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Adjacent Content Marketing ftw

When you are coming up with topics for content marketing – not the stuff where you define your company’s value or the offerings of your products, but the stuff that people want to keep coming back for – don’t focus on your products.

No one thinks your baby is as cute as you do. You are not the market, even if you may be a member of it. Your mother may want to see 1000 pictures of the kids, but your neighbors do not. Why then do you think your market wants to read content about your product? If they are in a buying mode, they may want information about your product, but they don’t want an ongoing relationship with product content. They don’t want to share it with their friends and followers.

Content marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing today. It delivers benefits across many programs. It can cause people to come to your site and to return frequently. It can power your organic search traffic, by letting all those pages be indexed and found and by driving thousands of links to your site, thereby raising your authority. It is the lifeblood of sharing on social networks. And, it is a way to get the influencers in your industry involved with your brand.

To be effective, though, content needs to be about topics that are not product focused. To be authoritative, they do, however, need some relationship to your industry. The key then is to develop what I refer to as “adjacent content”. What does your market and community care about? What interests them? What will enhance their professional knowledge? Once you shift your thinking to those topics that aren’t about your product, or even about the problem your product solves, potential topics will explode in volume.

In RealEstate? Don’t write about your listings or your sales success; write about pricing trends in the market. Run a grocery store? Don’t write about your specials; write about the growth of local farms in the area and the demand for their produce. Make fine furniture? Write about the new woods available from Latin America that are changing the industry.

Not the thing, the thing next to it…the adjacent content. That’s your sweet spot. Build the value of your brand by giving people value in content that interests them AND that relates to what you do. Do that and they’ll come back and read your product copy when they are in buying mode…it’s right next door to where they hang out anyway.

Image credit: Mr. T in DC

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Click Behavior and Google+ Profile Help Search Rankings

Two recent experiences with my personal website davidmeiselman.com have given me some anecdotal evidence of how Google uses a couple of factors in driving its ranking algorithm:

1. how often people click on a link to your site in the search results
2. having a Google Plus profile associated with your site.

I have had this site now for a number of years, both as a platform to share my professional expertise and to try to “own your own brand” and have a greater share of the top google search results for my own name (you can’t come across as knowing much about SEO if you don’t appear prominently in results when someone Googles your name…). But paying some level of attention to how I rank for my own name has also given me some insights into Google’s ranking algorithm.

The first thing I noticed a few months ago was that I was getting a good chunk of visits to my site coming in through my resume page. Many of those visits were being driven by search queries for people with resumes like mine. Clearly I was showing up high enough in those searches to get some clicks. I also noticed that when googling my name, that my resume page was the second page from my site to show up in the SERPs. Given this level of “success” (I still get very low site visitation in the grand scheme of things so it’s all relative…), I figured I must have gotten some links to the page from somewhere that was helping the authority of the page and helping it to rank. So, I checked my inbound links to that page and found…nothing! So why then was the resume page ranking higher than other pages that actually had an inbound link or two? the only answer I could come up with was that this page was appearing more in search results and getting more click-throughs from those results than any other on my site.

The second thing I noticed happened when Google+ launched this summer. I haven’t been updating this blog in quite some time (I have pledged to remedy this, hence this and forthcoming posts) but I noticed a distinct change in my ranking once I joined G+ with my Google profile. Just prior to this, my site had actually slipped to #2 in the SERPs for my name – due I assume to the aforementioned inactivity. Literally the day after I joined G+, with no other changes or activity on the site, I reclaimed the top spot in the SERPs…It’s important to note that my google profile already linked to my site, but it was my activity in G+ under that profile which drove the impact to the SERPs.

Now none of this is a remarkable discovery or something that top seo people haven’t already written about. But it was really interesting to see the evidence of these factors impacting my own site’s rankings. As I pick up my blogging again and have new fresh content (that will be shared via social channels) it will be interesting to watch how my site’s appearance in my personal branded SERPs changes… I will write a follow up post when that happens.

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How is Twitter changing the nature of search?

I have recently started using Twitter a lot more.  I tweet every so often but I also regularly follow some Twitter affecting searchpeople that have smart things to say.  What I have noticed though is the degree to which people are starting to share links to content on the web through Twitter. More precisely, I have noticed the degree to which there seems to be a shift away from blogging to share stuff and toward tweeting a tinyurl of it.  Microblogging through Twitter or Tumblr, etc. seems tailor made for this form of “conversation” of callouts to cool and interesting things. Many of the people whose blogs I follow have definitely shifted their behavior to use Twitter more often and are posting more links there.

Blogs seem to be reserved now for more thoughtful analyses and longer expressions of ideas.  To be sure, these posts still have links, but I would really like to see a study of whether their volume of links has declined over time.

Why is this an issue?  Well mainly because the prime way people find stuff on the net, Google, is focused on determining contextual value and authority for certain topics based on the links connected to web pages.  If the “linkerati” are increasingly doing their linking on microblogging platforms whose links are no-followed, where will this leave the value of the google index?

At least some of the small url services, like http://zi.ma, are providing link love value by providing 301 redirects in their urls so that when people just copy the small urls from Twitter and paste them in their blog, there will some value passed to the target page.  But as the “net” disperses from traditional “pages” into other forms like tweets, where will this leave search?  Where will it leave the link focused algorithm? I don’t have the answers yet, but it would be great to hear someone else asking or starting to answer the question…

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Search and the exchange model: are exchanges making a comeback?

The other day, I found a new site for food artisans to sell their wares called foodzie.com (great name!).  It’s description, echoed by lots of people around the web, is that it is the “etsy” of artisan food.  Etsy.com, for those who don’t know, is a place where artists can sell their hand crafted items.  It is an exchange for crafts and hand made gifts and it has grown by leaps and bounds.  Well foodzie is much the same thing…a place to bring the buyers and sellers of artisan foods together.

Some of my not so many readers will know that I founded a company in the early 90s (about a year before eBay) based on the exchange model.  We were too early, earlier than eBay, we focused on areas that were less broad than eBay, and we didn’t execute anywhere nearly as well.  But the exchange concept was a big hit and continued to be through the ensuing years.  While many vertical exchanges, especially B2B ones like Chemdex.com, came crashing down, broader exchanges like eBay continued to flourish.

A few years ago I wrote a post on my personal blog about the shift in bringing buyers and sellers together that was taking place in moving from exchanges to search.  The value provided by exchanges was always the bringing the buyers to the sellers.  Sellers made their stuff available and buyers knew where to come and get it.  Search started to change that.  Just by entering the name of the thing you were seeking into google you could find people who had it to sell.  You could argue that adwords and SEO replaced exchange listings as the best way to reach buyers.  Vertical search engines started popping up as well…with sites like Kayak for travel and Indeed for jobs.

So with the launch of new sites like Etsy and Foodzie, does that suggest that exchanges are making a comeback?  Are buyers able to find things in relevant search results or do they need aggregators in the form of exchanges to make the “stuff” they seek easily accessible.?  I think the key in answering the question comes from what people feel gives them the best “search results” when they are looking for the thing…if something is unique or isn’t suited well to broader search engines results, than people will flock to the places that provide a better experience in getting to the thing they want.  Sometimes that comes from providing semantic context around a search and a topic specific ranking algorithm.  Sometimes that will come from leading enough vendors to set up a virtual stall in a place that draws visitors based on that aggregation.  My guess is that we will ebb and flow but that both exchanges and search engines will continue to be in the mix.