When we dug into another metric, things started to look a bit different.


How to Build a Global Brand Without a Global Budget

So if we looked at actually the time spent, we saw that the time spent with this one piece


of 90-minute video, which was 8,500 hours, was equivalent to the amount of time that


was spent watching the entirety of all of our blog content or reading the entirety of


our blog content over that last year.


So this was a huge difference in effort that all the blogs we'd ever made, several, several


thousand versus 1,170.


But these 4 videos that lasted 90 minutes, they actually delivered the same return.


And this clicked that actually a 30-minute interaction with 3,000 people did more for


our brand performance than a three-second interaction with 43 million people, thinking


back to that campaign that we did in 2017.


So when we start to measure the idea that actually the key thing was time watched, not


number of touch points, so not number of impressions but the amount of time spent, the whole mentality


shifted and the creative mentality shifted.


We started to think about, well, we're not going to care about the amount of people that


we reach.


We just care about the depth of that interaction.


We care about the resonance that we're having with these people.


So we then started to think there is a key metric that most of us are forgetting with


all of our marketing.


And it is the key metric for measuring and achieving success with brand, which is time


spent.


So if we then take different kinds of video content, for example, here we have a product


video.


On the left, we have a social media video in the middle.


And then we have our new category of brand marketing video on the right.


We can see that they have different skills and different kind of strengths.


The one on the left, product video, not so many views, has really helped with assisted


conversions.


The one in the middle, the social media video, maybe hasn't really helped with conversion


or time spent, but it has really helped us reach out more people.


It has got that engaged views.


It has kind of got that reach.


And then lastly, the brand marketing video, well, it may not have necessarily that reach


and it may not have helped with conversions, but it's really helped with engagement.


It's really helped with people spending time with this.


So instead of just what most of us are doing now and starting to create things that are


just about touch points and the number of hits, reach, and conversions, start also to


think about a third category of content, which is for brand marketing, which is about the


amount of time spent.


So this was a revelation for us.


And we realized this is what we should be doing.


This is how we should be changing our marketing for brand.


So we thought, well, what if we stop advertising on TV?


What if we just stop investing all that money in TV and start instead investing, creating


our own?


And suddenly we saw that lots of other companies are doing this as well.


Companies like Uber have started doing the thing called Uber Presents.


MailChimp is starting MailChimp Presents.


And even a small company down the road in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Price Intelligently


at ProfitWell have started making their own little series and podcast about how to measure


pricing pages and how to adjust the success of them.


So lots and lots of different kinds of companies across B2B and B2C were investing in instead


of advertising, building their own long-form content.


The value is obvious.


With short-form advertorial, we're focused on watching involuntarily.


So we're shoving our content in front of people and hoping that they like it.


Whereas with long-form entertainment, we are only really caring about people coming to


watch us voluntarily.


So we're really focused on that people choosing to watch the content.


With short-form advertorial, it's about quick to consume.


Long-form entertainment, it's about people spending a significant amount of time and


investing their energy in watching our content.


The short-form advertorial has to be simple and easy to understand, whereas long-form


entertainment needs to be in-depth and detailed.


And so what I would recommend and what I think we need to do in the modern world to really


market our brand, no matter whether we are a small or a big business, is to create a


show.


And this process is called brand affinity marketing.


So back to our two concepts.


Brand awareness, brand affinity.


People know you, people like you.


We can go directly to brand affinity because brand awareness is not necessarily the value


that it once was.


In fact, we don't normally know about companies anymore through awareness.


We know about them because they're recommended to us.


So instead, we have a concept called brand advocacy.


If we think about the way in which we usually hear about products and services, yes, partially,


it's to do with generic recommendations.


So if I search for something like best lobster roll in Boston, I'm going to get some lists.


But am I going to trust this more than the alternative, which is going into the Slack


group and asking a bunch of Boston natives what their particular preference is for lobster


rolls?


I'm obviously going to trust the former.


I'm also going to trust the latter, sorry.


And this is the situation we're in, where we now have instant access to recommendations


from people who are experts in all the different kinds of things we have.


So anytime we need purchasing information, we don't normally necessarily go to generic


sources.


We're just let go to our channels of Slack, of WhatsApp, of places where we know that


we have experts and individuals who can give us specific recommendations that we would


trust.


So we initially think about building advocacy.


If we need to think about trying to improve brand advocacy, we think about doing it through


influencer partnerships.


And this can kind of work to an extent, but there's a flaw with this because influencers


are often just speaking directly to people.


If we think about, we have these different subsets, we're after our target customers,


we have professions and interest groups that our customers are part of.


Within that, even stronger communities and subcultures, influencers kind of sit off to


the side.


And to try and work with influencers to directly then change the perception of a variable market


can be quite challenging.


Influencers are just kind of broadcasting and hoping to achieve shifts.


But most of the perception, most of the actual brand salience comes from the conversations


between individuals within the market.


And that's where things really start to change.


So we could then think about investing in, well, let's really just try and speak to an


entire profession or interest group and try and win them over to try and build the advocacy


that will lead to affinity.


And again, that kind of can work, but often these people are kind of scattered and not


necessarily talking to one another.


The real smart place to aim with this kind of creative content is communities and subcultures.


Because these are the groups of people who are really actively talking to each other


all the time.


So people who have an active, specific interest in a certain thing, whatever it might be,


a certain passion.


And they are part of a community or a group or an undercurrent who are always kind of


conversing and trying to help each other out with the situation.


Those are the worlds in which you can really build a brand because this is where the conversation


happens.


So affinity is driven by identity.


How do we as brand marketers then speak to that?


How do we get involved?


Well, I think we need to speak to the subcultures.


We need to find our nerds.


And I'll give you an example of this.


So I'm a musician.


I'm a total nerd for music.


And I am a part of the subreddit Guitar Pedals where people who are big into guitar pedals


just post pictures of their pedal boards and different pedals and talk about it all the


time.


Very, very active community.


So how here is a subculture, how do we speak to them?


Well, if we think about two different companies here that are both trying to sell to the wider


community of musicians, one is a company, Guitar Center, big kind of player in that


market.


And the other one is my local shop in London called Anderton's.


And on the face of it, they look quite similar.


But Anderton's have really been able to stand out and achieve great success against some


of the big players just by speaking directly to this community and subculture.


So they have made a ton and ton of videos that are just basically musicians being really


silly.


So doing things like trying to test which different amplifiers and guitars they can


tell with a blindfold on.


Experimenting this stuff, just messing around, doing all the things that people wish they


could do if they had more money and time.


And this, of course, speaks to that community and gets shared and people start to really


care about it.


So with this long form creative content you're going to start to create, think about creating


content for communities who speak to one another, not just your target customer.


You need to go one level broader, one level more niche and say, who are we really trying


to speak to in terms of community of people rather than a person?


And then when you think about content distribution, so once we have decided we are going to start


to create this content, we're going to create something different.


How do we actually then distribute it?


I think we need to take a radically different approach because the way in which we distribute


content right now is really just tied to that old model of eyeballs, of touch points.


This touch point area that what we really need to do is get as many people to see all


of our content all the time as possible.


And any opportunity to not distribute it further is a wasted opportunity.


But I think this is flawed.


This is what happens when I try and, you know, when I'm exploring a YouTube channel.


Okay, let's check out this brand that I like on YouTube.


Here's the latest video.


Hey, I'm Chris from Wistia and I'm shooting this video on a webcam.


You can make an awesome video using nothing but your laptop's webcam.


So let's run through some tips on how to do it.


First off, be sure to keep the...


I remember this comedian.


He was great.


Oh, I've got to see this.


This sounds fun.


Oh, there's loads of good comedy stuff.


What's this one here?


This other one he's done.


Oh, he was on Conan.


Thank you.


Thanks very much.


Yes, you're absolutely right.


I'm actually from England.


So I had a bit of a tough time getting through immigration.


What about these what about these impersonations?


Oh, an ad.


Oh, for goodness sake.


Okay, wait for this to come.


Yeah, next.


Okay.


What's this?


Oh, what's this?


Martial amps.


Oh, I was looking at buying a martial amp.


Oh, let's have a look at this.


This seems cool.


Okay, I'm going to like this video.


What's it saying in the comments?


Sounds good.


Okay, and what have they got here?


Something about pedal boards.


I like pedal boards.


I need to buy a new pedal board.


Let me have a quick look at that one there.


That seems good.


And what's this?


An ad for a nostalgic music center.


It's the kind of thing I like.


Oh, wow, look at this record player.


That seems great.


Love it.


I would love to get one of those.


Anyway, how about dogs playing with cats?


Great.


That sounds cool.


Let's see what we got here.


Oh, perfect.


Look at this one.


Oh, no, wait, this is what I definitely want.


Cats being jerks compilation.


Can I have your mouth?


Huh?


No?


Sure?


Can I have it?


Please?


Come on.


Give me the remote.


