Nick Stamoulis

Using Google Analytics To Track The Impact Of Your Content Marketing Efforts

A recent survey by eMarketer found that 87 percent of B2B marketers used content marketing this year, making it the most used marketing tactic in 2012. But 43percent of the respondents said they didn’t even attempt to measure their program’s success. Now I think it’s fair to share that most of us that work in marketing understand the value and lasting impact of a content marketing campaign — brand awareness, industry authority, search presence, lead generation and more. But many members of the C-Suite, the ones who sign off on our content marketing budget, want to see tangible evidence that our content marketing campaigns are directly impacting the website and ultimately the bottom line. While it’s still hard to prove one-to-one causation between this specific piece of content and that particular closed sale (there is so much more involved in the buying process) it is possible to use Google Analytics to show the impact of your content marketing efforts. Here’s how.

The first thing you want to do once you’re logged into your Google Analytics account is sort out any content from your company blog. It’s easy enough to search for “/blog” (provided your company blog is on the same domain) in the All Pages tab in your Google Analytics account and that will show you which blog posts have gotten the most traffic. Once you’ve picked a particular blog post to analyze (might as well start with the most trafficked blog post!) you can set the date range to the day before the post went live to the day you’re pulling the report. Chances are you’ll notice a flurry of activity the day the post went live but great content will continue to attract visitors long after the initial spike.

The next thing is to see which keywords have sent visitors to this blog post from the search engines. You can do that by clicking on “Secondary Dimension” then “Traffic Sources” and finally “Keyword.”

Secondary Dimension Area

This will give you a good idea of how your visitors are searching. If you notice one search phrase in particular that is driving a lot of traffic it’s worth noting and incorporating into future content marketing efforts and your SEO campaign at large.

You also want to look at where the visitors to this blog post came from. Hopefully you are investing in social media promotion — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and so forth — which one of these is sending traffic to your blog? Is the majority of your traffic coming from organic search or a referral site? Also look at the average time spent on-site. If visitors from LinkedIn are spending over six minutes and organic visitors are only spending two minutes (which is still a good number) you know that your content is resonating with your LinkedIn connections. If the numbers were reversed you might want to reconsider which LinkedIn Groups you are submitting your content to and look for better options.

It’s also possible to take a step back and get a broader picture of how your content marketing efforts are impacting your site as a whole. Narrow the date range to a day or two before a blog post went live and a day or two after it was published. Chances are the date your blog post went live was also the most trafficked day that week. That’s because content stimulates activity. Fresh content gives the search engines a reason to come back and re-crawl your website and the quicker your content is indexed the sooner you’ll be getting organic visitors. Fresh content also fuels your social media marketing efforts, hence the traffic spike from social sites.

Outside of Google Analytics you can also track social media signals like re-tweets, shares, Likes, +1s and more to see how well your content is resonating with your audience. Popular and shared content tends to rank better in the search engines that content that doesn’t have a lot of social media activity surrounding it because every time a piece of content is shared it creates a social signal, alerting the search engines this content is valuable.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of Boston-based SEO and social media marketing firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 150,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

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Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis December 22, 2012 | Comments (0)

Taking On An SEO Client With A Penalty

In the wake of the Panda and Penguin updates — and subsequent refreshes — I’ve been getting a lot more leads from website owners and marketers that are suffering from a search engine penalty and need help digging themselves out from underneath it. Some of them freely admit to employing a black-hat firm in the past, or doing it themselves, and they realize it finally caught up with them. Still other site owners feel like they were blindsided and are struggling to understand what they did wrong and how they can recover. I don’t have much sympathy for the site owners that knew they were “playing the game,” but my heart does go out to those site owners who maybe were taken advantage of or were trying to manage their own SEO and knew just enough to be dangerous.

As a white-hat SEO provider I am very hesitant to take on an SEO client that is dealing with a search engine penalty. Not because I don’t want to help them, but because working with a penalized website can be an entirely different ball game. I know that some SEO providers specialize in working with penalized sites, but if you are more like me and are finding a lot of decent leads are coming from penalized sites then here are a few things to consider before taking these sites on as a client:

1. Do they understand what they did wrong?

I’ve talked with some owners that truly feel like Google is out to get them. It’s important to make sure any site owner you’re working with to resolve a penalty understands that Google isn’t out to “get them,” nor does Google owe it to them to help their website succeed. Google is a business, just like any other, only their products and services center on search. In order to make their product better they have to provide the best possible search results. I’m sure some sites got flagged by Panda and Penguin that should have been left alone, but odds are if their site got penalized it’s because they deserved it. Complaining about how unfair it is won’t fix anything. You — either on purpose or by accident — ran afoul of the guidelines and now you are dealing with the consequences.

