But once search analytics firm Systrix collected some data on “farmer”, a different picture emerged: while some sites had been slammed, article marketing stalwart EzineArticles lost 90% of its traffic, and Yahoo!’s Associated Content lost even more, the big names were largely unscathed. Demand’s eHow actually rose slightly, although some of their other properties dropped.

I’ll admit it: my SEO strategies leaned a little too heavily on article marketing in the past. It was tempting, it was easy, and it was pure SEO.

The old trick was pretty simple: there were dozens of “article directories” online, which would pay somewhere between “A pittance” and “$0″ for 300 words or so of content, which could include a link. They took care of the hard part:  building a trusted site that could rank for the long-tail terms that showed up in the articles, and would pass link-juice along with traffic.

Google’s “Farmer” update didn’t end that process, but it definitely changed it. The first reactions assumed that Google was going after the big content farms — i.e. the biggest of all, Demand Media’s eHow.

But once search analytics firm Systrix collected some data on “farmer”, a different picture emerged: while some sites had been slammed, article marketing stalwart EzineArticles lost 90% of its traffic, and Yahoo!’s Associated Content lost even more, the big names were largely unscathed. Demand’s eHow actually rose slightly, although some of their other properties dropped.

“Farmer” means that doing article marketing the easy way is over. You can no longer treat low-level content production as a commodity, and crank up the dial in order to achieve rankings. Not only did many content farms lose rankings, but they responded by raising quality requirements and implementing no-followed links. Not only will you get a smaller audience, but you’ll have to invest more to get it.

Target the top content sites. eHow is still ranking well, and still delivers traffic. Youtube also benefited from the latest rankings change; it’s not hard to create a one-minute video around each of twenty different long-tail terms, which could easily rank on page one.

Reemphasize social media. Facebook was one of the top beneficiaries from this change. But more importantly, social media as a whole may benefit in a relative sense: you can’t get into the universal search results as easily, so getting into the stream and the newsfeed may be the next-best option. A few possibilities: Instead of five generic articles, write one compelling (and re-tweetable) piece of linkbait. On Facebook, don’t just “own” your business name. Try to own a mid-tail keyword, too. Find out which “sharing” icons your users click on; ditch the rest.

Start emailing. If you can’t own the SERP and you’re already at maximum capacity in the stream, you need to own the inbox. Read more at searchengineland.com

I puzzled over the title of this column for a bit. The initial title I wrote was “The Importance of Unique Content”, and I actually mean something different than that. Most of the time when we talk about unique content we mean not simply using copies of someone else’s text (whether it be plagiarized or licensed). What I am going to focus on today is the importance of covering different topics than other people do. Let me illustrate the problem using the mortgage marketplace as an example.

If you look at this data carefully, 66% of the ranking weight (according to the survey) is directly related to links. An additional 6% goes to social ranking factors, and as with links, these are related to how people perceive your site. That gives us a whopping total of 72% or ranking weight.

So how are you going to attract attention? By being the 18,500,000-1st website to offer basic info on mortgages? By offering a mortgage calculator? Have to be millions of sites that already do that.

Offering content on the same topic matter as all these other sites is not going to cut it. You have to figure out how to differentiate. In the mortgage market, this is going to be particularly difficult. If you are going to try and break into a tough market, here are some ideas you could try:

The key thing is to figure out how to do something that is truly different. You might argue that the market you are in is not as competitive as the mortgage space. That may be true, but for fun, I sampled a bunch of other markets by conducting the following searches, including the “” to reduce the number of false positives: Read more at searchengineland.com

Content marketing is hot right now. According to the B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, 51% of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budgets within the next year. That’s because publishing compelling content can help you attract customers, increase your brand awareness, promote your thought leadership and bring more visitors to your website. And that’s just a short list of benefits!

However, you may have come across a few myths that are preventing you from getting the greatest ROI from your content marketing efforts. If you’re in the early stages of a content marketing strategy, you may believe at least one of the following myths.

Reality: It takes more than simply publishing a blog or posting a tweet to bring visitors to your website. Sysomos recently revealed that the average lifespan of a tweet is one hour–meaning that if no one retweets you within an hour, you’ll have to either try again later or post something more compelling.

Reality: Publishing keyword-rich content can improve your search engine rankings and bring more visitors to your website, but those visitors won’t stick around unless your content is engaging. Don’t try to get to the top of the search engines by stuffing your social media content and website with keywords. This makes your copy boring and tells your readers, “I wrote this for Google–not for you.”

