BI Revolution

Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.

5 Ways To Avoid The Online Competition Trap
Never ceases to amaze me. Team +Curagami sees the Hatfields and McCoys squared off and fighting tooth and nail over nothing all the time. Here are 5 ways to avoid the Online Competition Trap (be sure to Read Mark Traphagen's excellent note in comments on the attached too):

* Use Google Adwords to discover REAL DEMAND for keywords (use exact an broad match too and if you really want to get depressed use "exact match" to see how few people are actually searching for that new widget you just created).
* Create something like our Curagami Keyword Efficiency Index (cKEI) to calculate where #blueoceans live (keywords or phrases with less competition but healthy search volume and YES these are getting harder and harder to find). Use "long tail" analysis to find these.
* Understand your "poker table stakes" keywords - words you have to have content for but won't win in this lifetime.
* Know what they are spending (use +SpyFu) and then SPEND DRAMATICALLY LESS because you've out thought them. One way to do that is look for a #contentmarketing "fighter pilot" in your space and toss them into your ecosystem (I did this with +Red Bull during my keynote to a group of #smbs at +FedEx conference and they found it eye opening to say the least). 
* Think about using new tools such as Curagami, tools that help create #community so you do LESS but win MORE hearts and minds. Would classify +Paper.li +Scoop.it and +Optimizely in this category of get more spend or do less tools.

You Are What You Measure
The old cliché is true - in content markeitng you are what you measure. This morning my friend Phil Buckley (@1918) shared a nice compliment on G+:

"I'm always impressed by the different ways +Martin W. Smith slices and dices his data to find the actionable nuggets."

Appreciate the compliment and thought I would share a view into how my content marketing brain works (scary I know LOL). This ScentTrail Marketing Post does two things. First it shares how I created the post Phil was referring to: Content Mentions Social Mentions Study (http://martinmartysmith.com/content-marketing-social-mentions-study/ ).

AND

The post shares 5 New Key Performance Indicators I use to watch our content marketing at Atlantic BT (and my personal brand content under the @ScentTrail label).

5 New Content Marketing KPIs
* Daily Mentions.
* Content Type.
* Tools.
* Top 10.
* Link Efficiency Index (LE().

Use these 5 new content marketing KPIs to know if, what kinds and what tools matter to your content marketing.

What about you? Do you have cool new content marketing metrics? Share them and I will curate in and share across my social net.

Thanks and happy Friday to my Scoop.it tribe :). M

Book by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz about using data to build a better startup faster, part of the Lean Startup series with Eric Ries and Ash Maurya from O'Reilly

Marty Note
Reading Lean Analytics now and HIGHLY recommend it.

Klout, Context & Links
This post links to my G+ summary in prelude to my http://www.curatti.com blog post tonight. Here are some preliminary thoughts on the page of notes I took during Dixon Jones talk.

Links & The Real Value of Content
Dixon works at Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com/ ). Majestic is asking the right question - what is the value of a link. They've even created tools that help intelligently answer that question.

"Inbound links" as a measurement is clouded by "bot spam". In a great example of the power of the "flow" tool Dixon shared. Even more powerful was an example of Majestic SEO vs. two competitors. On a purely inbound link review Majestic doesn't win.

But are all of those links valuable? Value is contextual and any spammy ways of inflating inbound link numbers need to be discovered and factored out.

Once links are run through Majestic SEO's "trust flow" tool evaluating where links came from and the respective trustworthiness of sites sending links in Majestic wins the comparison.We finally have a tool to separate white and black hats.

Think of that for a second. If you were to simply use aggregate inbound links you would buy ads with Majestic's competition or, and this is worse, you might think the competition's inflated (probalby by spam) value is something you should buy.

Once the Majestic SEO tool separates wheat from chafe a more accurate and "influential" picture emerges. SEOs and Internet marketers know how to parse page spread, social following and inbound links to pierce the veil of most who spam, but, for an outsider, "most links" may translate into "most trusted".

There is the web's biggest rub. Since the web is an interconnected system discovering if real people who have real value are passionate about a site tool, or brand with metrics such as high inbound links or big pagespread (pages in Google) is the only way to make an informed decision UNTIL Majestic wrestled context and content to the ground.

Curagmai & Majestic
The reason our Startup Factory funded startup Curagami and Majestic fit together like Lego blocks is relationships between a site and its 1% Contributors, 9% Supporters and 90% readers. Curagami helps FIND the Contributors, Supporters and Readers and Majestic helps define each of member of those "tribes" by their CONTEXTUAL influence. I may not have high Klout and be irrelevant for a conversation about women's fashion, but be perfect to help discuss cycling (since I rode a bicycle across America in the summer of 2010). .

If the first job is to FIND Contributors, Supporters and Readers and the second is to ask them to JOIN with Contributors and Supporters high on the Ambassadors list then the 3rd job is to contextually empower advocates in each group. We know the future is about community and real people not bots are the building blocks of online community.

What Dixon shared today and Majestic SEO has been working hard on is helping marketers know what kind of ASK will work best for Jill, John and Bob. Jill might know women's fashion, pets and be a car mechanic in her spare time. John may know email marketing, gourmet cooking and wines. Bob may know finance and cycling.

Curagami helps find 'em & Majestic helps define 'em in order to create an ASK that works. Powerful and very cool tool since the future is about building community and not every Contributor, Supporter and Reader who visits your site is the same. As we begin to create "rich personas" thanks to tools such as Majestic and Curagami our content relevance will go up, and up and UP.

If you are thinking more content relevance = more LOVE and MONEY we agree :). M