Web Content

Social media marketing and the mad electrician.

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social media marketerSocial media is not something you just add on to your existing marketing plan.

It won’t work if you say, “Hey, last quarter we tried coupons, this month let’s try social media.” It’s not an advertising medium.

If you want social media to really work, you have to pull apart your whole marketing plan, and your company culture, and rebuild everything with “social” at its heart.

I have worked with a couple of different companies over the last little while, both of them in the B2C space, both of them in their first year of business. But they have had very different levels of success with social media.

The first company built its company and its marketing plan along traditional lines. Old school marketing. And then they decided to give social media a try. They just bolted it on.

It didn’t work.

The second company was more of a “native” web business. Its founders were younger and had grown up with the web. This business had “social” at its core. Everything – from sales, to customer service, and to marketing – revolved around social media. In fact, even the way people communicated within the company took place on a social platform.

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The fastest way to master the craft of writing for the web is to create and write your own website.

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My money making website about coffeeIt’s hard to track all the different ways in which I have built up my knowledge and expertise in writing for the web.

I guess it started when I wrote and published my first website back in 1996.

When I began writing for the web full time in 1998, I was soaking up new knowledge from all kinds of different sources. I would read articles, buy books and listen carefully to fellow presenters at industry conferences.

And, of course, I learned a great deal from every new client project I took on.

But nothing compares, or even comes close to the knowledge I have gained from writing and publishing my own hobby website, CoffeeDetective.com.

Yes, it’s a hobby. I work on the site just in the evening and at weekends. Sometimes.

And before I get into the part about learning, let me just mention that the site has also become a significant source of income for me and my family. Since I began writing it in 2007, this hobby-site has earned me over $200,000 in passive income.

Now let’s look at how my coffee site has helped me learn so much about writing for the web.

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Don’t send your readers to sleep with pigeonhole copywriting.

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piI’m going to begin by giving you an illustration of what this post is all about.

Here are two ways in which a company might communicate the availability of its customer service agents.

Example #1: We are available to take your call between 8:00AM and 6:00PM.

Example #2: We’ll leap at the chance to take your call between 8:00AM and 6:00PM.

If I were to give you a brain scan while you read those two lines – and if I knew the first thing about brain scans, which I don’t – I might see zero brain activity while you read the first example, and a sudden spark of activity while you read the second.

How come? Because the language in the first example is so familiar, so expected and so simple, you really don’t need to think at all. Your mind recognizes the vocabulary, and sees that it’s all put together in a way you have seen and comprehended a hundred times before. No cognitive activity is required.

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The biggest threat to quality content is…social media.

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Content marketing crashThere is a huge crash coming.

Racing down the highway, approaching from opposite directions, are content marketing and social media marketing.

Many people think these two vehicles are complementary, one supporting the other, driving in the same direction. And potentially they could be. But that’s not what I see happening.

I think they are about to collide and cause a lot of companies some huge headaches.

Here is what I’m seeing…

With their Panda update Google bankrupted a ton of companies and forced the rest of us to focus more on the quality of the content we published, and less on the quantity.

For the last couple of years we have all been focused on creating quality content. At least, we have if we want Google to be nice to us and list our pages high up in the search results.

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If Google was in charge of your local library…

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google libraryThanks to my nifty NSA-Lite smartphone app, I was able to record the following conversation between two Googlebots as they set about reviewing and reorganizing the books at my local library.

(Don’t worry, after this short, light-hearted detour I’ll get back to my usual posts on writing for the web and freelancing next week. And yes, for the technically minded among you, I do know the Googlebot doesn’t judge the quality of the web pages it finds and indexes. Poetic license.)

Googlebot 1: Unbelievable! It must have been literally months since anyone last checked out the contents of this library.

Googlebot 2: I hear you dude. How can they possibly maintain quality without checking for what’s new at least once a day?

Googlebot 1: Agreed. The whole place looks like a pretty sad dump to me. Anyway, let’s get started. Here’s a dusty-looking volume: 1984 by George Orwell. What have we got on this?

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What I hate about web content. And how to make it better.

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most web content is noise, not signalI hate the race…the pressure to add more and more pages of content at an ever-increasing rate.

A few years ago millions of rubbish pages were being uploaded to the web every day. Then Google put a big dent in that approach with its Panda updates.

Unfortunately, the race is still being run, but with a slightly improved quality of content.

It’s still a race.

And I hate that.

I want to publish content according to my own calendar, not because I feel I have to compete with everyone else.

And I want to publish content that has a purpose, not simply because “more content is good”.

And that’s the nub of it. It drives me nuts when companies and individuals upload content simply because “more is good”, and “fresher is better than older”. There is an element of truth to both of those reasons, but the downside is that everyone gets into a race to upload truck loads of content that is just “good enough”, and created simply to satisfy the call for “more content”.

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