Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Is organic content relevant anymore?

This is a question I get asked a lot and it usually comes accompanied by an Alexa ranking remark: My Alexa ranking says I’m at 1,890,898 and last week I was at 2,589,723 but nothing is happening…Correct!

Link Building, the part of SEO that gets valuable inbound links to your website, is very time intensive. Most of the top websites have complete dominance over certain keywords because they’ve been linked to hundreds of thousands of times with those keywords. You would have to replicate that same output to try to rank in the top 3 results in Google, there are many ways to do this but it’s incredibly time intensive and the results are not immediate.

SEO is quite relevant still but the game has changed and:

As most things, SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s important to understand that following each and every single point here will only get you so far as other factors come into play such as competition for your keywords and the amount of competition your up against.

With the rise of social media it’s not surprising to see most websites get the most of their traffic from social networks such as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook where factors such as immediacy and freshness play a bigger role.

SEO has matured, the game has shifted to social media and the benefits are superior.

Alexa is just a measurement tool that compares you with the rest of the web based on it’s criteria, but it’s not something you should use to measure success. It’s really easy to lead most people to think that Alexa is what you should monitors as opposed to looking at your search results, twitter mentions, blog comments, etc…I’m not saying Alexa is wrong it’s just not that relevant anymore as a yardstick.

Unless you have a big search advertising budget to pay for keywords, what really matters is the social media engagement metrics I mentioned above.

Again:

Your best bet is to optimize your website with these factors in mind but focus most of your marketing efforts in creating relationships, bonding with your audience and giving the best possible brand experience, social media makes this possible in ways SEO can’t.

One last thing, the basic formula to follow for SEO is: Publishing more = organic traffic from search results.

But:

It’s not what and how much you publish, it’s what people do with it that counts.

Are you link building or relationship building?

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Pictures are worth a 1000 words so I don’t think I have to explain what this provokes. To promote the launch of Gap’s new loyalty program, Sprize, the GAP store on Robson Street in Vancouver, Canada was flipped upside down!

Found via ReflectionOf.ME

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I’ve always been impressed by the Jordan Brand and how it puts excellence into everything it does and releases. It’s to be expected as that’s what it’s legendary namesake stood for excellence on the basketball court.

Michael Jordan was known as a nightmare opponent, and this characteristic is reflected in it’s ‘Nightmares never sleep’ program for the release of the Air Jordan 2010. The captivating commercial features the Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade unleashing his inner monster and terrorizing the court on his way to a dunk.

The shoes are top notch as expected and even the YouTube Channel page has a pleasant introduction that you’ll remember. And for those who just like MJ like to be challenged, there’s the interactive website which features 4 different games that will certainly test your hand eye coordination skills. My test results are below:

The results are also posted to your Facebook news feed if you want to tell your friends what you’re up or just outright challenge them!

The point: The Jordan Brand understands what it takes to stay relevant, it never sleeps.

Groundbreaking commercials, innovative sneakers that combine style and performance, people with respect, quality presentation and rabid fans make the Jordan Brand a powerhouse!

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Attention is scarce because trust is scarce. And why is trust scarce? Because everyone is out to maneuver people into attention by throwing as much content as possible at them without putting some thought into what their problems might be. Think about it, do you trust your friends to give you thoughtful advice? You probably do and that’s the key. As a brand, ‘friending’ your customers doesn’t mean you got the keys to the castle, it just means you have an opportunity to become a real friend. How you go about doing this is not that tricky…

So how do we go beyond attracting attention to building trust?

By changing from a consumption mindset to a take action mindset. We want people to consume our content (attention) but do we really care if they take action on it (share/implement it)?  To build trust we have to care what they do with our ideas, I think that’s the key. This takes time but then again Rome wasn’t built in a day and real relationships take months to build.

With some much content getting pushed out there we have to be mindful of people’s time, so the question is: are we doing enough to help them solve their problems?

Ask yourself: Would I trust myself?

What say you, are you out there to grab attention or build trust? Which comes first?

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We know people prefer to use email to share content they find interesting with their friends but more interesting is knowing what they share and why. There are some answers now: according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who spent more than six months studying The New York Times’ list of most-emailed stories, people are more likely to pass along stories that are positive, long and intellectually stimulating.

Researchers found that popular stories often inspired a sense of awe by tackling a broad topic and requiring the reader to approach the subject from a fresh angle. Researchers say these articles are popular because they create emotional connections between the person sending the article and its recipient. “Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” the researchers said.

A picture is worth a thousand words and if I could present these findings in visual way I think the picture below speaks for itself, doesn’t it make you go AWE?

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