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10 Social Media, Content Marketing & SEO Predictions for 2016

12/20/2015

The year 2015 is about done and 2016 is just around the corner.

All the top sites are doing their prediction posts. Why not get in on that game?

I decided to do that beginning in early-December. It was a busy month for me and I didn’t get this post finished for a couple of weeks.

I decided to go back in and add in more stats and links that might help you. Perhaps they’ll also bolster my arguments.

So without further ado, here are my 2016 social media, content marketing, and SEO predictions:

#1 Rand will do 52 posts this year

I’m willing to bet that Rand Fishkin of Moz will slack off again in 2016.

I bet between Whiteboard Friday and his blog he’ll manage 52 posts.

I say this because I don’t know what the guy does or how it helps me. I also don’t know why so many people think this guy knows everything.

I guess he did at some point, which allowed him to make a multi-million dollar company. Since then he’s been coasting on his accomplishments, easing back on his laurels.

Nothing shows this more than the sorry excuse for a blog that, for some reason, is still linked up to Moz’s homepage.

Personally, I wouldn’t want a daily reminder of my inability to post embarrassing me like that.

Rand and Moz do, however.

Looking at Rand’s Blog I see that the last post was November 25, just about a month ago.

Prior to that we had:

August 15;
June 17;
June 9;
June 3;
June 2;
February 8;
January 26;
January 12;
January 8.

So that’s 10 posts this year, not even one a month. What’s particularly bad is that stretch from February to June. Well, it’s not as bad as that lame attempt at catch-up.

Maybe it's not as lame as that January-gym approach. Got busy there at the New Year, didn't he?

Honestly – why do we take advice from this guy?

Something else I’d like to mention is Rand’s love affair with still images, like this one:

My oh my…where to begin?

How much time do you think it takes for the Moz team to come up with that?
Do you think it’s a good use of your time?
Do you benefit from those still images?

Well, Rand and his team feel producing those images is a better use of their time than analyzing their industry and telling us what they think.

Personally, I’d rather read more of the latter than see those still-images. I feel I’m not alone in that.

So…why do I feel we’ll be seeing even more of those still-images this year and a whole lot fewer blog posts?

Because this is a “top” site and Rand is an “expert.”

#2 Hashtags in Titles will Fade #Away

Aren’t you getting tired of seeing haghtags in blog titles? I know I am.

I fully expect this silly tactic to go away this year. It smacks of desperation and the last thing you want to look like is desperate.

Is your site really doing so badly that you need that extra hashtag boost that the title-hashtag gives you? Gosh, I’m sorry.

Here’s a post from Search Engine Journal that does it:

Here’s another one from an article a week later, again on SEJ:

Here’s another one from Brand Watch:

Here’s a post from last December that thought the idea so good it did it twice:

So really, here we have a site trying to get a bit more lovin’ from Twitter. It’s mainly Twitter, though I suppose this might work on other networks as well.

Does it work?

What is the goal?

Are we actually getting more traffic to our sites because of this?

I’m not convinced. What would be great would be seeing these sites actually study this.

Will they? I highly, highly doubt it.

I mean, why point out what you’ve been doing all year has been a silly waste of time?

That’s not what expert sites do.

Instead they say, “oh...,” look over their shoulder to make sure no one saw, and continue right on as if nothing has changed.

Terrible.

#3 Barry Schwartz’s Content will Get Shorter

Barry Schwartz has good ideas. He also has a terrible work ethic.

How do 250 word posts help me?

I’m not sure, but that’s about all you can expect from Barry each year – short posts that don’t tell you much.

That’s the problem with these sites – they break news but never tell you anything else.

I mean, honestly – is it really fucking hard to put some analysis in there, tell us a bit more of the history of this thing, how it came about, why it came about, and what you think will happen?

That’s the thing – Barry doesn’t think. He just writes. He sees something and he writes about it.

I’d rather he spend more time thinking about what he’s writing about. It’s called analysis, and Barry needs to learn how to give us some.

Will he?

No.

#4 We’ll Stop Using [INFOGRAPHIC] in Our Titles

Alright, I can see why you might put the word “infographic” in your title – it tells people what the post is.

I can even understand why you might put a hashtag in front of it, hoping to get a little extra social media lovin’.

But why, pray tell, does the damn thing have to be in all caps?

INFOGRAPHIC vs. Infographic.

Hell, why not mix it up and say INFOGraphic?

It’s not any stupider than using all caps, and I doubt it’ll lose you anymore respect than the all caps version.

Mainly, using INFOGRAPHIC in your titles just makes you look stupid. I’m sure we’ll see it a lot in 2016, but not from the big sites.