Oh, this is great.


You don't even like...


What was I meant to be doing again?


You see, these platforms are not really built to optimize the time spent.


They are built to serve as many ads as possible.


So they are built with distractions built in them.


So if we are optimizing the time spent just thinking about putting our content everywhere


across all these platforms and try and get people to see it, we'll not necessarily actually


optimize for the thing we really care about, which is the amount of time that people spend


watching our content.


Instead, it will just optimize the amount of people watching it.


But all of those interactions which are not meaningful, genuine investments, are not going


to help build your brand properly.


So instead, I think what we need to do is start to think like a media company.


And how do media companies work?


Well, here is an example from The Good Place.


So Good Place, obviously put up by NBC.


Fantastic show.


Worth watching.


What they do is they will create a new episode comes out.


And what they'll do is they'll create a trailer for it.


They'll then make this trailer.


They'll put that across every different kind of channel, across different kinds of cuts


and different formats for Instagram, for Snapchat, for Twitter, for Facebook.


And then they'll also distribute it on TV and in front of other shows, in front of us.


Then they'll have interviews with the cast members.


So they'll come out promoting the fact that there's a new episode out.


And this will be interviews on shows, on podcasts, on whatever.


This itself will then be distributed on all these different social platforms as well.


We'll then go and do further interviews.


And then that will be distributed on all these different platforms.


And then finally, the episode launches.


And then the episode comes out.


And it airs in a very restricted private space where people have to actively seek out and


go to rather than being distributed on all different platforms.


But we've built up the demand in advance.


Then what happens?


Well, then you can kind of rewatch on the website.


And then there's highlights from this particular show that then will go out and be spread across


on social media.


And then we're going to create more of those.


And then there'll be a particular podcast.


And there'll be interviews on other podcasts by the cast members.


And that will then be distributed on all these different platforms.


And soon, as you can see, by every single episode, there are many, many multiple different


assets, all centered around promoting this core central asset of the particular content


itself.


And this is how media companies work.


They don't think about content distribution.


They think about audience development and audience acquisition.


And the focus has to be instead of just thinking about getting our content out there, it's


about bringing people to us so that we can control the experience, so that we can ensure


that they're watching as much as they can, so that we are using all this content that


we're creating to create more content, which goes on social media, but using social media


as a tool to build an audience and thereby build a brand.


In other words, thinking of it like Netflix.


So with Netflix, what do they do?


They go on, you know, do Netflix publish everything on social media?


No.


Look at their YouTube channel.


And it's just trailers.


It's clips.


It's trailers.


Clips and trailers.


Snippets.


Tasters.


They go through their experience with social media to watch short form content in the manner


that it's going to make sense on that particular platform where attention spans are short and


they're only spending a few seconds watching quick snippets that drive them to a longer


experience that they are then going to have that time and long engagement with content


that's going to really help build that brand affinity.


So use social media to advertise your content, not your business.


And this, I think, is the revolutionary aspect of this method of brand building.


Instead of just trying to get us out there, we are trying to bring people to us.


So market exactly like a media company.


And at Wistia, this is our attempt to do just that.


We after the success of 1 to 100, created a new series that came out last summer called


Brand Wagon.


That was an interview show.


And this was our way of marketing that like a media company on social media.


And some of you are probably thinking, Phil, this is crazy.


Are you really saying that in order to build a brand, we need to become Netflix?


Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.


Precisely.


Not in the sense that you need to start building the amazing kind of content that Netflix is


doing, not necessarily that high level, but you need to start thinking about creating


content that speaks to a specific niche audience, such that for them, because you have so well


targeted their particular interests, it is as interesting and as vital for them to consume


your content as it would be for them to watch Netflix.


And think about the fact that you are a niche publisher.


And to build a brand, you need to become a niche publisher creating really different


and interesting content for a very specific community that the wider media landscape are


not going to invest in.


But you as a business can.


And if you become the Netflix of plumbing, if you become the Netflix of sales management,


whatever it might be, through doing that, you can become the brand that will stand out,


that will build that reputation that lasts a long time.


So think about audience distribution rather than, sorry, think about audience development


rather than content distribution.


You're trying to build that audience, build super fans, measure people when they get to


your website in terms of the depth of their engagement, their connection.


Doesn't matter how many there are, and that's just how deep their connection is with you.


Because having 3000 people who really, really care about your business will deliver much


more value in terms of word of mouth and brand salience and essentially preference at the


end of the day than just getting a few hundred million impressions with a short ad that goes


out on all these different platforms.


Care about depth of interaction rather than the amount of interactions themselves.


So then you need to start thinking about how you can do that.


Well, one of the key things is to then build it on your website.


And Wistia, after their success building this kind of strategy, has actually pivoted the


entire product to help serve it as well.


So you can build up your Netflix on your website, your own kind of channel that's not full of


ads that has this unique branded experience.


And you can use therefore this particular place, this website asset that you have to


then capture emails as well.


Because an email is worth far more than a Facebook like or YouTube subscriber.


So again, instead of thinking about social media as the place for this content, think


about building your own ecosystem, bring people into the CRM, bring them through and start


to communicate with them on a regular basis.


If you own the distribution channel, you own the audience data, then you don't have to


worry about all that stuff we talked about to start with, with GDPR and connections and


spending money with YouTube and Facebook every time that you need to try and promote your


content.


If you own the audience data, you can advertise more effectively as well.


So you can start to use the advertising channels themselves to do more effective direct response


advertising and more effective advertising of your content rather than just spending


money fruitlessly on lots and lots of brand ads.


So instead of just spending money on advertising, your new strategy is as follows.


You are going to be trying to aim directly to build brand affinity.


Your metrics for success here is going to be the time that people are spending with


your brand.


The creative that you're going to invest in is long form entertainment.


Ideally, this is going to be video content.


But if you really can't start with a video, a podcast is a great way to go as initially


as well.


Something that people are going to really spend time with consuming.


You're going to target subcultures and communities, specific niche audiences who are passionate


who have a particular interest that they converse with each other about.


And you're going to create the best content in the world, that group of people.


And then how small, no matter how niche it is.


And then with distribution, you're going to market like a media company.


You're going to drive individuals to your platform.


You're going to think about audience development rather than just trying to push your content


out to them in all the catches.


Sounds complicated, but I promise just making a small start on this, you will start to see


the returns very quickly.


And if you need a hand getting started, I'm very happy to offer further suggestions and


advice on maybe the audience you need to target or the kind of idea that you could go with


for a long form entertainment series of your own.


So please feel free to drop me an email and I'm happy to help.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome. Alright, so welcome everyone.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

For those of you who couldn't attend.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Moscon last week must have said another one virtually this year


MozCon Live Recap Panel

as we could not do it in person.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

We had attendees from over 35 countries.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

There were networking rooms.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

We had 23 experts with awesome presentations sharing mind


MozCon Live Recap Panel

blowing insights. We had exclusive product announcements.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And even a virtual photo booth. I'm Ola.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I work with Mars and I was one of the co emcees at this year's


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Moscon virtual and I am joined today by three of the smartest


MozCon Live Recap Panel

SEOs in the world and three of our Moscon speakers to chat


MozCon Live Recap Panel

about all the exciting news that came out of Moscon.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

To get started, would you be able to tell me


MozCon Live Recap Panel

for those who don't know who you are, what you do and your


MozCon Live Recap Panel

history with Moscon. We'll start with Lily.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Hey everyone, thank you so much for having me. My name is Lily Ray and I'm the senior


MozCon Live Recap Panel

director of SEO and head of organic research at AMS of digital formerly past interactive.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So I lead the SEO team and I also double as our kind of


MozCon Live Recap Panel

in-house Google researcher and I publish a lot of articles and do a lot of speaking about what Google's up to.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And my history with Moscon is I've been going I think technically this would have been like my


MozCon Live Recap Panel

sixth or seventh year. So I'm a big fan.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome. Next up Cameron.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah. Hey everyone. My name is Cam. I am currently


MozCon Live Recap Panel

a content marketing lead at Shopify and I think this is my


MozCon Live Recap Panel

fourth or this was my fourth Moscon but it's my first time presenting.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So it was fun being on the other side of things this year.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

All right. And Pete.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Hey all, I'm Pete Myers, aka Dr. Pete.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I am the marketing scientist for Moz, which means whatever


MozCon Live Recap Panel

it means on any given day. I work on product research and


MozCon Live Recap Panel

research some of what Google does like Lily Ray.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

This is my I just realized this is my 10th year speaking at


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Moscon. I thought it was nine until today actually.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And I've been involved with Moz full time for five years but


MozCon Live Recap Panel

part of the community for going on 15. So


MozCon Live Recap Panel

in the long run. Awesome. Happy Moz


MozCon Live Recap Panel

anniversary. I guess that was last week. Yeah I should have realized it last week but