Reality: You have a huge opportunity to attract customers with your content. However, many marketers turn their blogs, white papers and social media messages into blatant sales pitches. If you try to pitch to potential customers before they get a chance to know, like and trust you, they will tune out. The bulk of your content should educate potential customers and help solve one of their key problems. Once your prospects view you as a trusted and helpful resource, they will be more likely to turn to you if they need your product or service. Read more at www.contentmarketinginstitute.com

Content creation and marketing are arguably the toughest tasks in marketing for a business to wrap their heads around.  The smaller the business, the harder it is to consistently create valuable content. Not to mention finding the time for content marketing.  I like to share a little process with my clients called the green approach to content marketing–based on the same principles tree huggers advocate to save the planet.

Reuse valuable content,

Reduce time wasted, and

Recycle for better results.

A key time-saver and smart way to create fresh content is to reuse valuable content your audience has already showed they love. Reusing content is not about re-writing the old, its about giving it a face lift and making it more valuable by re-presenting it to your audience in a useful and valuable way.  (Not to be confused with Recycling content, which we cover in part 3).

How you reuse content will depend entirely on your market.  Some ideas that have been useful in the past to my clients include: Read more at websuccessdiva.com

This is another post that is back by popular demand, with several changes and additions. In the last two years, content marketing has matured, and many more voices have joined the conversation.

There are a content marketing institute, an Alltop category, and now a content strategy conference, Confab2011. Why is everyone all of a sudden talking and writing about content?

First the definition - content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Many more interactions with products and services take place online today. Individual and social search are both becoming an important way of finding and filtering relevant information.

When you create content, you need to keep in mind what attracts customers and prospects, and their friends. Educating, informing, and creating with them are all ways to engage people in a conversation with you.

It should therefore not be surprising that the Top Ten reasons why your content marketing strategy fails are: Read more at www.conversationagent.com

People are spending more time watching more videos online than ever, and multimedia, like video, tends to hold their attention longer.

According to a Nielsen ratings report, “by June 2010, 136.2 million Americans had viewed 10.2 billion videos streams … The average U.S. Internet user spent 194.6 minutes watching online video during the month.” This constituted a 3% rise from the year before. Plus, research shows that multimedia can improve time-on-page, which means you hold a viewer’s attention for as much as 30 seconds longer.

1. Review your archives of company video. Great content may be there that can be edited to provide a new look at your organization. Create a video newsroom within your website to make it easy for users and search engines to find the key content.

2. Encourage viewers to participate. According to Wikipedia’s description of consumer engagement, “increasing the engagement of target customers increases the rate of customer retention.”

3. Publish content where your target market is engaging. When it comes to watching videos online, Google is king. It drives more traffic to video sites than Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined, according to a report by Brightcove and TubeMogul.

4. Embed video into your news release. Copy and paste video into your press release, webpage, or blog post. When embedded video is clicked, it loads on a player within the page. Read more at www.mpdailyfix.com

We’ve noticed a rise in the number of questions from webmasters about how best to structure a website for mobile phones and how websites can best interact with Googlebot-Mobile. In this post we’ll explain the current situation and give you specific recommendations you can implement now.

A good way to answer this question is to think about the capabilities of the mobile phone’s web browser, especially in relation to the capabilities of modern desktop browsers. To simplify matters, we can break mobile phones into a few classifications:

Let’s start with a simple question: what do we mean by “mobile phone” when talking about mobile-friendly websites?

Google has two crawlers relevant to this topic: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. The questions we’re seeing more of can be summed up as follows:

The next set of questions ask about the URLs mobile content should be served from. Let’s look in detail at some common use cases.

Finally, we receive many questions about what URLs to put in Mobile Sitemaps. As explained in our Mobile Sitemaps Help Center articles, you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent. Read more at googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Facebook recently changed the options in its news feed settings so users either “Show posts from: friends and Pages you interact with the most” or from “all of your friends and Pages.” Some users have unknowingly been defaulted to the first option, causing lot of content to be hidden from them without their knowledge.

It’s not exactly clear what determines which default users receive, though newer accounts appear more likely to only be seeing content from a subset of friends. Previously users could select exactly how many of their friends they saw posts from. Read more at www.insidefacebook.com

If you could characterize a business as lucky, then Threadless is super lucky. The online retailer of T-Shirts, in which the site’s community designs the Tees, became wildly successful because they own a unique space in the marketplace. Their product—the Tees—are also their content. As HubSpot has been preaching, if you offer remarkable content, you will get found online and grow your business.