Well…we’ll see.

For now let’s see some posts.

Here’s one from a Social Media Today post:

Social Media Today is actually the worst with this. I see far more of their posts doing this than other sites. Here’s another one:

Still, they’re not the only ones.

Here’s one that combines my duel loves of “infographic” in the title while using a hashtag as well:

Digital bad habits…let’s think about that.

#5 Google+ Will Lose More Users as People Flee the New Mobile Design and Current Users Die Off

Google+ has two things going against it right now:

First, the users are incredibly old, the oldest demographic on social media, coming in at 45 to 55 for the age of the average user

Then, their new mobile design really pissed off long-time users, and it’s likely many of these users will do what they’ve been saying for years, and migrate more fully to other networks.

We know from a September 15 post called What is Snapchat and How Can I Use It for Business? that 70% of Snapchat users are 18-34 years of age. Taking it further, Snapchat had “around 100 million daily active users” in late-2014.

On top of this we saw in October 19’s Young Consumers Read Reviews & Are More likely to Write Reviews that just 69% of those 55-years of age and above write reviews.

What’s more, we know from December 3’s Social Media Statistics 2015 that just 9% of Google+ users actually post content.

This doesn’t mesh with local SEO goals. One more reason to kick the old fogeys to the curb.

Old people can’t compete with that and since we know millennials have tons of money to spend, marketers will just start to ignore the old people.

Considering that the vast majority of Baby Boomers are too much in debt to retire and have no savings, this won’t be a bad thing.

Yes, marketing trends will be changing in this coming election year.

#6 Melissa Mayer will Finally be Fired from Yahoo

I remember writing some content for a guy in Germany back in the spring of 2013.

It was all about this woman Melissa Mayer at Yahoo.

I remember this because I was hurriedly writing it between classes when I was still teaching English in China.

My God, has that woman been around this long?

I think it’s because she’s a woman and was pregnant and…didn’t she write a book? Yeah, that too. We cut her too much slack.

I feel that she’ll do poorly this year as Yahoo continues to do poorly. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Yahoo Gemini will save the company.

I don’t think so, however. Perhaps Yahoo will ditch Melissa Mayer the same week America ditches Carley Fioriana.

Both are terrible businesspeople.

#7 More Sites will Close Comments

I think Content Marketing Institute, Social Media Examiner, and Search Engine Journal are the main candidates for closing their commenting sections this year.

Why?

They have no comments.

Well, when you look at the ridiculously large share numbers they have it’s clear they have no comments.

It’s a terrible ratio!

So…why are people sharing, but not commenting? Please don’t tell me the world’s full of shy ninny’s.

I guess it must be.

Or are these what I call robo-shares, nothing more that people sharing an article they got notified about on social or email, for no other reason than to look smart to their followers?

I think a lot of it is that.

#8 We’ll See A Pull Back from Email Marketing

Aren’t you getting sick of email marketing articles all the time?

God, I am.

It’s because we know that most email campaigns have an open rate of about 22%.

Worse, most email marketing campaigns have an abysmally small click-through rate of about 3%.

We know on AdWords the average click-through rate is 2%.

Sadly, most companies are expecting 10% to 15% for click-through rate.

Wow, talk about failure.

Yet we continue to see the big sites harp on how important it is to grow your email list.

Sadly, they nearly always suggest giving something away or engaging in some other gimmick.

Great, now I have a bunch of sign-ups that will never open, never click. No wonder our click-through rates are so low!

Folks, this strategy is not working.

Oh, maybe it’s working for some big sites that bombard you with pop-ups until you finally relent and give them your email list.

But you know what…it’s not. Even those sites have the same problems of low engagement, low opens, non-existent clicks.

Our email marketing strategies are not working.

Will that stop the Big Boys from shoving the same tired advice down our throats?

No – they’ll never stop. As long as you keep that sucker face on and lap up their bullshit, they’ll keep shoveling it at you.

So I expect more people will become vocal, saying what they think.

“Damn, it – I follow your advice and my click-through rates are shit! What gives, you dumb bastards!?!”

I’d like to hear more talk like that. Perhaps, just perhaps, we might be able to get somewhere.

For I know deep down that if we continue on, I’ll be sitting here next December writing how our email click-through rates are still an abysmal 3% or so.

#9 Twitter Goes Back on Share Counter Takeaway

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the removal of share counter’s from Twitter buttons will not go over well.

I’ll go further and say that Twitter has to backpedal and put those numbers back.

Maybe I’m being hopeful, or projecting my wants onto the situation. I dunno – are people going to pay…whatever a month to have that number, that ego booster?

We’ll see.