MozCon Live Recap Panel

you know I will. Awesome. All right. So let's dive


MozCon Live Recap Panel

right in. I'd love to hear from each one of you. There were so many awesome


MozCon Live Recap Panel

things that were discussed last week. What are some of the biggest takeaways


MozCon Live Recap Panel

you had this year's at this year's MozCon. So to


MozCon Live Recap Panel

for this one we'll start with Cam.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah definitely. Lots of great talks. It's hard to choose but I think


MozCon Live Recap Panel

some of my favorites were Casey's and Wills. They both


MozCon Live Recap Panel

talked a lot about kind of being counterintuitive and going counter


MozCon Live Recap Panel

to convention and intellectual humility and just kind of always being in that


MozCon Live Recap Panel

testing mindset. I think that's really important for marketers to understand


MozCon Live Recap Panel

like we can never really truly be out of that testing mindset. It's always something


MozCon Live Recap Panel

that we're going to need to test and learn and see what works on our unique site


MozCon Live Recap Panel

rather than just kind of blindly following best practices. So I really liked both of their talks


MozCon Live Recap Panel

for that reason because I think like at the crux of them the heart of them was just that like


MozCon Live Recap Panel

we're always going to be in that testing. We're always learning. We're never going to be able to say like


MozCon Live Recap Panel

these are the best practices and that's it. I'm done learning. So I really liked them both for


MozCon Live Recap Panel

that reason. All right. Awesome. And for people who are not


MozCon Live Recap Panel

that you know used to testing what are what would be a way you


MozCon Live Recap Panel

can say they can get started with that like running just tiny little test?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah I think it's you know you can start on whatever kind of stuff you're already


MozCon Live Recap Panel

working on. I know one of Casey's examples was


MozCon Live Recap Panel

you know there was like best practices or convention says that like


MozCon Live Recap Panel

having the number seven or this type of title is always going to


MozCon Live Recap Panel

perform better. And she's like well we have a post on our site where it's


MozCon Live Recap Panel

the top viewed post on our site and the number was 14 and it's not as long as people


MozCon Live Recap Panel

say it should be. So I think even just like looking at what


MozCon Live Recap Panel

best practices are listed and out there and kind of comparing that to your own site and saying like


MozCon Live Recap Panel

does this match up with what I'm seeing and kind of then from there diving in further


MozCon Live Recap Panel

you can always test simple things like you know if you're writing blog posts every day like


MozCon Live Recap Panel

try something new see if that performs better or worse. So just kind of starting with what you're


MozCon Live Recap Panel

already doing and maybe doing something slightly different and seeing what the result is.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome. Thanks for that Cam. What about you


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Lily? What was your biggest takeaway from this year's MOSCON?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So I think the biggest takeaway was the fact that like


MozCon Live Recap Panel

in previous years at SEO conferences we were much more focused on tactics


MozCon Live Recap Panel

and almost like hacks that we could use to rank better.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And the shift lately has been a lot more on user experience. So it's almost like


MozCon Live Recap Panel

everything that is good for users is ultimately going to be good for SEO and good for


MozCon Live Recap Panel

performance which is great. I think that you know Cyrus talked about it with like the long


MozCon Live Recap Panel

click and whether that's a ranking factor but ultimately like the things that he was doing to optimize


MozCon Live Recap Panel

for the long click are also really good for users as well. And then I think


MozCon Live Recap Panel

another another big one was like what Brittany talked about in terms of just like contextualizing data


MozCon Live Recap Panel

and SEO metrics and making sense of them and not necessarily like focusing on one KPI


MozCon Live Recap Panel

or taking it out of context but kind of like looking at the bigger picture and kind of getting a being able to present


MozCon Live Recap Panel

data in smarter ways. And then personally I really loved


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Areej, Luke and Jackie I think did a really great job of just talking about


MozCon Live Recap Panel

some like technical best practices around crawling and indexation and international SEO. I love all those topics so those are


MozCon Live Recap Panel

really great for me as well. Yeah I completely agree from my own recap I did notice that


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it was very much a switch into more of a foundational


MozCon Live Recap Panel

aspect of SEO instead of this is how you do this it's more this is how you should think about this.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Totally. Awesome. So what about you Pete? What was your


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biggest takeaway or some of your biggest takeaways? You know I always get the most out of the talks I don't know that much about


MozCon Live Recap Panel

and so PR is a big one for me like Shannon is always great to listen to and


MozCon Live Recap Panel

hearing what they went through during the pandemic and how they adjusted you know that was really interesting to me.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Outside of talks in our birds of a feather and some discussions there was a lot of discussion


MozCon Live Recap Panel

that was you know I thought was really great about how the pandemic impacted search.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I think it's something we don't talk about enough that you know we've had all these algo updates and natural language processing changes but


MozCon Live Recap Panel

the way the pandemic shifted searcher behavior and the way machine learning responded to that


MozCon Live Recap Panel

adapted to that I think was bigger than any single core update or any single thing that Google


MozCon Live Recap Panel

did because you know we just changed our behavior massively and we changed what we were looking for and we shifted to e-commerce


MozCon Live Recap Panel

and our priorities changed and so that conversation of like how did the whole world changing


MozCon Live Recap Panel

impact what we do you know is really interesting and how is it going to change that and how much.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So you know I don't have any magic insight about that but I think it's a conversation we need to have more in the industry.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I really liked Ross's talk about content as an investment and especially how we have to view you know if it's top of funnel or bottom of funnel or video or whatever it is


MozCon Live Recap Panel

as a different risk reward proposition and a different strategic approach and I think what I liked about Ross's talk oddly was I disagreed with a lot of his risk reward calculations.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Like there's a lot of things Ross said where I'm like no no no I like tools are great and we do this and we do that but I think that was kind of the point right.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

That we have to do that calculation ourselves our investment or the difficulty for us in doing any given type of content is going to be different and what we get out of it and what our goals are for that content are going to be different and we can't lump it into one big thing that we call content marketing and view it as all the same.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So I thought that was a really great food for thought that you know we all have to figure out what what we're after and how hard it's going to be for us for any given type.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah I totally agree. The analogy of seeing content as an investment was very cool and I spent the entire weekend trying to find o's in it. I couldn't find any so I told Ross I would let him know.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I don't know if he's checked his message yet.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Okay so Lily you spoke about the evolution of Google since the medic updates. What implications do you think these changes have on the way SEOs conduct their work?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah definitely. So for anybody who's unfamiliar the medic update is the informal name that Barry Schwartz from our SEO community gave to a Google core update on August 1st of 2018.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And it disproportionately impacted health and medical websites but it absolutely impacted many more categories than that. So I've been laser focused on that update and other core updates ever since because it has impacted a lot of the clients that my team and I work on.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And I think one of the biggest observations and what I presented about it MozCon is just this shift towards expertise authority and trust as an SEO strategy.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

It's always been an SEO strategy but I think it's taken a really big role in the last few years so it's becoming harder to rank for topics where your brand and your company doesn't really have true expertise.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And I think even in the past year Google's refined that even further so what I would encourage companies and digital marketers to focus on is almost like a less is more approach when it comes to content creation, focusing on the areas where you truly have authority and expertise,


MozCon Live Recap Panel

not necessarily just trying to like meet some cadence with your editorial strategy or your content calendars or just producing all the content and trying to rank on everything.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So just focus on the areas where you can actually offer unique value and expert content and then put your best foot forward in terms of demonstrating who's producing that content who's behind it, all that good stuff.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome. Yeah, I really enjoyed your presentation on that. I plan to go back and watch that again.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So, given your research and the history of Google's updates up to this point, what do you think is the next step going forward and how can SEOs prepare?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

It's getting increasingly competitive even with this last core update in July, I feel like there's been yet another shift towards even more authoritativeness for certain topics so it's like, again, like it's it's going to be harder, I think, to, to write about all the things


MozCon Live Recap Panel

and expect to see rankings and traffic for all the things I think it's more important to really do a gut check and recognize the areas where your brand truly has a unique selling proposition or unique value and, and making sure that's demonstrated throughout the content.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And I do think that Google is doing a lot more with recognizing like the individuals who work at companies and have actual authority on certain topics, for example, like updates that Google's making with a knowledge panel and things like that.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So the more that you can do to think about who the real experts are at your company and just make sure that that information is conveyed throughout the site, I think is going to be a good forward thinking strategy.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Okay, awesome. So basically be focused, know what you're really talking about and have a way to show that you're an expert at what you're talking about.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah, absolutely.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Okay, awesome. Thanks. So next up is Cameron. Would you be able to, well, you discussed that the content refreshes are a very highly effective way to regain lost visibility.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Could you walk us through why these are so effective and how you've leveraged it at Shopify?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah, definitely. I think that they are obviously most effective depending on how much traffic decay your site actually has.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So I know for a lot of people who come into maybe a new content marketing position, one of the first things they're going to want to do is like look at their body of content that they're working with, what already exists.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And I think more often than not, in my experience and in my talks with content marketers, they're coming into, you know, there's a lot of existing content and a lot of it's not performing.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so I think that's more of like the rule than the exception. And so like being willing to dive in and look at that is like a really important step because I think more often than maybe we assume there's a lot of decay going on in our sites.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And if we're only focused on producing new content, then we might not get anywhere, we might not move the needle. New content is great. Talking about new topics is great.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

