The number is out there, Google made 37.9 billion dollars last year. About 96 percent of this came from advertising. WordStream’s impressive new infographic explores which keywords were the most popular and whose ads made the search engine so much money.
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Whether you are starting up a new business or trying to grow and improve an existing brand, content marketing is almost a necessity in the current global economy. But, what is it?
Simply put, Content Marketing is the technique of creating and distributing valuable information and or ‘content’ to possible customers and consumers, keeping them engaged and interested. The purpose isn’t to sell them directly, but to give them something valuable and keep their interest, incentivizing them to come back of their own volition.
But, why use this strategy? Why not use direct or interruption marketing methods or commercials instead? Simple. They’re annoying. The average consumer has had a backlash against many conventional marketing strategies. Through the invention of DVR, people can simply skip over the commercial break without skipping a beat. Over the radio, ads are considered a gap between music and news, and online? Banners are ignored and pop-ups are considered perhaps the most annoying technique of all.
So, the solution is to create content that the reader will wish to actively seek out. There are many types of possible content; going from blog posts, testimonials and reviews, to viral videos and viral marketing.
The first step is to plan your goal. What is the purpose of your business? Aside, of course, from making money. After that has been attentively planned, you can move on to the consumer.
The second step is finding out who your base is. Who are you selling to? What are their personalities like, their wants, needs, desires? And most of all, what do they need to know to go from possible buyers to definite first time and repeat customers? After that, how can you most effectively match up their needs with your business’s goals?
Then, you must find out where your marketing base is. Where do they congregate? What kind of websites do they find online, and what interests them? You must try to sell to the target audience, using any possible channel. If you’re selling to the hip and trendy youth of today, blog posts full of outdated slang won’t appeal, while viral videos on YouTube aren’t going to touch base with octogenarians.
From then on, finding out what content and tactics are required will become clear. First, find out what you already have. What materials can you re-purpose, and what content do you need to create? What gaps can you already fill? Whether or not you write in-house or partner with a copywriter, or buy unique content online, it is important to be sure what is being published will fit your target audience.
There are a variety of content marketing channels, all of which have benefits and drawbacks. Videos have gone viral and did worked wonders for some companies, as well as creating content that consumers simply enjoy. See “The Man You Could Smell Like” campaign from Old Spice for a style that viewers enjoy and run with. Blogs that subtly add in your business or product in posts, or good reviews can do wonders.
After the content has been crafted, it is important to create a calendar. Spread it out and be sure not to over saturate the airwaves or to bombard your audience too fiercely.
Finally, observe how your marketing technique is being accepted by the consumer. Page views, web traffic, and several other measurements can be taken to see how effective the strategy is. Be sure to adjust your methods accordingly.
Davy Kestens is a motivated young lunatic from Belgium with a highly entrepreneurial vision on his life. Continuously starting up online projects when he’s not out trying to take over the world. His latest published tool for world domination is GhostBloggers.net – An online marketplace where you can buy & sell unique blog posts.
Earlier this year Alexa shook things up a little, applying some kind of penalty or reduced modifier to websites with a traditionally higher percentage of Alexa toolbar users than average, predominately technology and webmaster focused sites who found the Alexa data useful, or who actively evangelised Alexa toolbar use as it is often a major factor in gauging traffic for advertising.
Some of the 3rd party tools offering Alexa data also provide other useful features, especially for webmasters with toolbars such as Search Status for Firefox.
Some level of rebalance was probably fair, to try to address the concerns of sites with high traffic but with a much lower frequency of Alexa toolbar users, who often felt they were at a disadvantage, especially in advertising sales.
During the last month Alexa has introduced another round of filtering or penalties, reducing or wiping out the effect of traffic from Social Media and Social News sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon, but potentially other sites such as Twitter or popular feed readers.
I haven’t done enough granular research to come up with a final list of likely candidates.
This is something potentially valuable to advertisers, as huge traffic spikes are possible from the largest social sites that can lead to an imbalance in their trend data, especially for the most recent 3 month period that appears in their toolbar by default.
I actually welcome this change, although I would much prefer to have both sets of data available, thus allowing Alexa to also provide a 3rd, possibly unique measure of the most “socially influenced” sites.
Unfortunately they seem to have made an error in their calculations, reported by both Performancing and more recently Daily Blog Tips (lots of head to head comparrisons), which is interesting to explore in more detail.
If there was a 75% penalty for webmasters, or their toolbar multiplication factor was 75% less you currently have something like this:-
Traffic=((Toolbar*10)/4)-SM
Say there were 60 visitors to a site using the toolbar (maybe from 500 -1000 total visitors), and 100 visitors were from social media (10-20%)
((60*10)/4)-100 = 50 visitors being counted
Note: It would only take 25% of traffic to come from social media for the resulting traffic to equal to zero
What it should be is something more like:-
Traffic=((Toolbar*10)-SM)/3
/3 rather than 4 because webmasters might more frequent social media users as well, though penetration of both toolbars might be even higher.
((60 *10)-100)/4 = 125 visitors being counted
These are only examples of how the math might work and are not real world figures – I am sure Alexa are using much more complex calculations, but I am equally sure they are making some serious mistakes that can make a site receiving 500+ unique visitors per day appear to have way less than 100, or a site receiving 10,000 appear to have the equivalent of 1000 visitors or less.
This is something that affects all sites, but disproportionately affects sites (technology and webmaster) with a higher percentage of Alexa toolbar users, that had them rebalanced earlier this year.
Here are some examples of popular webmaster related sites that this double-dipping penalty have had a drastic effect on
Shoemoney.com currently with a 1 week average of over 174K
Doshdosh.com currently with a 1 week average of over 200K
ReadWriteWeb for 5th August one day stats was an Alexa rating of 90,000
Search Engine Land for 5th August one day stats was 83,000 with a one week average of 86K
The double-dipping penalty also hasn’t left the social sites themselves unscathed, with Digg and Reddit for some strange reason showing noticable declines, but Mixx continuing to gain. Maybe internal referrals from subdomains offer a benefit.
Then there is Tech industry favorite Techmeme, which is quite capable of sending 1000s of visitors to other sites on a daily basis, real referral traffic, but for some reason has a weekly average of 137,000 itself.
Daniel on DBT went into a lot more examples as mentioned earlier, including comparing traffic where he knows the real stats.
It is hard to tell how this might have affected larger sites, as relative traffic levels might be looked on as seasonal averages, and a drop from 2K Alexa to 4K Alexa might be just par for the course.
So far there is no official mention of any changes on the Alexa blog.
Whether my equation is correct doesn’t actually matter, it is clear that many sites (but not all) within the technology and webmaster niches were hit.
The most infuriating part isn’t the penalties and calculation mistakes themselves, however they are done, but how Alexa, owned by Amazon, could make such as huge and obvious mistake.
Could this be deliberate, and if so why?
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