#10 SEO Sites Focus More on Content Marketing and Social Media

I think we’ll see top SEO sites like Moz and Search Engine Land go more with content marketing for topics on their blogs.

This is clear to me from both the July Online Marketing Industry Survey and the August SEO Ranking Factors post. Both show that content is perceived as more valuable than SEO…to users and now more and more to Google.

Big sites will focus more on content because guest posting, linkbuilding, keyword optimization and all the rest of it is falling flat.

I mean, guest posting really went out the window this year!

I say that because we always have Google algorithm updates that take everything those SEO folks said from years ago and penalize it.

We see this again and again.

Far from it embarrassing the SEO sites, however, they continue to push outdated and downright harmful ideas.

Worse, we know this stuff just doesn’t work. We know that you have to focus on what your user wants.

With mobile overtaking desktop and more semantic search and long-tail phrases doing away with traditional methods, SEO just isn’t going to get as much play in 2016, or future years.

Again, people will jump on that, saying we’ve heard it all before.

I already see big sites like those mentioned steer more toward the social media marketing and the content approach for building traffic, however.

We’ll see. For now I suspect it’s a wait-and-see approach. As the year progresses, however, and as we tally the various articles appearing on SEO sites, I think we’ll find this one comes true.

Conclusion

Wow, lots to think about! Let’s recap what those predictions were:

#1 Rand will do 52 posts this year
#2 Hashtags in Titles will Fade #Away
#3 Barry Schwartz’s Content will Get Shorter
#4 We’ll Stop Using [INFOGRAPHIC] in Our Titles
#5 Google+ Will Lose More Users as People Flee The New Mobile Design and Current Users Die Off
#6 Melissa Mayer will Finally be Fired from Yahoo
#7 More Sites will Close Comments
#8 A Pull Back from Email Marketing
#9 Twitter Goes Back on Share Counter Takeaway
#10 SEO Sites Focus More on Content Marketing and Social Media

So those are my predictions. I hope they made you think or gave you a new perspective.

Good luck in 2016 – if you do 'well' enough maybe you’ll be on a list next year.

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3 Reasons Why Penguin 4.0 Will Hit Around Thanksgiving

10/29/2015

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From Mapto Media

Google’s Penguin 4.0 algorithm will hit around Thanksgiving.

That’s about 31/2 weeks from now. Are you going to get screwed?

Chances are…no.

Penguin typically affects a 2% of sites. If you’re reading this content, I doubt you’ll be one of them.

Why? Because you care.

You care about content and news and keeping up to date. The idea of spam repels you.

It repels Google Penguin as well, and that’s why it’ll take a good bite out of those spammy sites’ revenue come Thanksgiving.

Now…why do I say Thanksgiving?

Because that’s what Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land hinted at today.

The post was called Google’s Next Penguin Update Should Be Within The Next Two Months.

It was quite short, but said that Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst mentioned on Twitter that he expects Penguin 4.0 to come out “within 2015.”

After reading the post I felt pretty confident right away that Penguin 4.0 would come out around Thanksgiving. I even mentioned that to Barry Schwartz:

@gpstberg i love thanksgiving
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 29, 2015

Darn, he’s a little vague there. I’ll let you take that for what you will.

Schwarz also tells us that this will be in real-time, meaning you could be forced to stare at your analytics report as the traffic is dropping.

Whether that’s as bad as coming in the office and seeing a complete train wreck of your business is unknown to me – I don’t engage in spam.

Yes, I have no pity for these fools. And let’s remember, the last Penguin algorithm only affected about 2% of sites out there.

Let’s go through a rundown of past Penguins right now and get a feel for why I think Thanksgiving is the date to watch.

Penguin 1.0 came out on April 24, 2012
Penguin 1.1 came out on May 25, 2012
Penguin 1.2 came out on October 5, 2012
Penguin 2.0 came out on May 22, 2013
Penguin 2.1 came out on October 4, 2013
Penguin 3.0 came out on October 17, 2014

We get a few dates in October, but nothing in November. What the hell’s going on here?

Perhaps you’re forgetting about last year’s “Thanksgiving update.”

Ah yes, that one.

Let’s get into the reasons why Thanksgiving is Penguin Day this year.

#1 Google Likes to Unroll Algorithm Updates Around Thanksgiving

In Mid-December 2014 Roy Hinkis had a post on Similar Web called The Penguin 3.0 Pattern: Losers Will Keep Losing, Winners Will Win Again.

The post does a good job detailing the updated rollout of Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014, as well as the November 27 “Thanksgiving Penguin.” Three additional versions may have been put out in early-December as well.

So what does it all mean?