New things happen you want to be covering, but if you're not kind of updating that decaying content, then it's just going to constantly be like a traffic detractor.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

You're going to look at your month over month totals and you're going to be either stagnating or still in the red just because all the old content is just like consistently just like taking away from your traffic totals, which is really discouraging if you have like pretty aggressive growth KPIs like I know a lot of content marketers do.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So they're effective just because there's a very real problem of traffic decay, especially on sites with a lot of a lot of lacy content.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I also think they're super important just in general for content marketers who either are a team of one or a very small team.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I would definitely say that it's more and more effective use of your time, not exclusively maybe to focus on refreshes, but to kind of really heavily lean into that just because it tends to be then we see that if you do a refresh, you rank a lot quicker than just a net new piece of content.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

If that's all you're doing, then it might be a lot slower moving. And when you have limited resources, you want to do the most impactful things.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So I think, yeah, just remembering that like the more you publish, the more you have to maintain. And if you're just a team of one or a really small team that isn't really sustainable.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so I think like leaning into refresh is a little bit more than maybe we've done in the past is probably a smart move just because of resource constraints and the fact that traffic decay is a very, very real thing.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Right. Awesome. That actually ties nicely with what Lily just said about being more focused in your content. If you notice a decay, that's a chance to go back and clean up what you've done before instead of just creating more noise, basically.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Right. Yeah.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So you included a Twitter poll in your presentation and basically that SEOs only spend, well, you found that the SEO spend 0 to 25% of their time on content refreshes. Did this surprise you?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

It did. I think, you know, I wasn't sure what to expect. That's kind of why I did the poll. I was like, I really don't know what other people are doing.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And of course, it depends. Right. I mean, that's like one of our favorite phrases. It depends. But it depends really truly on what you're working with.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I mean, there might be plenty of content marketers who are working at startups and those startups don't have any content. They've never done marketing or content marketing before.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So you might not have to worry about refreshes because there's nothing to refresh. But I was still kind of surprised just how big of a piece of the pie said we don't really focus on this or we rarely do it just because of how impactful they can be.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So I think like if you're not even sure if that's something that you should be doing or you've never done it before, just yeah, definitely look at the data.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I would be surprised if there wasn't some opportunity lying in your data with, you know, content you published previously that's been decaying.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

But there's no reason it couldn't be reclaimed if you focused on a refresh. So I would definitely encourage that if you're not currently doing it.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah. So Ellie asked if it matters if you are a small or a large business, like does the impact differ with the size of your business?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah, I would say, I mean, the size of the business is interesting because I think it depends on like how much traffic you're even trying to get.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

You know, if you're running like a self-serve model and you need like a lot of leads and a lot of people coming into your site,


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I would definitely say like, you know, whether it's refreshes or net new content, you're going to do what you need to do to kind of widen that net and widen the top of the funnel and get a lot of traffic in there.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

But if you're, you know, doing content marketing for more of like an enterprise company, you might not need to do this as high of a volume just because it's more about quality and then quantity.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So when it comes to the size of the business or like the size of the business that your business needs, I would definitely say that any kind of content production should kind of follow suit depending on how many leads you even need.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And that's, you know, leads or purchases that you need in your business model. But yeah, I would say that if you're working at a big company, chances are they've probably done a lot of content marketing before.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So the bigger company, the more content probably has been done before, that's anecdotal. But I would say, yeah, definitely bigger company, usually more content, usually lots more opportunities for refreshes.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Okay, awesome. And so moving on to you, Dr. Pete, or Pete, as you mentioned that you prefer to be called.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So would you be able to tell us a little bit more about your presentation? I know you, well, it was from, let me get this right. It was outranking your rivals from data to action, I believe. I don't know.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

You might cut out just in time, so we don't know if you got it right or not.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Sounds a good move. Yes, I dug into competitive analysis and some of the work we've been doing over the last year or two.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And I guess the short version of it is that as I re-explored what competitive analysis meant, you know, the thing that kept coming up is we do these, especially competitive keyword analysis and ranking analysis.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

We do these mega spreadsheets, we do these sort of mega dumps and we end up with this giant list of keywords that are some kind of intersect of our competition and what they're going after, what they're ranking for that we're not.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And it's often not particularly relevant. It's maybe not stuff that we care about. And it's not very actionable. You know, you can easily end up with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of keywords to go after.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And it's not realistic. And it's especially unrealistic in a bigger company environment where maybe you're going to hand that off to a content team, you know, or someone who isn't going to really take the time to understand the context of all that or isn't going to bother because they just see this data dump and go, oh, thanks, that's nice.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And they don't know what to do with it. And we've talked to a lot of teams where that happens.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So I got into a process we've been exploring and I guess the short version is this more of a focused approach where instead of this giant lump of keywords that we're seeing how those keywords group into topics.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

We're understanding, to Cam's point, what we've written about that in the past and whether maybe it's outdated or underperforming or, you know, just isn't targeted to what we expected or maybe we're diluted.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

We've got seven posts on the same topic and we've never really combined them. And then, of course, what our competitors, what pages they're ranking for.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so understanding it more on the page level and getting. So I did an experiment where I kind of did three of these and I had a cluster of keywords.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I had my best ranking pages and my competitors best ranking pages. And it really gave me a way to target an idea and to know what I needed to improve on.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And what was nice about it, too, is it gave me a way after the fact to go, you know what, this didn't do what I wanted it to.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

But that's because this old post that's outdated is outranking me. Maybe I need to throw in redirect. Maybe I need to link those.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Maybe I need to build kind of this topical hub that combines seven of these posts that I want to keep them all active.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

But maybe there's one place somebody could land to go to all these.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so it really gives you a more strategic approach to evaluate your content and to value what you're going after instead of, hey, here's a thousand keywords, you know, write a thousand pieces of content, which won't happen.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And you're not going to get results. So this segued into the Moz page, which is that we are working on tools to do this.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And we have a we have a beta, a closed beta coming, I hope end of this month, early next month called True Competitor, which is essentially analyzes your SERPs and tries to look at who are your most relevant online competitors are


MozCon Live Recap Panel

and factoring in authority so that we understand who's relevant and who is achievable and giving you a better picture of what you're really up against.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And then later in the year, competitive gap analysis tool, which will help you understand the keywords and content that you're competing against in an organized way.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So to see that, hey, these related keywords about this topic are all things you're competing against.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And these are the pieces of content that are doing the best, including your own, and to help give you kind of an action plan for how to go after that and not just that giant data dump.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So we're hoping in the fall, we'll see how I get ETA day by day. But one beta going out soon.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome. I'm especially excited for the True Competitors one, because from talking to our customers, I know that's something that people have needed for a while.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And even during MozCon, a lot of people seem to be excited about it. So looking forward to that.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Also, what does this mean for the future of Moz based on our pipeline of products that we release now?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

You know, I think this kind of reiterated the idea that ultimately keyword research and rankings and all these things strategically go back to content.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And we've had a content tool in the past and it's difficult to have multiple product lines.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And we've had some missteps trying to figure out how to juggle that. But what's funny is we end up heading back that route that, you know, eventually you're going to create content to do this.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

You're going to create content to try and compete. You're going to create content to target keywords. You're going to create content to rank.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so helping people better understand all the things we do, whether it's links or keywords in that context.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so Rob, you know, we launched, Rob Busby, we launched two alpha tools that are proof of concepts, a topical link finder and the on page keyword grouper.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And that's kind of the common theme of those is trying to understand how the links are going after, how the keywords you're targeting focus on specific topics and how they group and how many how many topics or keywords you can go after with one page.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And this gets into exactly what Lily Ray was talking about, like we're not targeting these individual keywords as Google gets better NLP ranking for one head keyword might mean thousands of long tail variations.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And we need to understand that as a concept and as a topic and target more naturally, you know, speak more naturally, write more naturally and understand that that could mean we rank for hundreds of keywords instead of that one big vanity thing we're chasing after.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I'm really excited about that tool because everything you just described is like what my team does manually all day every day for our clients. And like, especially the point where you mentioned, you know, having 10 different articles for 10 different keywords or something like that.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

It's that that was such an effective strategy like five to 10 years ago in the SEO world and now we're running into problems with clients that have especially during these core updates were like a lot of that content is seems to be impacted negatively because it's just not thorough enough or it's not hitting on enough.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

