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Community In A Box
Community In A Box is about the only marketing left - friends of friends proxy marketing.
Online only has one time – NOW.
Now is GOLIATH, a monster sure to kill us all except for a tiny DAVID slinging rocks at the future. David, undeterred by the monster’s apparent size or formidability, is unimpressed by yesterday’s victories. Yesterday’s victories mean little when a stone hits you in the face today.
Better to die on our feet slinging stones than live on knees comatose with yesterday’s victories or afraid of tomorrow’s insults. Tomorrow’s insults are inevitable. We are dreamers, dreamers who believe monsters fall to slingshots and stones. Our dream, our romantic vision, philosophy and belief is why
we’re creating “Community In A Box”.
You In?
Ten SEO Trends & Tips for 2016 Ten SEO Trends and Tips for 2016 was inspired by 7 SEO Trends by Anne Carton (via Os on Scoop.it). Curagami’s 7 SEO Trends / Tips are different, but we used Anne’s excellent post to get ours started. 2016 promises to be a watershed year for Search Engine …
Our SEO for Web Designers has surpassed Warren Buffett's Startups Tips to become our #1 Haiku Deck:
SEO for Web Designers (9,972 Views)
http://shar.es/1gyTSf
Warren Buffett's Startups Tips (9,050 Views)
http://shar.es/1gyTIK
Makes SEO for Web Designers our fastest and steepest trending Haiku Deck. Our 42 Decks have generated over 100,000 views proving visual marketing is here and slides are a new online marketing channel.
SEO For Web Designers
Web designers shouldn't be SEO experts since keeping up with DESIGN is a full-time job. But web designers are where SEO rubber meets the Google Road so understanding a handful of ideas is critical to the online success of any designers creations.
This Haiku Deck includes a list of our favorite FREE SEO tools and how to use them to create a content marketing map. Content marketing maps help move your site to the first page of listings for keywords that matter (to your business or nonprofit).
Many of the tips included in SEO for Web Designers are universal and so helpful to anyone creating online communication...and who ISN'T creating online communication these days?
Marty Note On Developing Trusted Content
Startups must create content to develop trust and community. Content marketing. and this may be a surprise to some, is not an end unto itself. You create and share content to help, educate and share. Startups should create content to develop a self-sustaining community.
Sharing content requires being vulnerable, real and authentic. The six tips from the linked post focus on creating honest communication. My 4 content marketing tips describe how to create content sure to be shared (a form of trust), built upon and provide the feedback loops you need to run an online business:
Six Content Tips (from the link) * Eliminate Hype. * Make Your Content As Unbiased as possible. * Present alternative perspectives (from trusted leaders and gurus). * Include objective research. * Beware of product pitches (just say NO to product pitches). * Proclaim your identity (be honestly who you ARE as any disparity creates dissonance).
Marty's 4 Content Marketing Tips (to promote shares and feedback)
* End with a question asking for feedback & don't mind if none comes (1:9:90 Rule says only about 10% of your visitors are going to engage with your content is ways you can see).
* Shorten your sentences & paragraphs and lose the conjunctions and personal pronouns.
* Create short (10 words or less) headlines with "grabbers".
* Create, shoot or develop original art.
Questions are great. We use questions in three ways:
* We ask and then answer our own question as a way to engage a clear line of reasoning and thinking.
* We ask contextually relevant questions at the end of a post looking for feedback on a reader's experience.
* We ask and leave open questions in heading sand sub-heads to promote the content as answer reading the curiosity of a question prompts.
Short and Sweet
Shorten and create SEO writing. SEO writing is reducing your "stop words" such as personal pronouns or other words search spiders can't understand. SEO may be out of favor these days, but those "spider tips" apply to creating content to promote online readership and engagement too. Think Hemingway more than Faulkner.
Original Art
Startups shouldn't use stock photography. Stock creates dissonance with any startup's main positioning. All startups are claiming to be smarter and more creative than the other guy. When you use sock you look just like the other guy. Just say NO to stock no matter how much your designer wants to use it. CORNED use stock but ask your design team to create unique edits and perspectives so your stock doesn't look like everyone else.
Bunch O Balloons Featured on TODAY Show This morning!
Bunch O Balloons, an easy to use time saving water balloon invention, may make $1M on Kickstsarter thanks to great crowdfunding marketing and the new SEO. Team Curagami is in Charlotte at the Search Exchange Conference.
This Curatti post combines a fascinating new tool set capable of making "Editors of Chaos" come true and the story of how a crowdfunding project goes "mega-viral".
Curagami Scores
We've tuned our Curgami engine to evaluate three website and brand CSFs (Critical Success Factor):
* Content.
* Community.
* Conversion.