2. Can they hold on for the long haul?

Recovering from a penalty is usually no quick and easy task. Even if you do everything right within days of being penalized — assuming you hone in on exactly the right problem and fix it exactly the right way — if a site is suffering from an algorithmic penalty you have to wait until the next refresh for those changes to really have any effect. This might take six weeks, it might take six months — we don’t know. Before you agree to work with a penalized site it’s worth finding out of they can keep themselves afloat for a while without much help from the search engines. Do they have other ways of promoting their site and driving traffic? Can they keep their doors open long enough even with the penalty? Some site owners enter panic mode when their site is penalized and might only be able to survive for a short while if the penalty isn’t lifted. It’s important to know how desperate the situation is before working with a penalized website.

3. Are they prepared to do what’s necessary?

Depending on how severe the penalty is, your potential SEO client might be facing a very big — and possibly very expensive — uphill battle. Do they have the time, the budget and the drive to do what’s necessary to help their site recover? One mistake didn’t get them into this mess and one flip of the switch isn’t going to undo the damage. You want to make sure the site owner knows what they are in store for when it comes to recovering from a penalty so they aren’t expecting a magic trick from you to fix it overnight.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you as the SEO provider to decide if working with a penalized website is a challenge you are ready to take on. Entering a website that is in panic mode is very different from working on any other site, so it’s important that both you and your client know what you’re getting in to.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of Boston-based SEO and social media marketing firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 150,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

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Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis November 21, 2012 | Comments Off

Relying Too Heavily On SEO Leaves Your Website Vulnerable

My heart goes out to all the website and business owners that felt the wrath of the Google Panda updates last year and the Penguin update back in April of this year. After the rollout of those two

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updates my SEO company received an influx of calls from panicked site owners wanting to know A — where they had gone wrong, and B — was there anything I could do to help them recover their lost traffic and rankings. Some of these site owners easily lost 80 percent or more of their traffic and their entire business was on the verge of collapse because of it. I felt especially bad for the site owners that didn’t know where they had gone wrong and couldn’t understand why their site had been penalized. Many of these site owners, who hadn’t been able to afford a white hat, full service SEO firm, had either outsourced their SEO to a black hat company or tried to do it on their own. Obviously something had gone very, very wrong — without them even knowing how or why — and they were paying the price for it.

While I would never wish to see any site owner in such a dire position, situations like this only reaffirm a point I’ve been making for years about SEO — if you rely too heavily on SEO to keep your business alive you’re putting everything at risk.

1. The search engines don’t “owe” you anything.

Obviously the search engines want you to do a good job with your SEO. After all, when a well-written

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and optimized site does a good job with their SEO it helps clean up the search results (hopefully keeping the spammers at bay) and gives the search engines a better product. Remember, the search engines are trying to run a business, just like you or I. You might sell pet supplies or IT services; they sell the search experience. It is not Google or Bing’s job to help your business survive. Your success is only relevant to them as long as your site provides the best information for their users. Once your site is no longer the “best” they are under no obligation to keep your site high in the SERPs. What other online and offline marketing channels do you have in place to protect your site should that happen? Could your website take a hit and keep on trucking?

2. What if Google vanished tomorrow?

Admittedly, the odds of Google falling off the face of the earth are poor, but look at some of the

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other former Internet giants that are no more (or holding on by a thread); Digg, MySpace, AOL — they were all once the undisputed kings of their online space and where are they now? Should Google topple someday (albeit it will probably be a slow demise and not an overnight death) where would that leave your website? How would visitors find your website if Google didn’t exist? Those other marketing channels become a lot more important when you think about it that way. Even if the majority of your traffic is coming from the search engines, you want to make sure your site could survive should is disappear.

