Commentary Should Remain the Lifeblood of Blogs

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton still has a problem with readers' comments: Apparently, they're boring.

At SXSW 2012 in Austin, Texas, Denton -- whose media empire includes such popular blogs as Gawker.com, Lifehacker.com and Gizmodo.com -- reiterated his disdain for allowing just anyone to comment on his company's blog posts. He says comments have become so caustic and toxic of late that he's again considering only allowing a pre-selected group of people to comment on them.

This from a media mogul who describes his own blogs as "the definitive news and gossip sheet for entertainment, media and business."

It's true that some comments naturally carry more weight -- for instance, if they come from a knowledgeable person or expert -- while others offer vital counterpoints that add to the conversation. But tamping down on the ability for readers or customers to freely provide feedback is a sure fire way to kill the credibility of a brand.

For Denton's Gawker Media, in particular, controversial posts appear all day long and they attract countless comments from avid readers who want to voice their own opinions, relate similar experiences or suggest a solution to whatever is being addressed. I would argue that this back and forth amounts to nothing more than the lifeblood of his business.

How Not to Be a Spammer When Marketing Your Business

Email is the single most effective marketing tool for many businesses -- and being blocked as an email spammer can be their biggest headache.

It's getting more difficult to get into inboxes, as the battle between spammers and Internet service providers rages on. Nearly one in four commercial emails doesn't make it to the inbox and is either shunted to spam folders or blocked altogether, according to a March report by Return Path, a New York email deliverability monitoring firm. Six months earlier, that figure was one in five.

Small companies often run afoul of spam filters, even if they have opt-in email lists of supposedly willing recipients. Many who are new to email marketing start off on the wrong foot, says Dennis Dayman, chief security and privacy officer at Eloqua, a Vienna, Va., marketing software and services company. "They 'spray and pray' and hope that someone will click and buy," but are hit with angry complaints and find their emails blocked as spam, he says. Ironically, many companies send too few messages to have their way smoothed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as known commercial email senders.

But you can significantly improve your odds of reaching customers and prospects by taking the right steps.

Bruce Kennedy

The Managing Director and Co-Founder of OMA, ‘BK’, as he is so well-known in the business community, has had over 40 years engrossed in all aspects of that hybrid discipline – part art, part science – we all know as ‘Marketing’.

From his early years selling space in his College magazine, BK has worked in a wide diversity of marketing roles, sales rep, sales manager, product manager, national sales & marketing manager, consultant, and whatever else you’d like to call him in a marketing sense, both in his own business, from start-up’s right through to the bigger multinationals and in local, national, and international roles, and always with a strong ‘hands-on’ approach.

For the past decade or so, BK has become increasingly more attracted to the internet as the business platform of the foreseeable future.  Now, with the formation of OMA, time to focus that marketing background and experience towards helping other businesses find their own optimal online profile.

About Us...

What do we do?

Our vision is to help small to medium sized businesses develop assets that will help them earn higher profits and avoid common pitfalls of online marketing.

How we do it?

First, we consult with you to understand your business needs. Then we develop a personalised systematic approach to help you achieve your business objectives. At Online Marketing Australia, we help businesses with website design, search engine optimisation (SEO), market/keyword research and email marketing.

What we commit to?

Our commitment is to work with you and develop assets that will deliver concrete results and long-term growth for your business, while offering these services at an affordable cost.

Call Online Marketing Australia now on (07) 3876 9705 or email us at bk@onlinemarketingaust.com.au to book your free 30-minute no-obligation consultation.

Google SEO Changes Explained

In a little over a year, Google has rendered 10 years of SEO dogma mostly useless. Go ahead and throw out everything you used to hold dear, such as link building, keyword-rich content, internal links, and tracking results on SERPs. It’s time to start over.

Is all that drama necessary? Yes, it is.

Recently, Google made changes that together have dismantled what we have taken for granted in the world of SEO. Each of the six major changes focused on one aspect of search. The cumulative impact of the changes has me calling for the end of an era.

Let’s review each change chronologically.

1. Google Panda. The change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm was a well-publicized move to shutdown “content farms” (sites that exist solely to rank highly in search results, grab traffic, and monetize that traffic with paid ads for actual content sites). A total of 12% of search traffic was rumored to be impacted. The result was that quality sites ranked higher in search.
2. Google+. Google created Google+ as a social networking service—and intended to leverage its power in search to put a dent in Facebook’s run. Google’s Circles were touted as the core differentiator (a feature that Facebook quickly copied). However, the true differentiator was (and remains) the ability for Google to index social traffic in its search algorithm.
3. Secure search. Google started hiding your organic search details (the terms you searched) from websites if you were logged in to Google (at first Gmail, but now all Google properties). Now, 15-30% of a site’s organic traffic is “unknown,” which places a massive hole in the marketing tool box.
4. Freshness update. Targeted at news results, Google changed its rankings to display the most recent content first. For example, if you search for information about the NBA Playoffs, Google displays the 2012 playoffs, not playoffs from other years. (That change is not limited to news items. Now, the more recent the content, the more likely it will come up at the top of search results.)
5. Search plus Your World. Google now indexes your social feed and includes results from your feed ahead of other natural searches, so all search results are personalized for you—when you are logged in to a Google account (and to a lesser degree, even when you are not). Now, my results are really different from your results.
6. Penguin. The change will lower the search engine rankings of pages that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google has signaled an intent to penalize sites that over-engineer the search results using keyword-stuffing techniques. The penalties will be targeted at the worst offenders.

The dynamic of managing how your company shows up in search has changed—forever. What does a “page one result” mean when every search engine results page is personalized? How can you use keywords on your site to ensure people find your business? If 30% of your organic traffic is hidden, how can you know what terms your visitors are searching?

Be Prepared for Constant Changes

You can do the following four things to help your content rank high in search results, no matter what changes Google continues to roll out.

1. Write high-quality content… and write regularly. It is more important than ever to tell your story in as many channels as possible. Make sure your content is well-written, relevant, and timely. In this new web environment, good stories win readers.
2. Audit your content. If you have high-quality content that hasn’t been touched in a while, update it.  Refresh it, share it, reuse it. Get your reimagined content out into your community in new and interesting ways.
3. Get more contributors. An easy way to expand your content is to expand your list of folks creating content. Get more people in your company blogging or writing for the website, or sharing content via social channels. Tap into other sources for content, such as your user community or technical teams. Remove any technology roadblocks that make it hard to add contributors and post new content.
4. Engage your community. Think about your entire web footprint holistically rather than consider them disconnected silos. Use each social channel to fill in gaps in your content strategy.

These dramatic changes may have snuck up on you. However, the good news is that we are all in the same position. Businesses that recognize what these changes mean—and can adapt to the new SEO reality fastest—will gain a critical advantage.

Robbery at 30,000 ft

Robbery at 30,000 ft

Richard Branson doing a poor bird impression

Just got off a flight from Perth to Brisbane... and I am still smarting from paying $360 for excess luggage for a box of workbooks for my seminar today. That was $15 a kilo...

I know I should just shut up and cop it BUT the rates change on Wednesday to the Qantas system of per piece... and it will be just $40 excess if I do it on line or $80 at the airport. Can you imagine how much Virgin Blue raked in for all those years and Qantas when it followed their lead...

Oh well... rest of trip is on Qantas... I just wonder why do they cancel the Perth to Brisbane Red Eye some Sundays??

Written by Wayne Mansfield