For the search crowd, the SXSW session to take place on Saturday called “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better!” is no doubt on the list of those to attend. It was supposed to have Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts, Bing Sr. Product Manager Duane Forrester (who has kind of become known as Bing’s Matt Cutts) and Search Engine Land Editor in Chief Danny Sullivan, who has established him as one of the leading voices in the search industry.
View our SXSW coverage here.
Every so often real life catches up with you in ways you didn’t expect. My wife broke her foot a few days ago. She took a unfortunate spill off a stepstool, but she’s telling everyone it was a ninja fight. Those ninjas pack a wallop: she’ll wear a cast for up to 6-8 weeks, and the doctor said she can’t drive with her current cast. Overall, the broken foot has been a good reminder that having your bike stolen, while annoying, isn’t too horrible in the grand scheme of things.
One wrinkle is that my wife and I were going to spend about a week together at South by Southwest, and I was scheduled to participate on a panel. She’s not going now for obvious reasons (ninja fight). I’ve rejiggered my travel so I’m only away from my wife for a day but I believe I can still do the panel.
That now has an update on it, reflecting what he said in the tweet.
Fans will no doubt be disappointed. I’ve seen this guy walk the halls at conferences, constantly being surrounded by people who want to talk to him. Just like a rock star. The Twitterverse is understanding, however.
If you build it, they might not come, if you haven’t thought about how search engines view your web site. Forget testing for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Search engines are the common browser that everyone uses. The good news is that search engine optimization (SEO) doesn’t mean terrible design or some type of black-magic trickery. Rather, there are good, sensible things that everyone should do that pleases both search engines and human visitors. In this session, representatives from Google and Bing provide this type of advice. They’ll even get you up to speed on the impact that social media is playing on search results. Even better, it’s all Q&A. Bring your top questions about how they rank sites and get answers directly from the source.
Cutts, Forrester and Sullivan all put together a session together at last year’s SXSW as well. Here’s our coverage of that. It could give you an idea of the kinds of things to expect, though a lot has certainly happened in search in a year’s time. I’m sure Search Plus Your World, for example will be a topic of discussion this year.
You can find plenty of advice from Matt Cutts on various topics here.
Content is the foundation of any successful online marketing effort. You need content for your newsletters, website, blog, and social media efforts, as well as your audios, videos, and all your other content sharing. To generate that much content regularly means that you need to have a lot of ideas. Now, for some people, idea generation is easy – they seem to always have something they are thinking about and working on and planning to write about.
with different topics for each required item.
So, for example, my thinking process might go like this: I write for my blog, and then I expand on the concept for my newsletter, and then I reformat that newsletter article slightly to become an article that will be sent out for syndication. That way, I’m constantly building on my original idea, and refining my delivery of it, and this process makes sense.
So how do you generate great content ideas in the first place?
1. I develop ideas from books I’m reading. So, for instance, whenever I read a book, I think about how I might apply this to my business, and then, also, how my clients might apply this information to theirs. Similarly, though I don’t watch a lot of television, when I do see an idea or concept on TV, I will see if I can develop it into a blog post or article as well.
3. I read the questions I receive on social media sites or email. When people reach via email or Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, I pay attention to what they are asking and see whether I have content about it already. If I do, I often times share this article or blog with them. If not, though, I will respond to them, and then take the email response and convert it into a post or article. When I receive media requests, I pay attention and I save my replies for these and may write articles from them as well.
4. I discuss or free-think about ideas or concepts my clients might want to know about. I also have a list of 20-25 subject ideas or topics that I keep as a set of “spare” or “back-up” ideas – ones I can use if I ever need to create content and can’t think of something to say.
5. I pay attention to trends and share them with different people on how to use or apply them. It’s especially fascinating to pay attention to advances in neuroscience, psychology, and technology and be able to provide some feedback or explanation, or to help people see things in a new light. People always benefit from being on the forefront of new knowledge.
6. I pay attention to ideas or strategies I use in my own life and work. If I want to be seen as an expert, I need to contribute something about what I’ve tried, what’s working, and what isn’t. So I use myself as a way to test ideas and strategies and then to share my results. People are often intrigued in the personal aspect of this process; they feel like they know me better – and trust me more.
Each of these are strategies you can adopt too. If you’re stuck for new content ideas, start applying these six steps to observe the world around you. I’m certain it won’t take too long before you have more ideas than you can handle.