Content Relationship

I cannot speak for you, but as I blog and create content I do not think about the relationships between my content as much as I should. I try and categorize content best I can, but these categorizations are hard to do because some of our information might belong to the same category but it can be so different than the other information within that category. I’m sure most of you have seen “Related Content” or “Related Topics” widgets that will recommend other articles. These are great tools, but these tools are dynamic and most people install them and ignore their results. If leveraged properly the relationships that content have with one another can create a usability heaven.

How Chain Blogging Can Fix Common Usability Problems

One key to creating a successful website is your ability to keep your visitors on your site. Some things that make or help visitors leave are:

• Articles that are too long.
• Unhelpful articles.
• External links.
• Poor internal navigation.
• No reason to stay.

There are more things that help visitors leave, but those are the things I want to focus on. I want to recommend some strategies and a technique that may help promote better readership, longer visits, more content consumption, and better usability. I call this technique “Chain Blogging”.

Issue 1 – Articles are too long.

Think of someone who smokes. Most internet surfers are addicted. When they have some free time they have to get themselves some internet. They find themselves with an extra five minutes. They want to find something fast and be able to read something quick. Cigarettes are only so long and only have so much that can be smoked out of them. Well these internet addicts are the same way. They have limited time and need some satisfaction. Short and to the point information is very satisfying to readers. Leave out the fluff. The fluff can make a great topic for an additional or supporting blog post.

Issue 2 – Unhelpful articles.

This one is pretty self explanatory. If your article isn’t helpful in any way, don’t expect much traffic. I know at times you find yourself blogging to blog, but try and make every little article that you make helpful in some way.

Issue 3 – External links.

When I read blogs I will click on links that help with the details. If you are smart about things, you can replace those external links with internal links to pages where you can offer the same information. This allows a “series” type of relationship between blog posts. Many of these series can relate one to another. You may think, this is starting to sound like a wiki. Well duh, it is organizing your blog or content in the same way that a wiki does. Remember to give credit where credit is due, but you can do this with footnotes or create an external resources section referencing these articles, much like wikis do.

Issue 4 – Poor internal navigation.

Poor internal navigation can lead visitors to dead ends or information that doesn’t help support the initial article that lead them to your site in the first place. If you can feed the topic and support the topic that is on their mind, you will have a better chance at keeping them on your site. Issue 4 can be resolved by implementing the same strategies alluded to in Issue 3, creating article relationships. By linking to other internal pages you encourage users to stay on your site. They become aware that your site contains many resources when it comes to the specific topic they entered your site seeking.

Issue 5 – No reason to stay.

I think you probably understand this issue. If you have done things right by resolving all the previous “Issues” we’ve discussed, you’ll find Issue 5 resolved. Giving good relevant content will keep visitors on your site every time.

Search Engine Benefits

Since we discussed the benefits to our users for resolving these issues for site usability, I thought we could discuss the search engine benefits of resolving these issues.

• Great relevant internal linking strategy.
• Gives you the ability to focus each article on a single keyword phrase.
• More content to crawl creating a broader search reach.
• Easy linkable resources for others to link to.

Benefit 1 – Great relevant internal linking strategy.

Relevance is a major element in link building. This strategy when done properly can make for extremely relevant links. The search engines were created to help people find what they are looking for, this strategy helps promote that right within your site. It helps to keep visitors on your site and create an impression that your site has a lot of relevant information on the topics it covers.

Benefit 2 – Gives you the ability to focus each article on a single keyword phrase.

I have found that a majority of my search engine rankings tie directly to the phrases that are used in my “title” and in my URL or “slug”. When you try to create content focusing on too many keywords you aren’t given the ability to nurse all the keyword phrases as they a need to be. By writing multiple articles with a single keyword focus it allows you to do this. It allows you to make sure that every keyword you are trying to focus on appears in both the title and URL.

Benefit 3 – More content to crawl creating a broader search reach.

More content can equals more results. This can help to get the desired “double” search engine listing results that many people seek after, along with Sitelinks in Google’s listings. It’s a matter of more is better in this situation. Remember you can always write other articles that piece it altogether after you have put together all the pieces.

Benefit 4 – Easy linkable resources for others to link to.

When I link to external resources I like to link directly to articles that are straight to the point at explaining what I need help explaining. When you create short to the point articles it makes people that link like I do more likely to link to you.

Operation

I thought I would discuss operational benefits to following this blogging/content management strategy but there are a few difficulties in managing it this way too. So I’ll discuss them all at once.

Quicker Blog Postings

By focusing on shorter, more straight to the point blog posts this allows you to publish and create blog posts more quickly. This is great because it can allow you to create a lot more blog posts in a day.