It's not comprehensive enough. So what we're doing is for many of these sites that have published, you know, thousands of articles that are just not really meeting the mark and maybe they've talked about the same thing on 15 different pages. We're looking for opportunities to consolidate those and make it one big comprehensive page.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So it's exciting that the tool will help us with that process.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah, I think the pandemic kind of surfaced it too because you can have a page that really hyper-targeted, you know, COVID-19, for example, and a bunch of higher authority pages that only talk about coronavirus are ranking for that.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Right. Because Google understands that that's the same thing. And you don't have to have laser targeted that and put it in your title tag and everything else.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And they just said that about the new is it MOMA, one of the new models that they it went out and found 800 variants of vaccine names and was able to understand that they were all highly related.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so like the upside of that is we don't have to target every little thing. The downside of that is that the highly authoritative sites that aren't laser targeting it are suddenly ranking for those things and outranking us.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Absolutely. We got to fight harder and smarter.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

That's awesome. That's more more another reminder of why less is more. I think that's the thing that we're seeing more and more with SEL.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

All right. So we only have about five minutes left. So is there any closing thoughts?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Are there things that you is there something that you are going to take back to your team from what you've learned from this Marscon that you can take action on immediately?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I was that we can. Yeah, I think just going back to some of the talks that I mentioned earlier, like Casey's and Will's, and this was a pretty common theme throughout Marscon and a lot of different talks is just like, you know, do what's right for your own site.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

We, I think, as SEOs and content marketers have been in the habit of like, you know, tell us what the best practices are.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

We do these sweeping studies and we come away with like these best best practices that are like, oh, blog posts should be 2000 words long.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

It's like based on an average of like, you know, it just doesn't make sense to analyze it from that perspective, I don't think.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And I think one thing that I try to instill in my team and I hope that other people do as well is just like, you know, you really have to like roll up your sleeves and kind of be in that constant testing and learning mode, like what works for you.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

That's going to look a lot different site to site in business to business. So I think just yeah, that's one thing that is definitely top of mind after Marscon for me.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Okay, awesome. What about you, Lily? Yeah, it's kind of similar to that. But it's interesting because both the content talks as well as I guess like the UX talks and also the technical talks all kind of hit on the same problem that Google is dealing with and the other search engines, which is that there's so much content.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So whether it's like underperforming content or pages that you didn't mean to get index because it's like a crawling issue or faceted URLs or something like that.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

The problem is that Google has just too much to crawl through and it's really trying to prioritize good stuff. So like, whether it's, you know, doing content refreshes to Cam's point or whether it's actually reducing the amount of content that Google can crawl through the settings on your site, like technical settings, it all kind of has the same goal, which is just making sure that whatever you're allowing to be indexed is the best quality content.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome. What about you, Pete?


MozCon Live Recap Panel

You know, first as a Mozur, let me just thank everyone who participated. I felt really good about this year.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Last year, our first year remote was hard, you know, we had little hiccups and all the adjustments we had to make and come a long way and this year was great. So I want to thank everybody involved.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I think this is our, I don't know, 12th, 13th year of we had Mozur training before official Mozur gone and now we've been two years remote and I hope if it's safe, we're planning to see everybody in person next year and be great if we can.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I love what both Cam and Leroy are saying about this kind of legacy treasure trove of content that we all have that, you know, we create these kind of flywheels in SEO, which is great.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

But at some point you expected to kind of just keep producing and keep producing and it doesn't and things get harder. And we go, oh, we got to create something new. We got to do this new thing. We got to pitch the shiny, you know, somebody the big and shiny my friend used to call it.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

But there's all this stuff we're sitting on that really is good stuff or that we have a lot of knowledge about or that we could easily kind of update and something I haven't really written about but have investigated a lot the last couple years is,


MozCon Live Recap Panel

if you look at the way we view our traffic and our analytics, it's very much a what have you done for me lately thing and you go in and go, oh, that blog post got 3000 visits a day on Moz and it'll get 1000 tomorrow and 500 the day after that and then they'll end up at 20 a day for a week.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And then that's kind of it.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And that's what analytics shows us that window into like this week or this month.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And we ignore that post that's getting 50 a day, every day for a year that after two or three months, like completely outpaced anything new or writing.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

And so, how do we get a window into that and how do we do this kind of evergreen audit and see what maybe we're doing well that we could get up to 100 or 200 a day and really revitalize and you know not to take that stuff for granted because we rush off to the new stuff,


MozCon Live Recap Panel

and we're going to be really fast and the same with tactics you know NLP or EAT or whatever it is, they're all great core web vitals but they're all one piece, you know, and we can't get too distracted.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

That's a very great point and that's a good place to end this. The time went by really fast but I really appreciate three of you stopping by today and sharing your insights.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

If people are trying to learn more about you and follow your work. Where do you, where should they follow you on? Let's, whoever wants to go first.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I'm mostly on Twitter, Kami underscore Jenkins, if you'd like to follow me there.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Same here, Lily Ray NYC on Twitter.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Yeah, I think we're all the same. Dr underscore Pete on Twitter or, of course, on the Moz blog.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

Awesome. Thank you all of you for joining us. And for the viewers. The must con fondue is now available, all of the things that were mentioned today were completely covered in those presentations in way more detail than we're able to cover in 30 minutes today.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

So, go get those for the amazing insights that were shared by our 23 speakers are this year's Mars Con and the ticket for the next year, which will be in person.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

I'm so excited that I love the virtual one this year, but I'm excited for us to be able to meet in person again next year. I don't know when that will be available for sale, but keep checking must.


MozCon Live Recap Panel

com slash must con and also Mars at on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or wherever you use and you will get an update when the tickets are available.


MozCon Live Recap Panel


Thought Leadership and SEO: The 3 Key Elements and Search Ranking Strategies

Andy epitomizes thought leadership and is constantly on the cutting edge of digital


marketing research.


Andy is a co-founder and strategic director at Orbit Media Studios, an award-winning web


design company out of Chicago with some of the best and brightest staff that I know.


Andy is a top-rated speaker and author of content chemistry.


Buckle up, my friends, this is going to be an incredible kickoff to virtual MozCon 2020.


Take it away, Andy.


Hi, everybody.


This is Andy Crestadina.


I am thrilled and honored to be back because MozCon rules.


You guys are amazing.


I am so impressed with everything already and I love to teach.


This is a fun topic.


This presentation is actually a combination of some practical advice and some new research


that we did on the topic of thought leadership because there really isn't agreement on what


is it.


Specifically, as an SEO, as an SEO for 20 years, I'm happy to connect that dot with


a straight line between thought leadership, as we'll define it, and rankings, and search,


and links and authority.


Here we go.


I'm not really excited about the definitions I've seen for thought leadership.


Edelman does it this way.


It's free deliverables organizations or individuals produce on a topic they know a lot about and


feel others can benefit from having their perspective on doesn't include sales content.


That to me is literally the definition of content marketing.


I think thought leadership, we can hold a higher standard.


That is totally just content marketing.


Am I wrong?


That's pretty much a good definition of content.


But this, an individual, this is Wikipedia, an individual or a firm that is recognized


as an authority, maybe a little better, and specialized in a field whose expertise is


sought after and rewarded.


I actually like this one from Longitude.


Aristotle insight, that's a higher standard, that engages senior audiences and has a clear


marketing rationale.


It makes sense.


Here's my thesis for you.


Thought leadership combines three things, a personal brand, taking a stand, and being


an expert, being an expert.


This actually aligns in a simple way with the Aristotle three modes of persuasion, taking


you back to college.


Remember Aristotle and the three modes of persuasion, ethos, pathos, logos?


The quick review.


I'll break it down even in simpler terms, more contemporary terms.


It's a combination of an influencer, personal brand, taking a stand on something, a key


opinion leader, and being a subject matter expert.


You got to know what you're talking about, of course.


It's the intersection.


I'm going to say you need all three.


It's the intersection that makes you a thought leader.


I'm going to break those down and I've got a tactic for each, the influencer, opinion


leader, and subject matter expert.


First of all, first and foremost, our research found this.


You've got to be an expert.


Let's break that down.


To be an expert, I'm going to give you three ways, three examples of how this works well


in content and specifically for search, publishing original research.


Having new novel ideas and writing books immediately makes you more of a subject matter expert.


This is what we found.


We have 480 plus people to answer a bunch of questions about what is thought leadership.


I did this in combination with Michelle Lin from Entis Research and Morgan and Colette


from Survey Monkey.


Awesome collaborators, great project.


Experts in a field, that's who makes the best thought leaders, 60%.


Strong agreement that you've got to be an expert in the field to be a thought leader


and that the best thought leadership content is actually strong overlap with content marketing.


The educational how-to content, identification of trends, also research reports, these were


the biggest correlations with thought leadership content.


71%, in fact, 71% of our respondents said that purely educational content can be thought


leadership.


Again, I'm kind of disagreeing.


I'm going to hold this to a higher standard.


You'll see in a minute, but let's go deeper on this.