3. Good marketing is good SEO; good SEO is good marketing.

SEO is just another form of online marketing, alongside content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), online banner ads, retargeting and more. All of those elements make up the

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whole puzzle; SEO is just one piece. It’s important to remember that just because you are doing SEO that doesn’t mean you can forgo all your other marketing efforts, both online and offline. The more touch points you can create with your audience the better. Most consumers aren’t prepared to purchase something from the first website they see, even if it’s a relatively simple purchase. The more complex the buying cycle the more touch points you need to create and the stronger a relationship you need to create with your target audience along the way. It may sound strange coming from an SEO professional, but site owners cannot rely on SEO along to keep their business alive. While SEO is an important part of the mix it is by no means the only part. Failing to diversify your marketing efforts leaves your site in a very vulnerable position should things ever go wrong with your SEO, the SERPs or the search engines.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of Boston-based SEO and social media marketing firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 150,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

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Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis August 24, 2012 | Comments Off

Getting Your Enterprise SEO Campaign Rolling

For the most part, the same principles of search engine optimization (SEO) that apply to a small business website are exactly the same for a large enterprise. The biggest difference really is just the scale of an enterprise SEO

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campaign; the larger the campaign the longer it takes to get the ball rolling. Since SEO is so long term, it’s important to get your SEO campaign up and running as soon as possible so it can start to have a positive effect on your website.

Here are three tips to help get your enterprise SEO campaign rolling along, and to keep it moving forward.:

Optimize high-priority pages first.

Depending on how large your enterprise site is — and it could easily be thousands of pages — you don’t want to wait until every single page is optimized before you start going live with your SEO changes — it’ll never get done! Instead, determine which pages of your website are of the highest priority for your company. This could be product pages that generate the most revenue, product pages with the highest profit potential, a resource center used to generate quality leads and so forth. Keep in mind that doing keyword research on a page-by-page basis and optimizing the content — sometimes even rewriting the content — can take a long time, especially if you’ve never done any serious on-site SEO before and are starting fresh. Even if your in-house SEO specialist or SEO provider is only optimizing 20 — 50 pages a month, you’re going to start seeing improvements as time goes by as those top pages get optimized.

Know who to rope in and when to cut them out.

One of the biggest issues I’ve seen hinder enterprise SEO success is the sheer amount of red tape

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that exists at large companies, and the never-ending chain of command that needs to approve every step of everything before action can be taken. Don’t let that stand in the way of your SEO campaign! Determine who needs to be involved in the SEO process and at what stages so you can always be moving forward. For instance, does the social media manager need to be included in discussions about a high-level navigation redesign? Do your copywriters get to add their two cents when it comes to what long-tail keywords you want to target? In order to have a great enterprise SEO campaign you need to make sure there aren’t too many hands involved at once. Getting approval is important, but know whose approval you need and when to avoid any snags.

Be aware of external factors that could affect your SEO progress.

Since SEO is so long-term, it’s important to keep in mind any external issues coming down the pipeline that could impact your enterprise SEO campaign. For instance, does your company have any

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new products coming out in the next six months? Those new pages of content will need to be added to the “to be optimized” queue. You could even consider optimizing them before they go live to get them started on the right SEO foot. Are there any major PR pushes or advertising campaigns starting or ending soon? Online marketing efforts such as these tend to drive a lot of branded traffic to a site, so it could impact your overall visitor growth — for better or worse — down the road.

Every enterprise is different, but in my experience the biggest obstacle to enterprise SEO success usually boils down to getting the campaign rolling! SEO is constantly changing and evolving, so trying to nail down every single detail before you start executing your on-site and link-building campaigns is only going to slow the process down even more. Stay focused, keep moving and don’t panic!

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Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis July 6, 2012 | Comments Off

B2B Companies Need To Create Thought Leadership Content

Most B2B marketers understand the SEO and business value of a strong content marketing campaign. However, understanding why it’s important and understanding how to leverage it are two

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different things, and it is not always as easy to make the jump from planning to executing. One of the most important things for B2B marketers to remember when executing a content marketing campaign is that they need to keep their ego out of it and focus on producing thought leadership content. The end goal of SEO is to increase visitor growth via unbranded keywords to your company’s website. While branded visitor growth is important, B2B companies need an influx of new potential customers finding their website, even if they have never interacted with your brand. However, what reason have you given these new customers to trust your brand? While ranking well in the search engines might drive more traffic to your site, just because they clicked over that doesn’t mean they are convinced they want to do business with you. Your content has to prove something to those new visitors — it has to prove that your company can

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meet their needs and fix their problems. It’s not about your company! That is why it’s so important to take your ego out of your B2B content marketing campaign. While it’s OK to talk your products and services up every once in a while (say one out of 10 blog posts can be promotional), your content should really focus on educating your target audience, not selling your products. Creating content that shares valuable information with your target audience is a critical component of building consumer trust. So what kind of thought leadership content should a B2B company create? The first (and arguably most valuable content a brand can create) is the company blog. Not only is the company blog great