The tool creates unique metrics such as Link Efficiency Indexes (LEI) to evaluate a website, close competitors and it establishes "best practice" averages viral content, sustainable community and asynchronous conversion ideas (not going up against a competitor's strength).
We started our journey to answer a simple question:
What content should a website create and why?
That simple question has soaked up six months of our lives and tens of thousands of our investors' cash. Good news is we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Will your website WIN armed with a Curgami Score Report?
Yes :). Marty & Team Curagami
Emperors of Chocolate & New SEO
How would my former employer M&M/Mars or our arch rival Hershey react to the new SEO? Not so great. This is how the door gets opened for "clean slate" brands savvy at social media and who don't have a hundred years of built up animosity.
Could a new candy company focused on social media and the web survive? Might be a long time before the giants even knew an upstart was around. First company to become the Emperor of online CONTENT wins :). so YES a new candy company could disrupt the space.
CrowdFunde team is attending startup school. This Triangle Startup Factory Dairy shares our journey. Day 2 = creation of "unrealized networks", UGC & SEO.
Day 2: Tapping Unrealized Networks
Wow, what a day. Started with a Scrum-like standup and then worked the Business Model Canvas with TSF Founder Chris Heivly and Whitney. Discussing CrowdFunde's SEO benefit we realized that many businesses have "unrealized networks".
Unrealized networks are your customers. One undeniable New SEO truth is commons or platforms like HuffPost and Facebook out perform all other models. Problem is how does a small business easily add a "commons" that won't cost them a million bucks in cash or time?
CrowdFunde to the rescue.
CrowdFunde's goal is to help our partners TAP the gold they carry in their unrealized network. When I was a Director of Ecommerce our mailing list was around 50,000. We communicated with our customers regularly because email marketing was the most profitable Internet marketing channel (by far).
What we DID NOT do was for a community. We didn't realize benefits from our network. This Video Diary includes a 2 minute video that walks you through our first cut at tapping "unrealized networks". Please share any thoughts, reactions or ideas.
We are in "startup school" at the Triangle Startup Factory in Durham, NC for 12 weeks and everything is up for grabs. Together we create a cool tool, a "get more with less" tool to help conquer the "New SEO".
Thanks, CrowdFunde team and Marty
SEO for content marketers shares 5 "Quick Tips" to avoid SEO bear traps like: dupe content, keywords as friends, little things, & it's a SoLoMo world.
Find out how brands these days are using user generated content to manifest business opportunities. ... It has been observed, that 64% of people are ‘highly likely’ to purchase something that included their input, combined with the 92% of people who rely upon other individuals they know while making a purchase decision. Over the last five years, there has been a 35% increase in user generated content, and 70% people feel most loyal to brands that listen to them.
Via Samu Tuomisto
There are several ideas in this post for how our local newspaper the Raleigh News and Observer can become an Internet marketing powerhouse. My favorite is to create a Y-combinator-like startup school or partner with one.
Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill is rich in universities and the startups they bring so if our local newspaper were to embrace #Startups they kill two birds with a single stone - creating highly viral online content while bringing along UNC, Duke and NC State.
This RX might not work for all newspapers, but I note a favorite Internet marketing irony. Newspapers are RICH in the expertise any great website needs such as graphic artists, photographers, writers and editors. In fact any newspaper has 100x the content marketing talent as my 3 person team back in the day.
How did we make $30M in online sales while newspapers bleed red ink with all the talent we never had? Read on.
Slideshare may be the most powerful content marketing tool around. Few realize its power so your Internet marketing team's Slideshare use could be disruptive.
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SEO & Content Marketing's Future
Google, Panda 4.0, Rankbrain, SEO & Love shares how future content marketing will be shaped by smartphones, sentiment and feeling with 5 tips on how to thrive.
- Rich Get Richer
- Channel Diversification Is Essential
- It's About SMARTPHONES, Stupid
- Screens, Content Types, Social & Love
- Curate more than create, no content is ever "old"
. We share this post in our Startups Revolution Scoop.it since few startups understand SEO and fewer still think they need content marketing - big mistakes. http://www.curagami.com/google-panda-4-0-rankbrain-love/?v=7516fd43adaa
SOne of the Lean Content best practices we’ve seen several speakers at our meetups recommend is to leverage existing audiences on top of your own to increase the reach and the impact of your content.
Content curation is key for Small To Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs) online success & Scoop.it's new Content Director makes curation a marketing reality.
Quality Deserves Freshness QDF is important to "new SEO". This post & Haiku Deck share marketing, tactics & strategy tips so QDF works for not against you.