Publishing original research, I've got some specific things.


This is one of three or four, maybe five strategies I have for you.


This one is all about publishing something new, original, unique to you.


Steve Rason found this.


I mentioned this last year at Miles Scott.


Steve Rason found this, true to be of one million articles.


Those that outperformed the others in terms of links and shares had two things in common.


Well, first, he publishes the scariest hockey stick curve in all of digital where he shows


that most content gets nothing like zero, like goose eggs.


75% of articles get no external links.


Nobody ever links to them.


50% have two or fewer Facebook interactions.


Kind of a problem.


But what does work, what does outperform?


High level of both shares and links, call it social and search.


It's opinion forming authoritative content and well researched and evidence content that's


going to align exactly with our thesis here, which is strong opinion and original research.


We're going to do original research first.


Image marketing found the same to be true.


High growth firms are three times as likely as their peers to publish original research


as part of their content strategy.


Just go look at search console for any account you have access to or go look at Moz and check


the backlink profile for anybody that's published original research.


Go put in the big boys and go put in major publications and you'll see this as always


true, right?


Because the link is a citation.


You are like the bibliography for the internet.


Original research attracts links better than any other content that you could ever possibly


publish.


We proved this over and over.


We do this all the time.


The key is just to answer a question like this one.


What is the lifespan of a website?


I don't know.


How long does the average website last?


Anyone know?


No one knows.


I basically got a virtual assistant to go back and look at the top 50 websites and look


in the wayback machine and see the interval at which they were redesigned and publish


this lovely piece of content that reported for the first time.


This URL is the primary source for this information about website lifespan.


The average website lifespan of the top marketing websites is two years and seven months.


There you go.


This site is the source of that information.


It is valuable, important content, I hope to say, because I have evidence.


One of them is Wikipedia links to this article.


Now, I know that that is not an equity passing link.


I understand SEO.


I know what nofollow means.


It's just pointing you in the right direction.


You're doing something good.


When you get an outcome like that, something gets happening in your marketing.


Again, go check it in Search Console or in Moz or whatever tool you use.


Lots of links.


That URL has attracted more than 100 links over time.


Great.


Another example.


What website features are standard?


I don't know.


Anyone know?


No one knows.


Couldn't find it, so decided to do the research.


Again, gave a virtual assistant a list of the top 50 websites.


I think some list we downloaded from Alexa.


You get lists on things.


Then gave a list, basically a blank spreadsheet of your features, your websites.


Go look at them all.


The final piece, web design standards, the top 10 best practices in the top 50 websites.


This chart was the first time that this information appeared on the internet, which features are


standard.


It ranks like a champ.


In fact, outranks the World Webdive Consortium, which isn't surprising because they're not


really great at search over there.


They don't have to be.


They control the internet.


That has led to a lot of visibility as well as links.


You can see them.


This is examples of how you can drive thought leadership.


160,000 page views since that page has gone live and literally hundreds, more than 100


websites.


More than 200 websites have linked to that URL.


It's working.


Very recently, since last year, some of this I may have presented at other conferences


or you may have seen, but this one's new.


What's a good bounce rate?


What's the average bounce rate?


What's a good bounce rate for a website?


Not really strong supported data on this topic, but as a web development firm here at Orbit,


we have access to literally 500 plus Google Analytics accounts.


We went and had, again, a VA goes through 500 Google Analytics accounts and copies and


pastes all this data out into a giant spreadsheet.


Probably there's like a Google Sheets add-on or some kind of Data Studio thing I could


have done with a developer.


We did it manually.


It takes a long time to do this.


Here's the thing.


I've got the industry, B2B, B2C, or hybrid bounce rates for different traffic sources.


Kaboom.


The average bounce rate for websites is 61%.


Now you know.


This page is one of the most credible sources of that information.


I also broke it down to different industries.


The average bounce rate per industry.


The average bounce rate for e-commerce, 62%.


Bottom line, here's the tactic, take it this way.


What do people in your industry frequently say but rarely support with evidence?


That's called the missing stat.


Go find and publish the missing stat and you will win the internet for the day in your


industry.


Most brands don't do it.


Only 47%, according to Michelle at Mantis Research found that only 47% of brands consistently


publish original research.


You can do it.


You can do it how?


You just have to work a little harder.


It's 10 times the effort.


Each of those things was like, if the average post takes us 10 hours to create total all-in


content project, these are sometimes like 10 times that.


Yes, I'll spend 100 hours on a piece of content, but look at the effort.


Most content gets nothing.


These are getting hundreds of links to them, literally 100x the results.


Totally worth it.


Next tactic, we're going to write a book.


Well, 32% of respondents said that authors make the best thought leaders.


The key here is to just understand and track your lifetime body of work.


Your elbow, track your elbow, your lifetime body of work.


I've got a spreadsheet where I capture all my partial thoughts and bad ideas and half


written articles and I've got a tab for everything I've ever written.


It's this giant spreadsheet here, 440 articles or something to this date.


I can output that to a little chart that shows.


You can see my guess, my era of guest posting.


You can see my recent trend of jumping more into video.


Track your lifetime body of work over time, making that visible as a powerful motivator.


By the way, book pages are link magnets.


They're the easiest thing to build links to.


Books just drive attention.


They drive opportunity.


They drive thought leadership, awareness, influence, very, very powerful.


If you just make a list of everything you know, it's an awesome intellectual challenge.


Literally, make a list of all the things and try to outline your brain on a topic.


Do it with a bottle of wine.


It's a blast.


Then look to see what you've written about and haven't written about and go blog into


that outline to fill in those blanks.


When you get to critical mass, slow down, stop, pull back.


You've got 70% of it done.


Go write the book.


It's mostly done.


You blogged into it over a span of a couple of years.


This was my Andypedia.


It was a crappy picture.


It was like Post-it notes on a wall.


It took me forever to organize this.


This was in my wall for six months.


It turned into an outline of all the stuff that I know, which turned into the table of


contents, which turned into the book.


Now in its fifth edition, it's used by companies, this training tool, universities, as a textbook.


This is marketing that makes money.


Marketing is an expense.


What's your budget?


No, no.


This actually pays for itself.


It's weird how the laws of physics sort of reverse themselves in content eventually,


and people start paying you for your content.


Book pages are magnets.


They're definitely magnets.


Here are 260 websites, according to Search Console, have linked to that book page.


Not bad.


Next, thought leaders take a stand.


You've got to take a stand and stick your neck out.


I'm talking about strong opinion.


You come out for something, which means you come out against something.


You're not afraid of controversy.


You're an inspiring writer or speaker.


This was not as strong a correlation like interviews, opinion and commentary, inspirational


content.


Not as common of answers with our panel in our survey as the purely educational content,


but still 53% that having strong opinions was essential in thought leadership.


Seeing unpopular or controversial things was more of a nice to have.


True story, I got to ask a few questions of Seth Godin at the end of a conference.


We were all sort of in this room.


I'm sitting on a couch, front row, raise my hand.


I asked about thought leadership.


He had a huge grin even before I finished the question.


He loves the topic, apparently.


He said, thought leadership always creates tension.


It's about making assertions.


You've got to be willing to be wrong.


You can be certain some people would disagree.


Clearly Seth does not think that purely educational content or that Edelman definition is sufficient.


Take a stand.


He believes that the point of your content is to give people something to talk about.


My next strategy for you is to publish strong opinions.


53% said that that's essential.


Example, Basecamp, popular project management tool.


Search for the brand navigational query, an ad at the top from another brand.


Jason Fried gets angry and makes an ad that says, I didn't want to run this ad.


Then he tweets the ad that says, I didn't want to run this ad.


Then 13,000 people start talking about it.


Why?


He said something that people tend not to say.


He stuck his neck out and said, this is stupid.


This is wrong.


I'm being held hostage.


It's a shakedown.


Google is making me buy an ad for my own brand.


Boom, press.


Google's paid search ads are a shakedown, says the Basecamp CEO.


Tens of thousands of URLs are talking about the Basecamp shakedown.


Put it into Moz.


Look at that.


That's what a PR spike looks like.


You can go build links one at a time, or you could do something interesting and controversial.


You could take a stand.


You could be a brand with an opinion.


Hard, I know.


Try it.


Consider it.


Mark Schafer has been doing this for years.


He's a legit thought leader that I've looked up to for years.


When he published this thing, we all had to talk about it.


Content shock?


Basically said content marketing is an unsustainable tactic.


More than 1,000 websites have linked to that.


He's not even thinking about SEO.


He's just doing interesting things, like showing you the inside of his brain, really having


thoughts important for thought leadership.


1,200 websites link to it.


Five years later, I just recently put this into BuzzSumo.


Shared 2,000 times a year five years later.


Wow, that's pretty good.


I'm talking to clients about link building, people asking me, how do you grow authority?


Two clients in the same categories, senior communities, senior living.


