn lots of nice, juicy links which is great for your SEO.

Just like the analytics example using the Vegas casino analogy, our clients analytics accounts keep showing the same results. Website Visitors that view our blog content are more engaged. They stay on the site longer, view more pages, and bounce less! the below screen shot is from a clients campaign and shows a three month segment of traffic.

Advanced Segment. Total visits to the site and total visitors that viewed the blog

Advanced Segment. Bounce rate of blog viewers compare to non blog viewers

Ask ANY web marketer about the importance of low bounce rates and they will tell you that this stat is key! The above screen shot shows a reduction of bounce rate by almost 50%. I bet you $5 that if people do not bounce off your site, they are more likely to convert!

Advanced Segment. Average page views of blog viewers compare to non blog viewers

The more pages viewed the more engaged the visitor. Remember, this case site saw almost 20,000 visitors in this 90 day segment. An increase of .8 pages per view averaged over 20,000 data points is, well, astronomical!

Advanced Segment. Average time on site of blog viewers compare to non blog viewers.

We can’t say this enough! The conversion game is all about visitor engagement. A sure way to measure visitor engagement is by monitoring the time visitors spend on your site. Well friend, if I’m reading the above stat correctly, it seems that creating engaging blog content is a proven method to keep visitors on your site!

What value can one good blog post bring to you and how do you justify the cost of content marketing? Good content is like the energizer bunny, it keeps going and going! Below I have included a few screen shots from a content campaign that we manage. This one blog post has produced 1,444 entries into the site. As the content gains traction in the social landscape, more and more visitors are generated through the post.

Let’s think about return on investment. We know that Google Adwords charges $3 per click for keywords in this market. Our post generated over 1,000 new visitors within this market. Would you say that this post generated a $3,000 value? I’d say so! As time goes on, this content will keep creating traffic to the site, leading to a sustainable traffic generation campaign.

Quality of the Traffic

It’s all about visitor engagement right? The average visitor spends 2.35 minutes on this blog post.

The power of (good) content speaks for itself!

This Blog Post about Permanent Make Up Removal had the same type of results

The below graph is from the “Landing Page” report in Google Analytics. This shows a steady stream of inbound visitors to the blog form the blog post.

Facebook advertising is used in several different ways, and I believe that the true power of social network marketing such as Facebook advertising, is the ability to identify your exact target market and server compelling ads to them!

Geographic and Demographic Drill Down

The ability to reach the exact audience that you want to deliver your message to summarizes the goal of marketing. As little as 10 years ago this could only be done by the age group targeting, income brackets, the TV shows they watched, and through traditional media channels. Now, social advertising has changed the way we can reach people. Imagine if you had the ability to serve an ad to woman between the ages of 25 – 30, are collage educated, speak 3 languages, and love Opera.

Social Advertising gives us the ability to:

- drill down on a target market

- a geographic area

- custom age range

- their likes and interests

- Where they work

- If they are college educated

- If they are married

- If the are single

In addition to the above targets, their are many more options in social advertising. We have never had this ability in before now!

New Marketer VS Old Marketer

The traditional marketer thinks in terms of promotions, sales, and events. The new marketer will think in terms of content marketing. Content marketing allows me to match a blog post or a concept of a blog post to that exact target market. So, for example, if I have a blog post that talks
about how to optimize a server for high page load times that affects your business, I can carve out this exact segment on Facebook that might be interested in this target.

As I have this target identified, the demographics and likes of interest, I can repetitively serve ads and have different blog post titles. Now, follow me on this one. The goal is not to have them click and to convert to become a sales lead. The goal is to continually impress your brand’s impressions
in front of your target market with innovative blog titles. As the impressions reach the target market, they will relate your brand to these amazing content pieces.

Social Advertising Conversions

The conversion that we are looking for here is in the social following. So we want that person to click on this blog and follow your RSS feed. We want them to follow the newsletter, and we want them to become active in your community or start engaging with your brand.

This, I feel, is the true power of the social advertising, and this, again, I believe is why a Google AdWords revenue is down and Facebook ad serving revenue is up. So the key to content marketing is to identify how you can get your content in front of your target market in a non-threatening, non-sales driven manner.

Expanding beyond the concept that content is king is the idea that in the new age of social media, search engine optimization and digital marketing, content is the key.

