SearchCap: Bing Halloween, Amazon Echo, AdWords Cross-Device & RankBrain

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. The post SearchCap: Bing Halloween, Amazon Echo, AdWords Cross-Device & RankBrain appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

My Favorite Tool For Content Ideas

Great content is a must for any successful content strategy. Effective content helps your buyers, drives awareness for your brand as well as your service or product, and helps to convert your readers into leads and ultimately increase sales.

One of the best ways to measure content effectiveness is by looking at the number of social shares your content receives. Social shares are not the end goal, but they are an effective means to achieve reach to the widest audience of interested potential buyers who have a chance to convert.

How do know which content will attract social shares?

You can start by doing content profiling. This process helps you gather as much research and data as you can to inform your brainstorming and content ideation process, which will lead to better content ideas.

Content profiling also helps you learn about what works well in your industry, what your competitors are doing, and which social channels you will want to target. To get these insights, I love to use the BuzzSumo tool to conduct keyword and domain-based searches.

Keyword-based Search

When conducting a keyword search with BuzzSumo, you want to use content-driven keywords associated with your industry or product/service that are non-commercial in nature. This is because you want to get results on the top performing content created using those keywords, rather than product or service pages as you would get with commercial keywords.

To narrow your results, you can use quotation marks around the keywords you’ve typed in, and you can also filter the results by date so you are pulling up the newest content (i.e. last year).

You will see that the results are organized by total number of shares, then broken down by each social media channel. Do a deep dive into content pieces that have done well on all social channels. Continue running searches like this over time will help you identify content themes and ideas that perform best, which you can use to brainstorm your own content topics.

As you conduct your keyword search, you may have noticed certain domains that kept appearing in your search results. You want to note those websites down so you can do deeper dive research on them.

They are likely doing something right with their content efforts that’s worth looking into. As well, domains with higher social shares usually have a decent size audience reading and sharing their content, which may be sites you want to build a relationship or collaborate on a campaign with to help promote your content in the future.

As you work through your search results and deep dive research, you will also want to identify potential influencers who you can reach out to. You can do so by clicking on the “View Sharers” button  for each piece of content you want to look into, or by clicking on the “Influencers” tab. Note those influencers down and start looking for ways to engage with them, as they may be open to sharing your future content.

Domain-based Search

You can conduct searches on domains the same way you run keyword searches through BuzzSumo. This is extremely helpful when you want to do a deeper dive into sites that continue to appear in your search results, as well as looking into what your competitors are doing. Keep in mind that in some cases you might not be able to get a good set of results, particularly for smaller niches or domains that BuzzSumo may not have enough data yet to be useful.

You’ll see that the search results look similar to a keyword search, but the results are filtered and limited to only the domain you’ve searched. From here, try to look for patterns and trends in posts that appear to do well, as well as names of authors whose posts have continued to appear in the top results. Not only does this give you ideas for content you can create, these authors may have a big social following and may be people you want to engage with to help amplify your content.

You can do all of this research with the free version of BuzzSumo. The paid version will give you more insights into your target keywords and domains, such as the social networks and sites that are generating the most shares for top content, average shares by content length, types, and social networks.

With the paid version, you will want to do this kind of deep dive analysis on your competitors as well, so you can find out what content is getting the most social shares and what social networks are working well for them. Check out this article from Moz that walks you through the steps of how you can use BuzzSumo API and Google Sheets to run this type of analysis more quickly.

BuzzSumo is my favorite tool to help you generate content ideas and build out your strategy. What other tools do you use to develop or improve your content strategy? Please share your ideas in the Comments section below.

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The post My Favorite Tool For Content Ideas appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

The future of multichannel marketing in APAC

According to a recent study by Econsultancy, it seems that APAC is significantly behind North America in deploying multichannel marketing.  

In this post we'll look at some examples from the cutting edge which tell us where things are going.

Read more...

Got Boring B2B Content? How To Make It Engaging

Have boring B2B content? 7 ways to enrich your B2B content marketing to make it engaging. Has tips, examples and research to driveB2B marketing results

The post Got Boring B2B Content? How To Make It Engaging appeared first on Heidi Cohen.

Influencer Marketing And How To Amplify Your Content

Every minute 1,400 new blog posts are created. With so much content out there, how do you cut through the noise so people will see your content?

Creating good content is simply not enough anymore, you need a solid promotion strategy to help people find your content. Influencers who can help amplify your content play an important role in the success of your content marketing efforts.

So how do you go about finding influencers and what tools can you use to find them? Before we get into that, let’s first take a look at some of the common myths about influencers, so you know exactly what (and not) to look for in an influencer.

Myth #1: Influencers are anyone with lots of followers.

An influencer who amplifies content is not necessarily someone who has a huge following. The influencers you want to look for are those who respect your work and content, and are passionate about the topics your content focuses on. These influencers should also have an audience who is interested in the types of content you create, and they should be an engaged, active audience who regularly replies and retweets others’ posts.

Myth #2: Social shares solely depend on influencer sharing.