One of them, I say, yeah, publish original research, do influencer marketing, build relationships,


outreach to press.


I told the same to the other one.


The one gradually tried to build a few links.


My second client ignored my advice and instead took 30 octogenarians to Burning Man.


Boom.


Her message is that we are alive in our 80s and get out there.


Literally giant desert art party and she brings a bunch of 80-year-olds and the press goes


wild.


Ask yourself this, what do you believe that most people would disagree with?


Or what do you think will happen in the future that most people think is unlikely?


Even better, what questions are people in your industry afraid to answer?


Are they coming to mind?


Do you feel that tension already?


That's thought leadership.


Mark Schafer has been trying to get us to do this for years.


2013 social media strategy, grow a pair, people.


I love that guy.


You can kind of fake it by just having stronger language and less watered down writing.


Fix your funnel, 15 things to remove from your website immediately.


You got social media icons in your head or you're an idiot.


You got to take, it's a giant exit signs on your site.


They're candy colored exit buttons.


Why would you put that on your site?


You want people to stay?


Traffic's hard to win, easy to lose.


Where there's traffic, there's hope.


Do you really want someone to go from your homepage to Pinterest?


That's a terrible idea.


This article has 136 comments.


Wow.


Including this Acacia who says that my sanctimonious tone was surprising.


I was ready for it.


But look at Curtis right above there.


He says, I instilled hope into his young ambitious designer's heart.


You can be sure that people will disagree.


That actually wasn't really strong opinion.


It was just saying, giving normal advice more directly.


Shared thousands of times.


The key there was just to not water down your content.


Look at this.


Best practices to consider.


Changes that might improve your website.


Boring.


How about this?


Fix your funnel, 15 things to remove from your site immediately.


Just don't soften it.


Don't qualify every sentence.


Be direct, go straight at it.


Good writing.


This is Anne Handley stuff, right?


I'm going to hold it.


Be bold.


Okay.


Third final tactic.


Thought leadership.


These people have personal brands, a social following or some media presence.


They get cited by others and they're influential.


They're influencers in the true sense of the word.


Question.


You thought leaderships need a large social following?


No.


We had 480 respondents.


77% said no.


You do not need a social media following, but does a thought leader need to have active


followers of some sort who share and discuss their ideas?


Yes.


Basically, you have to have a platform.


It doesn't have to be Twitter, but you have to have a platform.


This is fascinating.


Can a brand be a thought leader?


I could come out with some strong opinions here.


I'm not sure that, wow, 70% said yes, a brand can be a thought leader?


Discuss amongst yourselves.


What about this?


Is the quality of thought leadership impacted if it's ghost written?


Half the respondents said no.


Thought leadership can be ghost written.


Obviously, it can be ghost written.


There's people, maybe some attendees who literally write thought leadership content on behalf


of their clients.


Not weird.


People all over.


Friends of all of ours do that every day.


What happens in this be visible thing partly relates to personal SEO.


Just search for Mark.


What do you see?


That is visibility.


That is SEO.


Look, he's got the big knowledge panel.


He's got books.


He's got this Twitter stream.


Can you do this?


Yes.


Videos.


What I would suggest to Mark is that he claims his knowledge panel.


There's a little extra step there that you can take.


There's not that much you can do once you do claim your own knowledge panel, but do


it anyway.


Mark Schafer, actually, you can see hundreds of people per month.


He shows up when you do keyword research on the personal proper noun.


That bio page is a link magnet.


Here's my bio page on my site.


447 websites have linked to my bio page.


That is another example of the direct, not dotted line, straight line between thought


leadership, personal brand, taking a stand, or being an expert, and search and authority.


My next tactic for you is to contribute to other people's websites.


32% said quotes in the media make effective thought leadership.


This is MozCon.


This is not a classic PR tactic, but I'm going to make it more strategic because I don't


have tons of opportunities to contribute to people's sites.


I need to get the most out of each one.


If you go to Moz and just look at the volume for all the phrases that you're tracking,


you'll see some are like 10x or 100x the others.


If you also consider to see what your ranking is fluctuating, going up or down, you'll quickly


find the best opportunities.


In other words, the pages that need a little love, the pages that would get the best benefit


from a link, the pages you should be referencing when you contribute to other people's websites.


Another way to do this is to go to the Search Console landing pages, choose a date range


before and after so you can see the pre-post, and just scroll down and you'll see the changes


in impressions or clicks for all of these URLs across that interval.


Which ones are going up?


Which ones are going down?


Look, this one's going down.


There are a lot of reasons.


I know there's lots of SERP features and so on.


Click-through rates are declining.


Still, this is giving you clues.


Data Studio is an even better way to do it.


Build a tiny report in Data Studio so it's all on subsequent rows and you can see the


delta there on the right, like the percent change in traffic from search per URL on your


site.


Those are the opportunities.


What do you do with them?


First thing you do is you put them on a list.


You've got to track those.


I've got another tab in that same spreadsheet I showed earlier called Focus.


These are the pages, these are the phrases that would get the best benefit from a little


love.


These are the ones that need a little love.


Now as you are networking, as you are discussing things, as you're publishing, as you're commenting,


as you're involved and taking a stand doing the things you do all day, hopefully including


others in your content and hopefully that karmically is coming back to you and you get


a request for a quote.


Hey, would you like to contribute to my post?


Absolutely.


Feel free to go check out, by the way, the value of that potential link.


It takes two seconds.


We do this 10 times a day.


We do this all the time.


The domain authority would indicate the relevance, the value of the equity of a link should there


be one.


Then go look at the pages that need the love the most.


Wait, that one could use a little love.


Then in your contribution, look for opportunities to reference anything from that list.


Sure, how about a contribution about blogging best practices?


Sounds great, buddy.


Then you submit a contribution that includes and mentions that link to that article.


Wait for the post to go live.


Actually, it takes a couple of weeks.


Article goes live.


Now go look at that and make them confirm that that contribution in fact included that


link.


Easy, easy if you have images because then you can include an image from that article


and then the image source link is something that they're very likely to leave in.


I think it's really hard to optimize a piece of content or build links to anything if it


doesn't have some original diagrams, graphics in it.


That research piece helps, original research.


Then go track that you just want to mention.


You want to link to that thing.


It's on the promotables list.


Then there's a social media marketer who just goes in and follows these instructions.


I made a piece of training content to know exactly how to share that and promote that


through our channels.


Great tip for content marketers.


Make a training tool that shows other people how to do your job.


It's going to move the fulcrum over and make you more effective for the rest of your life.


This appears in my social stream.


Check the box.


You won.


Now go do that 100 times a year.


Do it as often as you can.


Keep tracking.


Keep going back and looking to see which one needs the most love and keep that conversation


going on that topic.


Very powerful.


I do this all the time.


Recapping that, leveraging a personal brand for mentions and links.


Find articles that need love.


Track them on a list.


When you get an opportunity, provide a quote that references the articles from that list.


Once that goes live, check for the link.


Thank the author and promote that on social media.


Mentioning them, people feel deep gratitude for that often.


Next tactic, we are going to give presentations because it does strongly correlate with thought


leadership.


28% of respondents said that public speakers do in fact make good thought leaders.


This is one where then you can use, I've got some rush to this one.


Miles does the same thing.


I just happened to have this tool set up over here.


In your name or their name, whoever in your brand is being put forward in this way.


Track the company name of course.


Then look at those mentions, monitor those, go check those pages.


I'm going to do social bio link reclamation because if that person just links to my social


media account, bummer.


That doesn't really help me that much.


I'm not trying to build links to Twitter.


I don't need another link to Twitter.


You'd rather have that link go to your site.


You've got to reach out to them.


First they show gratitude.


They can create a quick request and ask them if they wouldn't mind changing that link to


go to what page?


The speaker's bio.


Create a speaker's bio.


Then they write back and say it's been updated.


You've got to link.


They'll confirm the link.


These speaker bios are also link magnets.


The speaker's bio can be optimized to rank for a commercial intent key phrase such as


topic speaker.


My speaker's bio ranks for content marketing speaker.


There's the rank.


This actually generates traffic for that, 100 plus visitors over this date range, and


generates leads for that.


The page is both a link magnet that will improve your domain authority, helping every URL on


your website rank higher forever after.


That page can rank for the commercial intent key phrase.


That drives the opportunity to give presentations, which creates much more brand visibility.


You can see this flywheel is working.


This virtual cycle is working.


This was fun.


We're going to wrap up here.


I'm going to give you now a new data-driven definition about thought leadership.


What is thought leadership, and can anyone do it?


I'm going to combine all the answers from all the survey questions and tell you basically


this is what thought leadership really means to the respondents.


It is educational content produced by an expert or a business that drives marketing outcomes.


It challenges the thinking of the target audience, and it identifies new trends and is supported


by research.


The benefits of this, traffic, leads, mentions, subscribers, these are all responses from


our survey, right?


