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How to Create, Curate, &
Promote Great Content
U N C O N F E R E N C E
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And some stuff about pandas and quality raters
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What Do I Know About Content?
Involved with search industry since 1997
Previously managed several thousand domains
with several million indexed pages
Most importantly, I know within a vacuum great
content by itself means nothing
Have played both sides of the coin, creating
software for autogen content as well as hiring
in-house staff for premium portals
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Joe Sinkwitz
CRO, CopyPress
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What is GREAT Content?
It must serve a specific purpose
Content can come in all shapes, sizes,
colors, and formats
Beautiful by my definition is something that
is useful to the desired end user
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Product Page Copy
Blog Posts
Infographics
Video
Interactive
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Product Page Copy
Great content needs
to be unique
Most big retailers use the same
manufacturer feeds – only one of
them will win online; Amazon
MACY’S PRODUCT COPY >>
EXAMPLE
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Blog Posts
Great written copy can cover
KW holes in most content
marketing strategies
Long-format, well-researched content
engages users, attracting links better
than {automated|overseas|intern-
level} content
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INFOLIFIC >>
EXAMPLE
Useless, thin content
is panda fodder
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Infographics
Best use is in taking a complex
subject and simplifying through
imagery
It HAS to be unique; there’s a lot of
crap floating around where the same
theme and concept is overplayed
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ORSYP >>
EXAMPLE
A great infographic is
digestible, educational,
and entertaining
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Video
Multi-purpose medium where
you can actually tell a story to
a captive audience
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BESTLIFEQUOTE.COM >>
EXAMPLE
Sales pitch? Education?
Pure entertainment?
You can get all three
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Interactive
The current King of
user engagement
Interactive is also just so awesome
right now with HTML5
Very difficult for someone to scrape
and replicate; publications need to
link to the resource vs copy/paste
without attribution
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NBA DRAFT BOARD >>
EXAMPLE
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Tripadvisor.com
It isn’t just a hotel. For our
Hawaii trip we used the
curation of experiences
and entire trips to plan
which hotel, restaurants,
and activities to undertake
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Curating Great Content
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Pinterest
Curating Great Content
E X A M P L E
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If your content is at all
image based, run like hell to
get started – your coupon
friends in the audience can
tell you how much money is
to be made here
Every topic is doable!
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Vine.co
Curating Great Content
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Only a few seconds
per video, but powerful
follower base
Humor wins here, but
fantastic for branding
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HE-MAN IS GETTING GREAT
BRANDING FROM THIS
HANDSOME FELLOW >>
EXAMPLE
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Hey Strategists
When deciding to make great content will it be
to live on your site or specifically to get ‘curated’
by a specific community?
The best pieces attempt to work on multiple
levels, satisfying both user needs onsite and
piquing interest from curators
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Panda Time
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Quick evolution of Panda
from the eyes of a
practioner; how I got out
of the first wave (and into
penguin) and how I’ve gotten
out of subsequent waves
Things to do to mitigate
Panda risk
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Making That Great Content
{Smarter|Better|More Useful}
In a word, visibility that results in action
There’s lots of ways to drive traffic, which
I’ll delve into
Dave loves native…and Italian meatballs
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Organic outreach & relationship building
Yes, buying openly advertised links still can work,
but the time horizon before getting slapped is
increasingly shrinking
Systematically building long-term relationships
devised to share great content, especially when the
relationship drives traffic, will stand the test of time
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Promoting Content
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PPC
Other similar toll roads
Similar to native, PPC style campaigns devised to
drive traffic can result in an increase in brand queries
+ secondary organic links, when properly managed
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Promoting Content
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Display Networks
Similar to native, display ads targeted to
user-specific demographics can yield brand
exposure + sales
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Promoting Content
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Social promotion
Facebook Ads, Sponsored Tweets, Stumbles
Low-intent, high volume traffic that has its place
if CPM focused
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Promoting Content
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Traditional PR
PR is going to merge with SEO as organic outreach
shifts back from being technically oriented to biz
dev oriented
Getting placement in Time or Washington Post
is hard to undervalue
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Promoting Content
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Offline
TV
Dead Trees
Radio
These mediums are still gigantic and though
typically requiring larger spends, some content
is ideal to be placed here
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Promoting Content
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Email and email listbuilding
Overlooked far too often by big publishers that
don’t know how to interact with their audience
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Promoting Content
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Think product placement
embedded on TV shows
I view it as fancy terminology for
advertising that matches content
to the context in which a user is
using a site
The goal is less ad blindness
and more interaction. The
ad is designed to be useful/
entertainment, hence
higher CTR!
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Native: Promoting Content
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How Does the Combo Work?
Great content needs eyeballs to matter+
By sourcing the right mix of native traffic, advertisers can get:+
Higher incidence of branded
search queries, boosting
authority signal
More qualified traffic than
the stumbleupons and
reddits of the world
Search benefit of
secondary organic links
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Let’s see an example already!
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The impact of great content + native:+
92 links, ALL organic, as of April 29th
33,000+ unique pageviews and going
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Another Example!
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{ Result } Page 1 for the topic
question discussed
Hub-concept client that used
static IG and connections to
gain in the organics
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MOAR Examples!
{ Result } Page 1 for many
retail interview queries
Client needed topically
relevant post + social
sharing to spread story
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There’s a Difference
Guys like Kaspar Szymanski & Fili Wiese != manual raters
[both former spam team members] – the “real” employees
will take time to look at URLs in depth if prompted
Actual quality raters are generally part-time employees
from an outsourced company at best, or overseas ESL
just trying to cram through to meet numbers at worst
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« Why is that at worst?
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Quality Rater Stats
The average time spent by actual manual raters on a
page that is flagged in the spam queue is ~20 seconds
Over the evolution of the guidelines, raters were even
instructed to mark helpful hotel affiliates as spam
When I employed a person that was simultaneously a
quality rater, I watched the process...Does it look like
a thin affiliate site? Is it obvious spam? Is it obviously
keyword stuffed? Are there obvious cloaks in play?
Porn? Broken images?
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What happened to the
helpful hotel affiliate?
Scrape, vilify, replace –
I call Knowledge Graph
the Great Scrape
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Next Came Doorways
Doorway penalties are particularly annoying for
affiliate and small business sites because think back to
the ~20 second evaluation. If you had a real, legitimate
business and the rater felt the design was weak on a
gut reaction, the expansion of the definition of what a
doorway way now encompassed you
I had plenty of these nasties
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And Today We EAT
EXPERTISE
Topical expert evaluation
AUTHORITATIVENESS
The idiots actually look
at BBB if you want to
manipulate it
TRUSTWORTHINESS
YMYL
Yes, we did eat...and will eat again, but what I mean is
E-A-T per the most recently leaked quality guidelines
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E A T
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You Have 20 Seconds
Is the design fresh and professional?
Trigger their emotional appeal towards it
being authoritative by default
Are you slathering ads everywhere or are
you focused? There is a fine line between
revenue-per-user and MFA/doorway/appy-
with-manual-penalty
Is the written content well structured,
grammatically correct, and spell-checked?
Simple to do to get past a spot-checker
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How can you take advantage
of this knowledge?
If you only have in-house design/development talent you
can commission someone to help with native and other
forms of promotion
If you only have native and promotion skills you can commission
someone to help you with design/development talent
If you have neither, you can work with an outreach
company and a design shop
Or, you know…CopyPress for any and all of the above
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