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from an SEO standpoint as each individual post can rank for important keywords, it is also a great way to educate the visitors that are coming to your site while still keeping them on and clicking through your site. Your blog can become a trusted source of information for your readers and gives them a reason to continually interact with your brand. B2B companies should also look into guest blogging on industry sites, which is a good way to introduce your brand to a wider percentage of your target audience and build valuable inbound links. Both large and popular industry blogs, as well as smaller blogs, are a great place for your brand to publish thought leadership content that will help build your online presence. Case studies, another popular form of B2B content, can be both good and bad for thought leadership

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depending on how promotional they are. Customer case studies are valuable assets for customers that are nearing the end of their buying cycle and want to see your products in action, but they aren’t necessarily the best for new visitors that don’t know anything about your brand. Informational case studies or industry research reports are a great link bait strategy because they can get picked up, cited and reviewed by other industry writers and bloggers. B2B brands should focus on creating content that is going to get the attention of their target audience and links from valuable sources. Informational content is much more likely to make a splash than promotional content. It’s important that B2B companies remember that their content is not about them, it’s about the customer. If you want to become an industry authority you have to give people a reason to trust your brand — and that comes with a content marketing campaign that focuses on thought leadership. While promotional content has value for both SEO and brand building, it shouldn’t dominate your content marketing strategy. About the Author Nick Stamoulis is president of Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO and white-hat link-building company based in Boston. With nearly 13 years of Internet marketing experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his SEO knowledge by posting regularly to the Brick Marketing Blog and by publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com Related Content:

Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis May 23, 2012 | Comments Off

Get SEO Value From Your Content Marketing Campaign

A great SEO campaign just isn’t possible without a strong content marketing campaign. More and more search engine updates are focusing on the quality and value of your content, and less on the

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quantity. However, coming up with a steady stream of great and relevant content can be a daunting task for many site owners. Some struggle just to get a new blog post published every week, so how can they possibly be expected to ramp up their content marketing efforts just to appease the search engines and help their SEO campaign? The answer lies in content recycling — taking one piece of content and re-purposing it for another platform. Unlike article spinning, that takes one piece of content and just publishes it on dozens of sites, content recycling takes one piece of content and augments it to fit a new format.

Here are four ways you can get more SEO value from your current content marketing efforts with content recycling:

Use blog posts in company e-newsletter.

If you want to increase the amount of e-newsletters you send each month, consider using your

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previously published blog posts as content fodder. You can include the first paragraph of a few posts in the e-newsletter and invite your subscribers to read the rest of the posts directly on your blog. So how does this help your SEO? You’ll be driving more traffic to specific blog posts and giving them a second chance at being shared on social networks. The more times a piece of content is shared, liked, or tweeted on a social network the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. By driving subscribers back to your blog itself and not just giving them all the content in the newsletter, you are delivering targeted visitors to your blog and website and have a better chance at converting them.

Post press releases directly to website.

When a press release goes out through a paid distribution site, the press release is published on

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that site, which means the distribution service benefits from all the promotion you do to help get that press release noticed and read by a wider audience. Why not get those valuable inbound links for your own site? Publish a slightly edited version of each press release on your site (with a unique URL) and promote that in all your social networks. Your site becomes the source of that press release and you reap the SEO benefits. Your site gets fresh content to give to the search engines and keeps those valuable inbound links augmenting your link portfolio.

Create static landing pages for white papers.

Instead of just posting all your white papers on a single page of your website, create unique landing pages for each white paper and optimize them for SEO. You can write up a few paragraphs that outline what the white paper is about and who would benefit from reading it — all the while targeting long tail keywords that will help bring the right people to the right white paper. And by creating a static landing page for each white paper you can always add the latest versions of the white paper (say you have a 2011 and 2012 version) and still keep the SEO value of that landing page.

Use webinars to fuel a video marketing campaign.

Video marketing campaigns don’t have to be particularly fancy or expensive in order to be effective.

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Sometimes simple video editing software is all you need. Take one of your recorded webinars and slice and dice it into two to three minute videos, each centering on a specific nugget of information. Many viewers don’t want to sit through your hour long webinar, but they will happily watch a short video to learn a valuable tip. Since making a webinar is such a time consuming task, this gives you the opportunity to make sure your efforts don’t go to waste and that webinar was worth it.