Easy Topical Decisions

If you have a hard time trying to figure out what you are going to blog about, this strategy should make things easier. By continuing off of the previous blog posts topic, it makes it easier to decide what to write about. While writing some blog post you’ll even discover other ideas you’ve missed and may want to link to later when you write supporting articles.

Requires More Upfront Organization

Using the “Chain Blogging” strategy does require a lot more upfront planning. You have to think a lot further ahead up front on what direction your blogging is going to go. What is going to be discussed. Things of that nature. You can always drop a random blog post here and there but it’s best to keep to the strategy.

Requires a Better Understanding of All Your Content

If you are going to be referencing other articles you’ve written it will require you to know your content and where to link to. It will require good planning while writing your articles.

May Require Retroactive Edits

It would benefit web masters to retroactively find articles that they can add links to. You may find yourself creating additional content that relates to previous articles that have been written. Creating retroactive links can help your new articles because old article already have credibility and have rankings in the search engines. Locating articles can be easily done through your site search.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve learned from this big long article. I know this article goes against all that I wrote above but I thought it would be easier all at once. This strategy may not work for every article, but where it will work, it can help out tremendously. So the key things that I hope you’ve gotten out of this article are that even though it may require better management of content, you can use large quantities of relevant posts using relevant internal linking strategies to influence your site credibility and web relevance.

Input Anyone?

Please leave your input and feedback below. What has worked for you? Are you already doing something similar? Are you a better SEO than me and have better suggestions about this strategy? I am no SEO prodigy and I’m sure I can learn a lot from you as readers. Please contribute by commenting to help increase the value of this article.

I am a big IMEEM fan and I know there are tons of different music social networks out there that can be used, but I just like the way that IMEEM is. I was doing some searching through IMEEM for a good playlist and the first one I ran into was one put together by a user by the name of kiasoul. I went to the playlist and as you would expect, it was a playlist put together by Kia promoting their new Kia Soul vehicle. Genius I thought. I know I may be a little slow because everyone else probably already thought to do this, but I thought I would jump on the same band wagon and let people that hadn’t thought to do it see how I did it.

I am in charge of the organic and social media here at PMA Media Group and one of our big assets we’re trying to promote is My Colleges and Careers which focuses on online education and non-traditional continuing education. Well the demographics don’t get anymore perfect than IMEEM. So I thought I would write an article about what I did.

Marketing With IMEEM Process

1. Create Profile

https://www.imeem.com/signup/
Create an account and fill out all the necessary information. I tried to keep it as close to the company name or website as possible since I’ll be promoting the company and/or website through the account.

2. Modify Profile Theme

http://www.imeem.com/profilecolors/
Next I started modifying the theme to work for what I was doing. I actually had a color palette I was working with so it made this quick and easy. There are quite a few free ones that you may want to just modify. I took the default one. Just edit the current theme and modify it how you would like it to look.

3. Add Banner Image

Next add background images and a banner image with your web address and any company branding that can help people start to recognize you. My banner image was 900 pixels wide and around 150 pixels tall.

4. Modify Profile Layout

http://www.imeem.com/customizeprofile/
Then I went in and made sure all of my layout elements were the way that I wanted them. IMEEM has a blog within it so I wanted to make sure that I had my blog posts listed there. There’s also a blogroll within the IMEEM blog where you can link out to other sites.

5. Create Playlists

http://www.imeem.com/mycollegesandcareers/playlists/
Now it’s time to name some playlists. I tried to create some targeted playlists for specific activities that relate to college life and school in general. You just want to try and personalize these playlists to your market.

6. Search for Related Songs and Add to Playlists

http://www.imeem.com/tag/college/music/
Next comes the songs. I decided to first search for songs. Use the search box up top on IMEEM and choose from the dropdown, “music”. You can also search by other options but I was more interested in specific topics. Then when the results come up, click on the title of the song you would like to listen to. When the song comes up there will be a link below the player that says “Playlist”. Click on that then there will be a dropdown to select which playlist to add the song to. “Repeat and rinse” until you are satisfied with your playlists.

7. Make Comments

At the bottom of all the songs or whatever songs you prefer, leave a comment about the song. You should also rate each song to help the songs get popularity and recommend them. As people see your comments, there will be a link back to your profile.

8. Make Friends

Make friends with other IMEEM users. As you update Playlists, create blog post, and through various other IMEEM community activities, your friends will get notified. Friends will tell their friends, and like other social networking strategies, if you have more friends you will have a higher chance of getting traffic coming to your site and you will also have friendships to leverage in the future as you need to.

