Linkbuilding with Sean McGinnis at ContentJam 2013
A necessary component of search engine optimization is linkbuilding. That is the process of going out and convincing other websites that are better than yours to put a link to your site on theirs. For many of us who proclaim to be digital professionals in the web-o-sphere, building links … okay let’s step right here. I think that term is one of the reasons why people do this wrong often.
You don’t build links, you earn them.
A link from one website to yours is a vote, that web team is saying “hey, look over here, this other site that isn’t our own that we get nothing from and thus have no reason to point it out other than it is doing something cool is doing something cool and we like it!” unless of course they attach that awful ‘nofollow’ clause to their link which could be their way of saying ‘hey that website is doing something dumb ad we are laughing at it’.
Links are earned by creating great content which brings us to what Sean McGinnis said in his engaging presentation at ContentJam 2013. Here are my notes from the presentation.
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Use Social Media to Turn Customers into Friends
I just finished listening to an episode of Under the Influence a radio show/podcast hosted by Terry O’Reilly. The topic of this particular episode was Customer Service. While the entire program focused on some of the standards we know and love – like Zappos providing mind-blowing service, Apple’s retail experience being one of the best in the electronics industry, and Ritz-Carlton doing everything to exceed customer expectations, I couldn’t help but think in terms of social media.
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Three Elements of Engaging Social Media Content
A friend had me over for dinner the other night and we ended up discussing social media marketing, what it was and what made the random updates made by regular people any different to the marketing efforts by brands, companies, and others with a specific interest in compelling followers to take an action. The conversation tied directly to a discussion I had with a potential client on my personal paradigm for effective social media content.
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Comments OffWhy Your Social Media Marketing Fails to Convert Followers Into Customers
You’ve listened to gurus at conferences, followed all the advice, listened to several podcasts, and have dived in head first into social media. You Tweet, Pin, Share, Like, and do all the things you see everyone else doing. You even managed to get a sizable following of people behind you but you haven’t seen a change in your bottom line. In fact, the amount of time you spend taking pictures, writing status updates, and blog posts, you might actually be losing money!
Is it all a scam? Is social media marketing the snake oil of the modern era or are you doing something wrong? Before giving up on one of the best tools for small business to compete against corporate giants, let’s examine what you are doing with your social media marketing by asking a few questions.
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Tagged social media marketing | Comments OffContent Creation Strategy: Respond, Reuse, Recycle
We’ve all done it. We’ve set aside time to plan out the content we are going to use to market our business and the blank page stymies us. We’ve diligently read the blogs, newsletters, and trade press associated with our industry and we still draw blanks. As a writer I’ve spent more than my fair share of time staring at blank pages hoping that somehow my need will fill the void with brilliant words. That has never happened.
I’ve learned through discovery and reading all those other blogs and listening to hours upon hours of podcasts a set of strategies to overcome the blank page doldrums. I’ve reformulated these strategies into three broad topics so I could use a title I thought was clever. Let’s keep the fact these strategies didn’t naturally occur in this way a secret between us, okay?
I personally like examples to break away from the abstracts. I’m going to pretend I own a cheese shop (I spell it shoppe because it makes it feel old timey).
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Comments OffHow Facebook Treats My Privacy
Today I received a message from Facebook. It said, in summary, ‘We’re sorry, we screwed up and gave what you thought was private information to a third party. Oops.’
Okay to be fair, here is the full text:
Dear Sean,
Your privacy is incredibly important to everyone who works at Facebook, and we’re dedicated to protecting your information. While many of us focus our full-time jobs on preventing or fixing issues before they affect anyone, we recently fell short of our goal and a technical bug caused your telephone number or email address to be accessible by another person.
The bug was limited in scope and likely only allowed someone you already know outside of Facebook to see your email address or telephone number. That said, we let you down and we are taking this error very seriously.
Describing what caused the bug can get pretty technical, but we want to explain how it happened. When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations. Because of the bug, the email addresses and phone numbers used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send were inadvertently stored in their account on Facebook, along with their uploaded contacts. As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, which included their uploaded contacts, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers.
Here is your contact Information (inadvertently accessible by at most 1 Facebook user):
*******9121
*******9427
We estimate that 1 Facebook user saw this additional contact info displayed next to your name in their downloaded copy of their account information. No other info about you was shown and it’s likely that anyone who saw this is not a stranger to you, even if you’re not friends on Facebook.
We recognize that mistakenly sharing contact info is unacceptable, even if you are acquainted with people who saw these details, and we’ve taken measures to prevent this from happening again. For more information on the bug, please read our blog post.
All of us at Facebook take this issue very personally. We appreciate your ongoing use of Facebook, and are working every day to deliver the level of service you expect and deserve.
Thank you,
The Facebook Team
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