I’m not sure how he does it but Seth Godin keeps up this constant stream of innovative ideas and challenging questions.

We won’t the only people who learn something every week, if not every day, reading his articles. This is what we learned from the article shown below.

Instead of ramping up the “aspiration” side of our promotion we need to address the fear of appearing foolish. There’s obviously value in introducing new thinking, but if that in turn requires independent thought, it runs the risk of scaring users off. We need to spend more time on explaining as well as exciting.

More insight from Matt Cutts about blogging – how to help Google find out what’s on your site and how to make the most of it.

These videos tend to cover similar subjects but they all have a slightly different angle.  Watch out for the nuggets – they aren’t always obvious.

In this case the the nugget is improve your page rank by participating in web type stuff.

Google has to find a way of prioritizing people and sites and one of the things it uses is social footprint – how well we’re known..

Enjoy the movie.

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• Excellent Site Review Panel by Matt Cutts & Other Googlers (seroundtable.com)
• What’s Going On With Google UK’s Search Results? (seroundtable.com)

Search Engine Optimization used to be the secret sauce known only to a few magicians who understood the inner workings of the Google machine.

There’s an awful lot of rubbish talked by people trying to scam their way into our budgets, offering to get us Google Page 1 in twenty four hours.

But both Google and the publishing services have evolved making the SEO of yesteryear irrelevant.

If you’ve already bought the concept of selling by blogging, this video is going to be extremely valuable to you – Must Watch.

If you’re not yet into blogging it will at least arm you with lots of questions for when your web site company wants to charge you for SEO.

Enjoy the video.

Posted via email from stevensreeves

There are some places on the web, and usually the more popular ones, that leave me feeling somewhat uncomfortable. Some heavyweight thinking about why they do that eventually led me to conclude there’s far too much pontification and preaching going on.

The people I know run their own businesses.  Most are consultants.  They know about communicating with people, and know it isn’t with pontification and preaching.  They aren’t going to waste their time being preached at.

The other thing is most of the stuff written by grown ups reads far too much like college dissertations.  These might be grammatically correct, and might explain in detail every argument – but reading them is hard work.

The really engaging stuff is written by a small number of highly regarded individuals.  One of those is Chris Brogan.  In his post What Makes a Story Work he explains his own golden rules for publishing.

In the article Chris paints the background to his rules – the why and hows.  As always the best way to understand is visit the post from the link, above.

You’ll want to visit the real thing when you’ve understood his golden rules:

• Let them feel smart and included. Stories where we are introduced as “part of the group” or “in the know” help us get over our initial discomfort.
• Give them a solid map. The only time readers shouldn’t know where they’re going is if they’re reading a mystery (or a Chuck Palahniuk novel). The rest of the time, start people off with a sense of where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and tips on how they’ll know they’re done.
• Reward them. If you’re producing material that’s longer in form, give your audience some kind of reward. This might be a checklist that lets them run off and do something with their partial knowledge. It might be some kind of acknowledgment that they’ve reached a next step. Whatever the case, if you’re challenging your readers, reward them. (Works in video games; works in other media.)
• Respect their time. Brevity, friends. I point it out all the time. If you can say something with fewer words, do it. Okay?
• Write about them, not you. Or, if you have to write about you (memoirs or biographies come to mind), give them something they can do to make meaning of what you’ve shared. One reason I loved WINNING by Jack Welch was that I felt I could use the stories as a better perspective of how corporations work. Make sure your media empowers your audience instead of toots your own horn. It’s how you make superheroes.

I’ll be embedding them in my own thinking from now on.

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• Why Blog When You’ve Got Facebook? (buildabetterblog.com)

In this video Matt Cutts is interviewed on a range of questions about ways small businesses can provide Google with quality information it can use in the search results it offers to users.

It’s great value for anybody new to the subject and re-sets a number of misconceptions more experienced might have.

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and has been for years.

I really enjoyed the no nonsense expectation setting here from SageRock

Posted via web from stevensreeves

In this video Google‘s chief economist explains how Quality Score impacts the advertisers position vis a vis competitors and how that impacts the bid auction and how much we end up paying.

It turns out with great copy for the ad and high quality and relevance of landing pagewe can get #1 position at the lowest cost per click.

My ad agency certainly didn’t understand this.  If they had they wouldn’t have gone about the pilot the way they did, And I wouldn’t have hired them anyway, because we just weren’t ready to compete.

Posted via web from stevensreeves

in having an Internet dimension to your marketing strategy, you should get an understanding of how Internet Marketing works.

So much of it actually reflects what’s happening generally in this increasingly “flat”, “open” and “crowded” world.

Take a few minutes to check out my post on the other blog No Secrets to Internet Marketing and see if that encourages you to download some podcasts, which are great to listen to in the car, or in my case while I’m walking the dog on the beach.

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• Even If You Aren’t Interested (frontofficebox.com)

Explain this please somebody!

A very well known SEO technology business provides a grading for web sites made up of all the clever stuff including Diggs and Technorati and Traffic and Links etc. etc.

Trying to understand where the silver bullet is in all this I’ve compared the grades of the top twenty businesses in our market with the actual order in which Google presented me the results this afternoon.

CRM Solution                           Search Position                            Grade Position

Intrabench                                                     1                                                             8

Sprint                                                              2                                                             12

Salesforce                                                        5                                                             1

Infusion                                                           7                                                            10

Office Interactive                                           8                                                            10

Woosabi                                                          10                                                            5

Front Office Box                                             11                                                           7

Sur                                                                     12                                                          13

Relenta                                                              14                                                          3

Batchblue                                                          16                                                          2

Javelin                                                                17                                                          11

Infostreet                                                           19                                                           6

Note – for clarity – I ran this query in the UK and that may have had some influence since UK businesses seem to dominate the higher search result.  But interestingly Google thinks Front Office Box is in the USA (which it is of course).

Here’s the main question:

Why do sites graded at 2 and 3 present in the search results at 16 and 14 respectively?

If anybody  can convince me they know the answer they might very well get a new client.