So if you are looking for ideas to stand out from the competition, keep your eyes on Threadless. To get us started on this path, check out HubSpot’s interview with Liz Ryan, Director of Email Marketing at Threadless:

1. Do you have buyer personas or how do you think about list segmentation in your email marketing?

2. How frequently do you send emails and what type of content do you introduce?

3. You recently launched a very bold re-engagement campaign (with a subject line “Open this email or say goodbye forever. (Kinda sounds like your crazy ex, right?)”). What was its goal? Were you taking any risk?

4. What results did you see from it?

5. Which company’s email marketing program do you admire & why?

6. What is your number one email marketing tip for our audience? Read more at blog.hubspot.com

The essence of this deck is that attention is linked with economic value creation. However, with infinite content options (space) yet finite attention (time) and personalized social algorithms curating it all for us, it’s going to be increasingly challenging to stand out.

Let’s consider Twitter, for example. They are seeing a staggering 110 million tweets per day. And the volume is growing. But therein lies the challenge. Each tweet decays almost as soon as it is released. Some 92% of all retweets (and 97% of replies) are within the first 60 minutes according to Sysomos.

The situation in some ways is worse on Facebook where a highly personalized algorithm called EdgeRank curates our feed based on personal affinities, content formats and timeliness. There’s not just one Facebook but 500M Facebooks. And, according to Vitrue, the majority of us participate at top and bottom of the hour. This means that anything you post to your Facebook page needs to create a social surge well before then. Read more at edelmandigital.com

Syndicating your content is a tricky game. On the one hand, getting more exposure for you, your brand, or your company is a good thing. On the other hand, having another site outrank you for your own content is not a good thing. In this post, I’ll take a look at some of the pros and cons and offer some tips about how you can make syndication work for you.

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Content syndication is different from web-scraping: content syndication is when you allow your content to be placed on another site. In some cases, the site will approach you asking to use your work; in other cases, you will approach them. In either case, both parties consent to the action. However, from a search engine perspective, it’s almost identical to web scraping because the engines see the same content in two places and have to look for signals that tell them who is the source or owner. Read more at www.wolf-howl.com

It’s been quite some time since I shared some tools on researching trends and hot content on Twitter. Today we’ll look at a few tools that allow to discover and keep an eye on hot content shared on Facebook.

Thanks to Recommendations social plugin provided by Facebook, there have been a few interesting projects popping up that allow marketer a deeper insight into what is being shared online.

Discover Hot Content by Domain

Discover Hot Content by Topic / Keyword Read more at www.searchenginejournal.com

You have a message and so does your competitor. Which one receives the most exposure and reaches prospects is often dependent on any company’s commitment to creating resourceful, unique and compelling content to reach that audience.

If you are creating content, promoting it and still finding yourself behind the competition, below are 3 tips to help you cross the marketing finish line in first place.

1. Create Your Own Sandbox. Going head-to-head is a tough marketing battle to win and often requires considerable resources, so make sure your key messages stand out by explaining what makes your product or service better than the rest.

2. Use more communication vehicles than your competition. Are your competitors on Facebook and Twitter? Then perhaps you should be too – and take the time to explore which marketing channels make sense for your audience.

3. Have a faster communications cycle than your competitors. Update your material regularly, and make sure to get new data out as quickly as possible, while maintaining communication standards. Find ways to automate delivery of your communications so that your news is always more recent than the competitors.  Quick updates to your newsroom, is a great way to get started. Read more at www.socialmediaexplorer.com

Frank Marquardt is director of Content Strategy at The Barbarian Group, a digital services and creation company with an almost radical devotion to Internet culture and nice red Swedish Fish™.

Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy. Great content should reflect your brand and give people a reason to stay engaged.

These five content strategy techniques will build better relationships and earn your brand better results on the social web.

That’s why it’s critical to build a content strategy into your social media campaign. Without a framework for what you say and a plan for how and when you say it, you risk leaving your audiences, at best, confused. At worst, they’ll ignore you. Who wants that?

1. Know Your Voice

2. Time Your Content

3. Know Your Audience

4. Solve Problems

5. Be True Read more at mashable.com

Writing good content for a blog is only half of the equation: promoting your blog to drive traffic is the other half.

Previously we offered five reasons to promote your blog with press releases as part of an overall content marketing strategy. This post provides a few tips on how to write a press release for maximum media exposure. Read more at www.problogger.net