Invitations to speak, backlinks were surprisingly low.


Those people who responded to our survey really need to watch this session.


That actually aligns almost exactly with the blogger survey, which we do every year.


We get 1,000 bloggers to answer 15 questions about the success.


Is thought leadership successful?


65% said yes, those that are doing it.


In our blogging survey, is your content marketing successful?


51% said that it's delivering some results.


30% said strong results.


It's working.


This works.


Then we learned that 66% of the respondents said that thought leadership is a marketing


priority for their company.


I love that.


I love this one even better.


47% of the 480 respondents said that they personally strive to be a thought leader.


Hope, love, beauty.


People really want to help others.


That is a great number that people do strive themselves to be leaders in their life, in


other people's lives.


I'm so encouraged by that.


Here is the final assessment, right?


The essential qualities for thought leadership, communication, the challenge thinking, they


publish data, they do something new, they do have strong opinions.


So you must, I'm combining it again, communicate clearly, challenging new ideas, back them


up with data and have a strong point of view.


These are the essential qualities of thought leadership.


The nice to have qualities were cited by others.


You're likable, you publish consistently, you say things that are unpopular.


So also we'll add to that, it doesn't hurt if you're a likable person who publishes consistently


and doesn't shy away from controversy.


I get this question sometimes people ask, how can I get more speaking opportunities?


I'm going to give you a couple of tips for growing your own thought leadership, whether


your goal is speaking or whatever it might be, backlinks, rankings, drive, demand, traffic,


shares, likes, comments, demand, whatever the goal.


When people ask me how they can get more visibility and then they go look at their social media


bios and it looks like this, like it's scary.


My first thought is you need to go polish your social profiles.


Let's start with the social profile picture, okay?


You got to frame that nicely, not like too close in their face or like way back here,


picture of the guy, silhouette on the mountain.


What is that?


No, we're trying to be a visible person here.


I don't want to see a tiny head in the bottom corner of your social profile.


Also the background is what's used for the setting in context, right?


Not your picture.


The silhouette is not what you need to be if you want to grow your personal brand.


And also take a quick look at your endorsements.


Microsoft Office should not be your number one skill.


So expanding on that, I'm going to give you 15 ways to be a more visible expert in a lightning


round.


Number one, polish, please polish your LinkedIn profile to perfection.


Number two, Google yourself.


How's it looking?


It's called personal SEO.


Do you like what you see?


Does it need to be helped, right?


Ask me later, I'll share tips for personal SEO.


Three, publish deeper, more comprehensive articles.


That's really the only reason anyone knows me is because I just go farther into each


topic, right?


Works like a charm.


You'd be in the top 1%, just do what 99% of people won't do and make that thing meatier


than the other writers.


Number four, conduct a study.


Number five, share more.


Just share more publicly, online, offline.


Six, similar, leverage social media video.


This is the golden age for social media video, especially on LinkedIn.


It's doing amazing things.


I've got lots of data for this.


Very, very powerful.


Makes you uncomfortable.


That's how you know you're on the right track.


Seven, network with other and collaborate with other experts.


Not hard, very powerful.


It grows your network, right?


Checks every box.


Offer to speak at classes, speak everywhere, accept every opportunity to stand in front


of a room and teach.


Start a mastermind group.


Cost zero.


Networking benefits, huge.


Learning opportunities, fantastic, right?


Just monthly virtual call with four people that you know and love and want to learn from.


Do you want to be part of this?


Let's do it.


Go to events.


Coronavirus era will end.


When you attend a live event, I almost always do this, organize a breakfast for the morning


up.


Nobody's got plans and you can actually get a bunch of people together.


Take a selfie afterwards.


You can build long-term relationships or better yet, just go start a meetup.


You can consistently start a meetup, write for many sites.


Write every day.


Always write.


Get up early before other people do and write something and then track that lifetime body


of work.


My 15th and final and most important ultimate takeaway, my best advice that I know how to


give and the most rewarding thing I've ever learned is that if you just learn something


useful and teach it to everyone who will listen, content marketing is a test of generosity.


The brand or individual or thought leader who gives the most away wins.


This was a pleasure.


Thanks, mods.con.


Stick around.


We've got a little bit of a Q&A and there are more sessions to come.


It's been an honor.


Again, this is Andy from Orbit Media.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

Hi there, I'm Kristi from the Content Marketing team.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

In this daily SEO Fix video, we'll walk through how to use custom reports in MozPro


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

to communicate traffic data.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

A common goal in SEO is to increase organic traffic to a website or page.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

If that's one of your goals, you need to know how to effectively report to your key


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

stakeholders on traffic driving initiatives.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

With MozPro's custom report setup wizard, you can create compelling and concise reports


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

that will automatically include Google Analytics traffic data.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

But first, be sure you have Google Analytics connected to your MozPro campaign.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

If you didn't connect Google Analytics during campaign creation, no worries, totally


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

okay.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

You can connect Google Analytics at any time through your campaign settings.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

Just keep in mind that you won't see data in your traffic from search section until


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

your next weekly campaign update.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

Now, let's set up that report.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

From the custom reports section of my MozPro campaign, let's click start from scratch


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

and then click on create report.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

After entering the name and description of my report, we can start adding modules.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

Since we want to report on traffic data, let's head to the traffic from search section in


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

the left-hand navigation and in the two modules in the visits view as well as the two modules


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

in the landing pages view.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

By adding both sets of modules, we can effectively illustrate overall organic traffic to our


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

site and show the top pages receiving organic traffic and show how they're performing.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

All of this information is pulled directly from Google Analytics.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

If we want to take this a step further, we can also add in the landing pages modules


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

from the ranking section.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

This section of my campaign will show the keywords that Moz thinks are driving traffic


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

to my landing pages.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

This can be super helpful if you're wanting to illustrate traffic and ranking side by


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

side for specific keyword combinations.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

Now all that's left is to design our report and schedule it.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

And the next thing you know, traffic data will be delivered to you on the regular.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting

Thank you for joining me for this edition of the daily SEO Fix, friends.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Traffic Reporting


#WhiteboardFriday: A (Re)Intro to Guest Posting (on Sales-Supported Publishers)

Hello folks, my name is Garrett French and I'm a link builder.


I run Citation Labs.


We have 120 employees and we build lots of links.


Today I'm here to reintroduce to you the tactic of guest posting.


Very specifically though, guest posting with a target of publishers, this largest portion


here of the publisher pyramid, who are supported by sales, whose main reason of publishing


is to sell things.


So let's dig in.


We are talking about earned placements.


Publishers have to approve this content.


There's an editorial gatekeeper again.


Yes.


No.


Do we want to publish?


Do we not?


Is it up to our standards?


We're talking about real websites with real audiences.


We're talking about flexible formats.


So you can think beyond an article.


You can think and do an FAQ for example, or you know, a glossary or something along those


lines.


And again, very much we want to emphasize the publishers that we're talking about here


get their revenue from sales.


They're publishing so that they can get new clients or sell products or services.


We're not talking about PBNs.


We're not talking about sponsored placements.


We're not talking about any circumstance where you have to pay money in order to get in front


of somebody's audience.


Lastly, I want to point out, we're not necessarily talking about op-ed circumstances here.


This isn't a branded expertise play.


This isn't, you know, your chance to show how much you know.


Now you're going to be able to show your expertise, but you're going to be second fiddle.


You got to put the publisher themselves and their interest in sales at first.


That's what you're doing here.


That's why you're approaching this group.


And again, it's why they publish.


That's the publisher benefit that you're going to be emphasizing when you approach this group.


Now why guest posts?


Well, guys, there's an enormous amount of visibility and reach here.


Okay.


Look at the, look at the pyramid.


Now any, this is, this is representative of most industries generally.


Where we've got 95% of the publishers are publishing to get sales.


4% are publishing their mission based and supported by taxes, tuition, donations, subscriptions,


et cetera.


And then we've got the 1% ad supported.


There are so many publishers out there trying to sell in your vertical and your client's


verticals and your target verticals if you're in house.


And there's a lot of disaggregated reach there.


There's a lot of newsletters out there, a lot of social media followings out there,


folks that you could be working to get in front of.


You have a lot more topic and context control when you're publishing on these, these types


of websites when you're seeking publishing on these sites.


Again, if you're looking at the tax tuition donation and subscription support, it's swath


here, the 4%.


You can sometimes have topics where you can discuss sales or mention a sales page, but


more frequently you've got to really focus on the publisher's mission.


Why are they publishing?


They're, they're, they're on a mission and so they're supported by something besides


sales.


And then lastly, of course, if we're talking about digital PR or any kind of mainstream


media focus or PR effort, they want content that's going to drive page views.


So they're supported.


So there's still some mission of course in there, but anyhow, you're much less able at


that point to link into your sales pages.


So again, what we're talking about here, one of the benefits here rather links to sales


pages, which of course is going to improve the rankings of your sales pages.