9. Place Badge Link on Site

The last thing that I recommend you do, is to create an IMEEM badge that you can place on your site(s) that will link directly to your profile. This will potentially get Google and other search engines crawling your IMEEM profile, but also potentially it will help keep your visitors to your site close to you. Badges are an ideal way to let people know what networks you are involved in and to build a relationship with you in a different way. To see a live example of the badge we create go and visit the My Colleges and Careers Blog.

Conclusion

I hope a few of you have benefited from this article. Please let me know how things work out for you. Please leave any feedback you have or even suggestions that could help readers in the comments area of this blog post.

Facebook is amazing on the chart.  Look at it’s growth in the last 6 months even.  It easily overcame MySpace and recently overcame YouTube.  These statistics I’m assuming don’t track all the API hook ins for different Apps that have been built by you could only imagine all the traffic Facebook might see from that.  Another employee and I were just talking about all the older people that are starting to get on Facebook.  It’s amazing who’s starting to use it.  It definitely has more of an appeal than MySpace.

The top 5 Social Networks by Traffic in order are:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. MySpace
4. Digg
5. Photobucket

I just thought I’d graph my honorable mention networks too taking out the big three, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace.

Honorable Mention and Up Coming:

1. Flickr
2. Yelp
3. Twitter

Twitter I think is probably one of the hardest to track.  It probably has more stuff hooked into it’s API externally.  I’m sure if we were able to track all the posts and things going on it would probably be number one on the list.  Even looking at the curve that is being tracked it looks like it’s going to look very similar to Facebook.

Flickr is barely less than Photobucket.  Not much to say other than that about Flickr.

I would keep your eye on Yelp.  I predict it to continue to grow fairly rapidly.  Especially as it’s consumed via mobile devices.  I think people will discover it more with the mobile apps then go home and write their reviews on their desktops.  Yelp is an awesome network allowing you to find and review local restaurants and businesses.  The curve of Yelp appears to be a gradual climb but I predict it starts to quickly head north.  If you haven’t started using Yelp yet, I recommend you do.  The more data it can collect the better the information it will provide.

What are your predictions?  What do you have to say about these graphs?

Brainstorm | Keywords | Research | Hook | Write | Publish | Share | Moderate | Your Input

1. Brainstorm Topics

My first recommendation is to try and determine what you would like to write about. Writing a blog post is much easier if you are excited or interested in the topic you are writing about. I recommend writing about things you’ve always wanted to know, things that have been on your mind lately, things that you have a lot of experience with, things that are in the news, pretty much anything you won’t fall asleep researching or writing about.

2. Identify Keywords

If you are looking for specific ranking then you need to use specific keywords. Identify 3 keywords you would like to get ranking for based on your keywords research. If you need help researching keywords I recommend reading an interview by Nate Moller with Mat Siltala about Keyword Research.

3. Research Topics

I recommend reading at least 3 to 5 articles about the topic you have decided to write about. Often time a good blog post does nothing more than connect the dots. Then when writing your post you will have some references that you can refer back to and potentially create some connections through trackbacks and/or commenting.

1. Reference these articles when you write your own, if the blog supports trackbacks, the blog post will create a link directly back to your article.
2. Reference the authors by name giving them credibility and also creating a potential friendship for the personal credit.
3. Leave comments and reference the site you are writing the blog post on when it ask for your website.
4. Create a link in your comments when it makes sense and doesn’t present itself as spam.

4. Choose your Hook

If you plan on doing any type of link baiting, determine what type of link baiting hook you are going to use. (The Art of Link Baiting)

1. Resource Hook
2. News Hook
3. Contrary Hook
4. Attack Hook
5. Humor Hook

(What is Link Baiting – Fishing For Traffic)

5. Write your Post

This is my recommended way to write the actual post.

1. Write a draft or write it in Word or another word processor.
2. Write it as if you are talking to someone in simple terms that make it easy to understand. (Some blog posts are nothing more than translated blog posts that others have written.)
3. Don’t worry about length, just understand what you are trying to explain and explain it until it makes sense.
4. Correct spelling and grammatical errors.
5. Reference other blogs as discussed in “Research Topics“.
6. Determine if the length of the article is too long.
7. “Chop it Up” into series if it’s too long and makes sense to.
8. “Incorporate” your “Identified” keywords.
9. Create Anchor links in the page to make it easy to skip to specific sections if it’s a long article.

(Effective Business Blogging)

6. Publish your Post

1. Identify when you would like the post to be published.
2. Enter the post into your blog, (WordPress).
3. Format the text to display as you would like it to.
   1. Bold words that make the article easy to scan.
   2. Emphasize the words that make the article easy to scan.
   3. Use heading tags where it makes sense, (h1, h2…)
   4. Link all words and phrases that need to be linked.
4. Find a related image to create more appeal and to also help with the social networks that like to pick up thumbnails when promoting.
5. Publish

7. Share with Friends

Share with all your friends and associates within the different networks that you are a part of. You don’t necessarily need to “digg” them yourselves, but it doesn’t hurt if done in moderation.