You can extend the shelf-life and SEO value of a piece of content with a content recycling take on your content marketing campaigns. You are investing a lot of time and energy to create this information and these relevant pieces of content, so why not get more bang for your buck. A strong content marketing campaign is going to lend itself to a successful SEO campaign and a better online presence for your brand.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is the founder of full-service Boston-based SEO firm Brick Marketing. With nearly 13 years of Internet marketing experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his SEO knowledge by contributing regularly to the Brick Marketing Blog and by publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com

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Featured, Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis April 5, 2012 | Comments Off

5 Easy Steps to Becoming a Better SEO Client

If you’ve decided to outsource your SEO that means that you have becomes someone’s client. As a client, you make up 50 percent of the SEO relationship and play a huge role in the success or failure of your

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SEO campaign. In order to make your SEO partnership the most successful it can be, you have to be the best SEO client you can be.

Here are 5 things every SEO client should remember:

Keep your SEO provider in the loop.

Respect their time.

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Trust your SEO provider to do their job.

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Stay involved in the SEO process.

Don’t go crazy.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of Boston-based SEO and social media marketing firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 150,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

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Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis October 29, 2011 | Comments Off

How To Better Manage Your Social Media Marketing

Anyone who has tried to develop a fully functioning social media marketing campaign knows how much time and effort goes into it. Setting up a Facebook page and calling it a day won’t cut it anymore. Social media is incredibly long-term, maybe even more so than SEO. If you want to save yourself some headaches down the road, you’d better learn how to manage your time and get your social media marketing under control.

Here are five easy ways you can better manage your social media marketing campaign:

1. Identify the trolls

Some people just live to cause mischief. They seem to delight in attacking your brand, flooding your social profiles with negative and inflammatory comments and generally being nasty towards your company. These are the trolls that prowl the Internet, doing everything they can to get a rise out of you. Part of getting involved in social media marketing means opening up your brand to attacks from trolls. It’s imperative that you learn early on how to spot the trolls from the real customers with a real grievance. You don’t want to ignore your target audience and their issues, nor do you want to feed into a social war with a troll.

2. Consolidate your profiles

Do you really need a separate Twitter handle for your sales team, customer service team, V.P. of Marketing, product development team and office manager? Maybe if you’re a massive corporation with dozens of departments, but probably not if you’re a local business. If you are going to create a profile, remember that you have to take the time and effort to fully develop it, cultivate relationships and build a network and promote it across the social sphere. Don’t give yourself more work than you need to. By consolidating your 10 social profiles into three, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and energy.

3. Automate various tasks

There are plenty of social media marketing tools at your disposal. I use HootSuite to sync up my company blogs and social profiles so that I can update everything at once. It saves me the time and hassle of having to log in to every account. I can also use HootSuite to schedule out updates for when I’m not in the office or don’t want to worry about forgetting to post something in the future. It may not seem like a big deal, but when you find yourself spending an hour or two every morning just updating all of your social profiles, you learn to appreciate automation software.

4. Focus on networks where your target audience is

You should definitely have a presence on the Big Three of social networking sites — Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — but that doesn’t mean you have to devote equal amounts of time to all three. Which social network does your target audience invest more time and energy in? Which social network is the best platform for sharing your content and building a brand? You might also find smaller, niche social networks that can help you build a much more targeted community. Don’t waste your time fishing where there are no fish.

5. Decide who will be your company’s “voice”

Before you even begin your social media marketing campaign, you need to decide who is going to run it. It doesn’t matter if it’s your P.R. team, SEO expert, copywriting or creative team or V.P. of marketing, each has a viable claim. Just make sure that the person or team in charge of your social media marketing has a clear understanding of your brand, company and business goals. They are going to be the man behind the social curtain of your company from here on.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of Boston-based SEO and social media marketing firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 150,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

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Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis September 30, 2011 | Comments Off

Using Social Media to Drive Your Content Marketing Campaign

People love to share interesting content. Both “interesting” and “content” can have very broad definitions. Content is anything that is public and shareable. This can be webpage content, videos, photos, articles,

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blog posts, graphs, podcasts and more. And what people find “interesting” varies from person to person. Is it funny? Thought provoking? Entertaining? Regardless of how you define “interesting content,” it is something that we as marketers are always striving to create.