Knowing how to apply content is vital to your online success. Search engine optimization, Google, Bing and other search engines rank content by keywords. A business owner and a marketing staff need to understand how to utilize content in this standpoint. Content is the key to search engine optimization.

Social media has changed the game when it comes to online success. Twitter and Facebook are both effective ways to help spread your content, allowing a business to ideally position their brand to the people reading the content. Understanding how to utilize content to power your social media campaign is extremely important to a successful online campaign.

Creating content is the best way to establish yourself in the realm of social media and search engine optimization. Through content you will have brand awareness and brand authority. Content is the key to your entire marketing strategy.

Search Marketing Expo (SMX)

The Search Marketing Expo was founded in 2006 by some of the same people who were involved with the 1999 launch of Search Engine Strategies. SMX offers a unique learning, networking and sharing experience through incorporating many viewpoints into their SEO Conference, by making their conferences highly choreographed to be the most effective and to be driven by attendees. Past keynote speakers include; Tony Adam the Director of Online Marketing from MySpace and Alex Bennert the In House SEO from the Wall Street Journal. The state of search marketing, remarketing and creative ways of conjuring SEO gold were some of the main topics addressed. The next Search Marketing Expo will be SMX Advanced London from May 16th to May 17th, 2011 in London, UK.

PubCon Conference

PubCon is a SEO Conference that began in 2000 as an informal gathering of early Web search engine optimizers and webmasters in a local London pub, therefore the name PubCon. Now though as the focus has shifted the name more professionally refers to “Web publishing conference” rather than the location. Some of their past keynote speakers including; Zappos chief executive Tony Hsieh on social media marketing and technical expertise, Cirque du Soleil’s director of marketing Shawn Rorick on merging traditional and new media and the growing importance of mobile search marketing strategies. The next PubCon SEO Conference will be held this year in Las Vegas from November 8th – 10th.

Marketing Optimization Summit (eMetrics)

The first eMetrics Summit occurred in 2002, it was co-founded by Jim Sterne author of the book Web Metrics which lead to the conferences founding with great enthusiasm. The focus of this SEO Conference is not what works best, but how to measure what works best, that is the core of eMetrics. Past keynote speakers include; Bob Page of Ebay speaking on delivering the best customer experience and Carol Gohl of Dell Computers speaking on Coordinating Concepts across media. The next North American eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit will be held in New York City, on October 17th- 21st.

The Online Marketing Summit (OMS)

The Online Marketing Summit is a SEO Conference known for putting top priority on providing educational content without the exhibit floor, vendor sales pitches or other distractions that can get in the way at other SEO Conferences. They have been putting on conferences using innovative strategies and workshops such as 1-on-1 interactive labs, peer networking, and online marketing boot camp since 2007. Some of their past keynote speakers include; Tim Ash the author of Landing Page Optimization in 2010, Michael Metz the Senior Director of Web Marketing Strategy from Cisco in 2009, Frederick Vallaeyes the “Product Evangelist” from Google AdWords in 2008 and Dan Siroker the Former Director of Analytics from the successful Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign. They will cover such critical topics as social media, search, email, demand generation, analytics, usability and integrated marketing at their next North American SEO Conference, taking place from June 6th to June 8th in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Search Engine Strategies (SES)

Search Engine Strategies has been the leading international conference series for webmasters, digital agencies, online marketers and corporate decision makers since their start in 1999. They focus on trying to select the best speakers possible and delivering the latest market intelligence while giving their attendees clear actionable tips and strategies that they will be able to implement as soon as they return home. Some of their past keynote speakers include; Duncan Watts the principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research directing the Human Social Dynamics group, Jeff Adelson-Yan the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Levelwing a digital advertising agency that provides data-driven marketing solutions, Jonathan Allen the Director of Search Engine Watch and Tim Ash the CEO of Siteturners.com. Topics like 6 Strategies for Superior SEM Results, Bing: More Bang for the Click, Google Ad Innovations and DoubleClick Search V3 Preview were all covered at the last SES in New York, NY March 2011. In addition to these specific topics, more general basics are touched on at every SES (making it great for both the beginners and those who are already established) such as; how to design search engine-friendly web pages, the basics of building links and their importance to rankings, whether to build expertise in house or outsource to an agency, and how to convert more of your visitors into buyers. This SEO Conference will be in Toronto from June 13th to June 15th and will feature journalist Amber Mac and Tracy Smith of the Yellow Pages as key note speakers.