3 Things 5,000 Startup Entrepreneurs Know You Should Too via @HaikuDeck
Wiki-ization of Marketing: Moving From Brands To Communities
1,342 views
As digital marketing becomes more about communities and less about control Wiki-like meritocracy is taking over.
http://shar.es/1nMGyS
Invisible Giant: Why the new SEO Is So Hard To See
2,317 views
The new SEO is being obscured by the social / mobile web, Google changes and the rapidly changing nature of content marketing & curation.
http://shar.es/1nM6nl Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today
1,318 views
Is it possible to design tomorrow's ecommerce website today? Yes
http://shar.es/1nM6rX
Never Ending Battle Truth, Justice & American Way
Tough "Dog Days" of summer for "Super Hero" marketing tactics. Here is a list of the dead and dying tactics:
SMB Marketing Tactics Costing More, Getting Less:
* Yellow Pages (near death).
* Print ads (near death). * Val-u-pak coupons (near death). * Coupons of any kind (losing relevance with smartphone users).. * Groupons (blows brands up almost beyond repair).
* Email marketing (sick due to social / mobile web).
* Social Media Marketing (sick and getting sicker fast).
* Content Marketing.(content shock sick). * Ecommerce (too many stores, same offerings).
* PPC (paying more to get less).
* Retargeting (cat out of bag, so sick efficacy declining).
* Video Marketing (steep learning curve, expensive).
* Viral Marketing (everyone has that cold now & hit or miss).
* Cause Marketing (not as unique as once was & live or die with partner). * Celebrity Marketing (expensive and live or die with branded celeb). * SEO (don't even get us started, all but gone, baby, gone).
Many of these "SMB" tactics are in a startup's launch plan too. Good luck with that. Startups have to double down on asynchronous tactics since their money is tight and they have little or no brand awareness yet.
Favorite startup asynchronous tactics of ours include:
* OPN (tap Other People's Networks).
* OPM (tap Other People's Money via crowdfunding).
* Crowdfunding.
* Friends-of-Friends marketing.
* Community (start handing of the keys to your content early).
* Partnerships.
* OPC (Other People's Content via content curation with attribution(.
* Video Marketing (learning curve and expense scares most away).
* Events.
* Training.
* Contests & Games.
That last bullet can be especially powerful for startups. Remember to create tools needed to empower advocates, contributors and Sherpas. Make it easy to help you by providing graphical tools, listening and curating content into a social space (curation is a form of social reward).
Curagami & The Ecommerce Revolution Played Triangle Startup Factory's Pitchday today discussing how how to fix ecommerce marketing with Curagami.
Marty Note
I wish I could sit every startup entrepreneur down and have them read this post about how blogging accelerates growth. Need funding? Spending tons of time pitching? Why?
If I could share a way for a startup not to have to have absurd conversations with people who will NEVER invest in their startup they would ask me what they need to pay for that kind of magic.
Guess what, the magic is FREE, all you have to do is write what is happening, create some videos and share your progress. I've been writing about The Social Startup and blogging is a KEY aspect of creating the kind of content people find and want to CALL YOU.
If that last sentence translated like this, "You get to keep more of your company," then you get the idea. Even if you never make a dime from the content you share blogging is worth doing. You will LEARN so much from sharing, getting feedback and reacting.
That kind of feedback is MAGIC and worth its weight in gold. When I worked in marketing at M&M/Mars we paid BIG BUCKS for the kind of information any entrepreneur can get FREE now. So SHARE and then ASK, SHARE and ASK again. Bet you make more money that way than bieng 100% widget focused.
Via Marie Ennis-O'Connor
Don't Ask The Wrong Questions
Statup Investors Often Ask The WRONG Questions in the WRONG ways. Here are examples of GOOD questions to ask startup entrepreneurs:
* How many unique visitors will your site get daily in the first year? * How many downloads (or sales) will your site make daily? * What is projected cost of customer acquisition first through third years? * Where will your website’s traffic come from? Top 3 – 5 sources? * Who are you disrupting and what is the PageRank PageSpread and number of inbound Links.
Complete list is included in the linked post on CrowdFunde
http://crowdfunde.com/new-money-startup-investment-criteria/
Google's New SEO Revolution wants improving heuristics the kind created by storytelling, cause and video marketing, the new Critical Success Factors.
Startups Can Jump The Class
If you are new to content marketing understanding how content marketing's four gears create a "virtual cycle" can help you jump the class. Content marketing's gears:
* Curation.
* Creation.
* Social. * Ecommerce.
Clean Slate content marketers, thos so new to the game they have few preconceived ideas, can move to the head of the class by organizing their marketing differently and in alignment with ideas shared in Content Marketing's Gears.
5 Common Startup SEO Mistakes
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![Want Trusted Content? Startups Do 10 Things [+4 From @Scenttrail] | Startup Revolution | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/CJNVsTM7hCTvHwOkGrOBczl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
![Why Slideshare ROCKS Content Marketing and SEO [for Startups] | Startup Revolution | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/XhJX0-ZA0L8N3fqa6BdFpDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