Content marketing is a critical component of inbound marketing. It builds links to your site, presents your brand as an industry expert and trusted resource for your targeted audience; it help develop your online presence and positions your brand so the right potential customer can find you at the right time. Great content is indispensable when it comes to SEO.

But what good is great content if no one sees it?

We might spend hours upon hours creating amazing, interesting and useful content for our clients, only to see it flat-line straight out of the gate. The simple truth is that, when it comes to content marketing, content creation is only half the battle. Without a well-planned and strategic content promotion campaign, we won’t ever see the true value of our content. That’s where social media steps in.

Social media seems like it was made for content promotion. The digital word-of-mouth, social networking sites

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encourage users to share opinions, experiences, thoughts and more with each other. Your content could (and needs to) be one of those things they share.

When you post a piece of content to one of your own social profiles, you’ve already gotten added value from the content — a link. In SEO, links are the bread and butter of your campaign. Not only does that link help diversify and grow your link portfolio, it also acts as the pathway to which a targeted user would find your brand. That published content then shows up in the feeds of your social connections. Not every one of them is going to bother to check it out, but even a small percentage is a good start. 1,000 unique readers may be great, but 100 are better than none. By publishing your content on your social profiles, you are giving it a fighting chance of being seen by your target audience. You can’t just hope people will find your content, no matter how amazing it is. Social networking sites are the perfect place to get the ball rolling.

Let’s say of those 100 users that bothered to check out your content, nine reposted it to their own profiles. When a user posts a piece of your content to their social profile (be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+), they are essentially telling their network it is worth checking out ; they found it interesting. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit follow the same principle, only content is crowd-sourced. Suddenly your content is visible to all of your social connections, plus the entire network of the user who reposted it. Now your content is being promoted to new, potential customers who may not have been aware of your brand. Your current social network is doing the heavy lifting for you! The peer-to-peer recommendation that comes from having your content republished by a user is far more powerful than even the most creative advertising campaign.

The search engines have started to incorporate social signals into their algorithms. They look at how many people have Shared, Liked,

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Tweeted and +1d a piece of content to decide how well it should rank in the search engines. If you’re not promoting your content on social networking sites, you are missing out on this critical ranking factor.

Since no two social networking sites are alike, they attract different audiences. This gives you the chance to promote your content without spamming your target audience, yet reach out to them on more than one platform. That kind of repetition helps solidify your brand in their online lives. The more touch points you can create for your content the better. Putting all your eggs in one basket is a risky move and you’re losing sight of the big picture. For instance, if you just rely on Facebook for your social media presence, you are essentially ignoring all of your target audience who you aren’t connected with on Facebook.

The bottom line is that you can’t rely on visitors stumbling upon your content, realizing how great it is and deciding to share it with everyone they know ; that’s just not realistic or practical. When you push your content on social networking sites as it goes live, you are giving it a fighting chance at providing real, lasting value for your brand. Great content will attract attention, but it can’t hurt to turn the spotlight on.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of Boston-based SEO and social media marketing firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 140,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

Featured, Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis August 26, 2011 | Comments Off

Can Too Much B2B Content Devalue Your Services?

Every business, regardless of industry, can find value in developing a content marketing strategy. This is especially true for B2B companies. In the B2B realm, great SEO and Internet marketing often hinges

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on a strong, consistent content marketing strategy. Great B2B content should become a resource for your target audience, something they want to hold onto and reuse.

But is there such a thing as “too much” when it comes to content marketing? Can B2B companies produce so much great, valuable content that they actually end up devaluing their own services? If you train your target audience to expect insightful information from you that they don’t have to pay for, will they ever be willing to buy?

By giving information away for free, do B2B companies actually get in their own way?

B2B content can be anything that is public and shareable. For instance, let’s say your company hosts a free webinar. Let’s assume that 500 people signed up for your free webinar in the preceding weeks,

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but only 345 actually signed in. Since there was no cost to attend, some of your attendees might not feel bad about missing out. Of the 345 attendees, you got 32 leads (say they filled out a contact form) but in the end (and after much pushing on your part) only one actually ended up becoming a customer. Clearly most people showed up for the free information, not because they wanted to become your customer.

Think about all the time and effort it takes to put on a successful webinar. How long did it take you to actually develop the content? How much did you spend on promotion and advertising? Depending on your industry earning one client from the webinar might be worth it, but then again maybe not.