8. Comment Moderation

Moderate the blog’s comments and reply to the comments that are left thanking them and answering any questions they might ask. Reply to any feedback that may be left. Modify the blog post or create a new blog post based on information that comes out of the post’s comments. A blog post can be evolved or can be improved upon with a different blog post.

What do you think?

This post is open to scrutiny and feedback. Please play devils advocate and/or leave your comments. What has worked best for you when posting blog articles? What would you do different. This post if based on my personal experience along with others that I have read and referenced above.

For example, I use Twitter and am connected pretty much all day to Twitter whether it’s on my phone or at my desk.  When someone Twitters a website, my tendency is to ignore that link.  I have found that if I go and read the article and I’m able to leave comments on that post, there are quite a few other people that are reading that post from Twitter and other social networks that have picked that article up. Next thing I know I’m getting traffic from all of the social traffic that the blog post has been receiving.

So not only do I gain traffic from Twitter itself, I’m able to leverage the followers that Tweet has, but I’m also able to push it on to Digg and/or Reddit and/or other networks and create more traffic for that post. It’s amazing how much traffic you can generate if you follow good quality commenting rules and promote articles that you have commented on.  I read two really good articles about quality commenting.

The first article was  4 Effective Ways to Comment on Different Blogs and the second one Formula for Effective Commenting state a lot of great tips. This is the condensed list of what I gathered from them both:

1. Find similar blogs so you can create relevant links and/or relevant traffic.
2. Add to the conversation, don’t just say “Nice Post”.
3. Only link to your blog or site when it makes sense.
4. Be different or intelligent when you comment.
5. Ask questions when commenting.  .
6. Answer questions that are asked.
7. Object appropriately, remember comments are moderated.
8. Join the conversation.
9. Keep comments short.
10. Be early in the comments.
11. Respond to comments about your comments.
12. Be funny.
13. Be real and genuine when commenting.
14. Keep commenting.
15. Keep a consistent identity so that you can build a reputation and people will recognize and trust your comments.

So the key to effective commenting is to comment in conjunction with social networking.

If you leverage other peoples friends and users by commenting on the things that they share, you can also gain a tremendous amount of traffic and potentially a larger following.

Fishing

1. Determine where you’re going to fish.
2. Determine what type of fish you are trying to catch.
3. Determine what type of bait you need to use to catch the right fish.
4. What type of hook are you going to use?
   1. Spinner
   2. Fly
   3. Bait Hook
   4. Jig
   5. Treble Hook

Link Baiting

1. Determine what networks you’re going to try and get traffic from.
2. Determine who your audience is.
3. Determine what topics your audience would be interested in.
4. What type of a link baiting hook are you going to use?
   1. Resource Hook
   2. News Hook
   3. Contrary Hook
   4. Attack Hook
   5. Humor Hook

Clarity?

Does that help illustrate Link Baiting? Every social network and website can be different just like every fishing hole and pond. There is no right way to do it, depending on the season and a lot of different circumstances beyond our control, the fish bite at different times and in different places.  The best thing is to be the first one to the fishing hole and to have something shiny and new that will attract them.  There are plenty of other articles out there that go into the details behind using the different “Link Baiting Hooks“.

Leave your comments and let us know what you think or if there’s a better way of illustrating this.

When beginning any type of online marketing campaign with any type of social media optimization involved you want to join the most effective social networks that you can find. So I decided to take a list that Traffikd had put together with a big list of social networks and see what type of traffic Compete estimated the sites had along with Google’s Page Rank.

Here are the results:

Top Ten Social Networks by PageRank

*Ranked first by Page Rank then by Compete.com to determine tie breakers. Full list of all 360+ can be found at Google Docs here and downloaded under File->Export.

Top Ten Social Networks by Compete.com Visitor Stats

*Ranked first by Compete.com and used Page Rank to determine tie breakers. Full list of all 360+ can be found at Google Docs here and downloaded under File->Export.

Get the spreadsheet of all 360+ Social Networks from Google Docs.

View Spreadsheet Now (last updated 3/25/2009)

Be sure to check all the sheets at the bottom of the document for the different sorted views. (All Data, Alphabetical, Compete (visitors), and PR)

We put our research online and available for the full report of rankings. There are over 360 social networks on the list. You can download it locally and use it as a checklist or however you’d like to consume the data. If you found this article useful share it with your friends, tweet it, digg it, or do whatever you can to spread this resource.

Some social networks didn’t make our list because they had so little data that Compete didn’t pick them up as having enough data. If you have suggestions for other social networks to add to the list let us know.

Please leave us some comments.