The number of social shares a piece of content receives depends more on the domain where it is published than on the influencer sharing. When it comes to amplification, influencers who have a stronger domain distribution are more powerful in driving traffic to your content than simply having them share it socially.

To prove this, Steve Rayson from BuzzSumo tested out with two of his own posts published on Social Media Today and the BuzzSumo blog. He found that his blog on Social Media Today on average had over 500 shares, whereas the post on BuzzSumo had about 155 shares. It’s not necessarily because the content on Social Media Today is better, but simply because the domain Social Media Today has a much larger, engaged audience who is actively reading and sharing content.

Steve also looked at the content produced by Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, who has over 250,000 followers on Twitter. In the past year, Rand has published his articles on several sites, and on average they received 1,639 social shares. The articles Rand published to the Moz blog, however, received an average of 2,688 shares, which is 1000 more shares than the other sites he posted to. Larry Kim, the founder of WordStream, also saw significantly higher shares for his posts on Inc.com than on the WordStream blog.

These examples show that an influencer’s publishing domain and blog authority matter more than the follower count when it comes to content amplification.

Myth #3: Social reach is everything.

Reach shouldn’t be the only number you look at, engagement is even more important when it comes to amplifying your content. As Mark Walker, Head of Content Marketing at Eventbrite, has said, “Someone with an engaged following of 1,000 will do more to amplify your content than someone with 10,000 social connections they don’t engage with.”

Influencers who have a higher retweet rate have a bigger impact on content amplification compared to those who have a huge following but a less engaged audience.

Now that you know what to look for in an influencer to help amplify your content, how do you actually go about finding them?

4 Steps To Finding Influencers

There are lots of tools to help you find influencers online, such asBuzzSumo,  ContentMarketer.io and Triberr. Whichever tool you choose to use, you need to find influencers who are passionate about the topics you write about and are willing to help amplify your content. Here are 4 ways to help you find them:

1. Find amplifiers of heavily shared content.

You can do this with BuzzSumo’s top content search or other similar tools. If you are using BuzzSumo, click on the “View Sharers” button for a top shared post. Sort sharers by Average Retweets and you will find the amplifiers who have the highest average retweet rate. Finally, click on “View Links Shared” to see if this individual regularly shares content related to your topic. If they are passionate about your topic, they would be sharing a lot of content related to it. You can also just type in a keyword and click on the “Influencers” tab.

2. Find authors whose content is heavily shared.

If an influencer is really passionate about your topic, they likely write about it too. You can also find these influencers with BuzzSumo top content search. This time, look for authors of heavily shared content. If you have a paid version of BuzzSumo, you can run a Top Authors report for a specific topic or domain, and this will give you a list of the most shared authors, the number of articles they have written and their average social shares.

3. Find influencers who have high domain authority, distribution and retweet rates.

Using BuzzSumo or other similar tools, get a list of influencers relevant for your topic, and look for those with a strong domain authority as well as high retweet rates. These are influencers who can truly help amplify your content.

4. Find influencers who amplify your content and your competitor’s content.

Use ContentMarketer.io, Triberr or other tools you’ve chosen and look for influencers who are already amplifying your content as well as your competitor’s content. These are amplifiers who you want to build or maintain a relationship with.

Now that you have your list of influencers, you should reach out and ask them to help amplify your content, right? Wrong.

Building Relationships And Winning Influencers

If you don’t have a pre-existing relationship with the influencers you’ve identified, the most important thing to do first is to build that relationship. Follow and engage with them on Twitter, share their content, and even try to connect with them in real life if you can. Invest time in helping them, whatever their objectives may be. Be as helpful as you can to these influencers, give and don’t ask.

You may also want to target second-tier influencers first. They may need your help more than the big influencers with large following. Those big influencers are approached by people very frequently, so by focusing on the second-tier influencers who are really passionate about your topic, you will likely have greater success with connecting and building a relationship with them.

You can approach your identified influencers to help with content amplification once you have developed a trusted relationship with them. One of the best ways to do this is by involving influencers in the content creation process. While your ultimate goal is getting influencers to amplify your content, the co-creation project should focus on creating value for influencers as well.

Creating Original Content Worth Sharing

While influencers can help amplify your content, the key to ensuring people will read and share it is creating valuable content that is worth sharing. This means conducting your own research and writing original content on your chosen topic, and becoming an authority and expert in that space.

This is hard work, but in the end, you’ll have quality content that people will actually want to read and share, including your influencers.

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The post Influencer Marketing And How To Amplify Your Content appeared first on B2B Marketing Insider.

What could the Google-Yahoo AdSense partnership mean for marketers?

You may have seen the news that Google plans to provide web search results and search ads for an unspecified number of Yahoo user queries. 

See the SEC filing here. So, what does that mean for marketers?

Read more...

SearchCap: Google RankBrain, Google Search Analytics API & Get Ready For Voice Search

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. The post SearchCap: Google RankBrain, Google Search Analytics API & Get Ready For Voice Search appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.