Let’s say it was a paid webinar ($50) as opposed to a free one and only 150 people signed up. Even that small upfront cost was enough

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to cut your attendance by 70 percent! Those 150 attendees might have thought that since it was a paid webinar, they would be privy to more insights and better information than a free webinar on the same topic, but are any of them seriously considering doing business with your company?

A B2B company with the resources might be churning out more content then they know what to do with: a company blog that has three or four posts going live a day, infographics, reports, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts and so forth. At what point do the scales tip against them? An educated prospect is going to take their time to research your company and might realize, “Hey, these guys are great. Look at all this information they are just giving away. I know! I can just use their guides and figure it out on my own and save myself some money.”

Content marketing is often a long-term process that is used to build your authority as an expert, cultivate relationships with potential clients, create brand loyalists among existing customers and much more. In today’s

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh at PubCon Las Vegas

online world, there is no doubt that content is king and a necessary component of any successful SEO campaign. However, is there such a thing as too much of a good thing? Can B2B content marketing be so great, that is ends up affecting your business cycle?

There really is no right, one-size-fits-all answer for B2B companies. No one can say how little or how much content you should be producing in order to maximize your SEO and marketing success because no two businesses are alike and each industry faces unique challenges. The dangers of too little content are a little easier to foresee (limited online presence, minimal online brand awareness, no site traffic increases and so forth) but the possible consequences of too much B2B content are harder to define.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of Boston-based SEO and social media marketing firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 140,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

Featured, Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis August 10, 2011 | Comments (1)

Content Marketing’s #1 Problem

Content comes in many forms. It can be a company blog post or a paragraph on a product page. Content can be a whitepaper, article or report. It can also be a video, podcast or infographic. It can be a webinar, a PowerPoint presentation, a speech, an interview and more.

In short, content can be just about anything. And in the world of online marketing, content is the reigning king.

You’d be hard pressed to find a company that doesn’t think there is some kind of benefit in producing content. Just about everyone knows, especially since the Google Panda update, that only useful and quality content is going to provide any real value to the reader and to the company that authored it. Generating quality content can do a lot of things for your brand. It helps establish your company as an industry expert and thought leader, it builds your trust factor with the search engines, provides inbound links to your site, turns you into a valuable resource for your customers and more. There is no good reason to avoid investing in a strong content marketing campaign. Yet even as businesses large and small realize the importance of content marketing, many say the same thing as an excuse for not getting it done: no time. That is biggest obstacle companies must overcome to implement a successful content marketing campaign.

It’s easy to understand why many companies, particularly SMBs, would say they just don’t have the time to add content marketing requirements to the mix. Smaller companies don’t have the staff of larger corporations, and oftentimes their employees wear multiple hats. Three-to-five-person companies have enough to handle with just keeping the business afloat day-to-day; where are they possibly going to find the time to invest in content marketing?

While I understand the concern and time restraints, this doesn’t mean that a company can’t get the ball rolling on their content marketing campaign and let it grow. At the very least every business should be operating a company blog.

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Even if a company can only commit to getting two posts to go live each week, that is a huge step up from producing zero content. A blog post can be as short as 350 words, so they don’t require a huge time commitment. These blog posts will eventually rank in the search engines, increasing online brand presence. Having more content also helps build your trust factor with the search engines, which can positively impact your rank.

If you aren’t sure that you’ll have time every week to write a new blog post, why not get a few weeks ahead when you do have the time? That way, if you get unexpectedly busy your content production won’t be forgotten.

Companies could have a lot of content at their fingertips they aren’t even aware of, minimizing the time it take to produce new content. How many old conference presentations do you have that were only used once? Why not upload those to document sharing sites? Have any video clips of your company or its employees being interviewed?

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Post those to video sharing sites. Old newsletters are great places to look for article topic ideas and user-generated content like reviews and e-mails can be posted to your site to add content volume.

It’s true that time is money. But investing the time into developing a content marketing campaign is money well spent. The hardest thing to do is get the ball rolling. Many companies see how much content a powerful content marketing campaign can produce and think to themselves, “There is no way we’ll be able to do that.” You don’t have to keep up with every competitor to start your content marketing campaign. However, you won’t be able to compete at all if you don’t find the time and start making some great content.

About the Author Nick Stamoulis is president and founder of SEO firm Brick Marketing. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal and publishes the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, which is read by over 130,000 subscribers. Read Nick Stamoulis’ full PubCon speaker biography here.

Featured, Speakers Blog | Nick Stamoulis July 21, 2011 | Comments Off