The article profiles a wedding dress site that saw its traffic drop by 75%. One online gaming site had a 300% drop.

Imagine if that was your income and you didn’t have any savings. That’s why algorithm updates are so important and why you hear a lot of news about them.

There are some winners profiled in this post as well, but I don’t feel the gains are nearly as spectacular as the losses. See what I mean by giving this one a look-see.

How Google’s Penguin 3.0 Is Playing Out Across The Web is something you might want to look in on.

Philip Petrescu had this post on Search Engine Land in December 2014. Of course, the post is a bit dated. Does that matter? I don’t think so.

You want to acquaint yourself with these updates because similar updates will continue to roll out…as we’re about to see. After all, they’re numbering them so you know they’ll appear again.

For Penguin 3.0, the changes weren’t much. “Less than 1% of the English language queries” were affected, the article states.

Whew – got off light on that one!

Google likes putting Penguins out for Thanksgiving, they’ve done so in the past. Look for them to do so this year.

#2 Google Could Be Interested in Hitting Spammers Where it Hurts

Thanksgiving is typically one of the busiest shopping times of the year.

Yep, we’re talking about Black Friday, which is on November 27 this year.

What’s more, Cyber Monday comes right after that, on November 30 this year.

Look to that Cyber Monday.

Imagine if you were a spammy site that’s just counting on getting tons of traffic and tons of money that day.

Now imagine that Google swoops in the night before and knocks your site from 100,000 hits a day to 10,000 or less.

Damn, you’ve just lost a lot of income.

Worse, you’re not going to recover anytime soon. Your whole year is shot, you’re out of business.

This is what Google wants. It’s tired of these spammy assholes always screwing things up.

Think about it as coming into work on the weekend.

That’s what these spamsters do – they make Google engineers come in on the weekend to see to them.

I’m sure people like Matt Cutts have actual important things to do at Google. Sadly, all we see is him talking into a computer, chastising SEO-types for all the stupid stuff that they do.

When will it end? Maybe Cyber Monday, November 30.

#3 Google Doesn’t Want to Be Malicious, It Doesn’t Want to Surprise

If you’re paying attention there’s no reason you should be surprised by Penguin 4.0.

In fact, Google wants you to know it’s coming.

Google is not a malicious company. It wants to help businesses because that helps its own business. What it can’t abide, however, are the continual efforts of spammers.

You’ll be seeing a lot more Penguin 4.0 posts come out over the next few weeks. That’s fine – Google likes that.

Google wants those sites to clean up their act before the new Penguin rolls out. Will they? I doubt it. After all, they never did so last time.

We know that Penguin 2.0 only affected 2.3% of the English search queries, yet those sites lost 90% of their traffic.

Maybe that low number, and the fact that so many recovered, made us think Penguin wasn’t so bad.

You might remember that some ways people recovered from Penguin 3.0 were to:

Remove link from guest blogging networks;
Remove links from spam sites;
Remove exact match anchor text links;
Use only “no follow” links for guest posts.

The main thing that Google wants with backlinks are high quality links that are put there for editorial reasons, not to get traffic.

And my God, should it be a surprise that these links can’t be against Google’s best practices?

It shouldn’t be. Again, it’s little children breaking the rules even when they know what the rules are. That’s what a spam linker is.

Conclusion

Whew – lots of stuff!

We know that Google Penguin 4.0 will come out in 2015, as Google reps said and as Barry Schwartz pointed out for us today.

Since November and December are it, it’s likely the slower Thanksgiving holiday time will be it.

We know that traffic will be slower across the internet as a whole on those few days because of the American holiday.

What’s more, Google isn’t going to rock the boat around the Christmas holiday season. They want to do that before.

Look to Thanksgiving this year…if you’re not too busy with family.

And let’s face it – you will be. It’s only the spammy site that are taking shortcuts that need to worry about this. Chances are good you’ll be just fine.

So grab some leftovers and get on the internet that weekend. You’ll be seeing a lot of doom-and-gloom Penguin 4.0 posts.

Should be fun.

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What is Google’s RankBrain and What Should You Know About It?

10/26/2015

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I saw the news on Twitter this morning – Google has a new…something out.

It’s called “RankBrain” and in this post we’ll discuss everything that we know so far, and all the sites that know it.

Buckle in and hang on.

Search Engine Land’s Take on RankBrain

RankBrain is a “machine-learning artificial intelligence that Google’s been using to process 15% of search results” each day, according to Search Engine Land’s post on RankBrain.

What we need to make clear is that this is not a replacement for Hummingbird, which came out in December 2013. You can read my analysis of Hummingbird’s arrival here.

RankBrain uses vectors, which are “vast amounts of written language” that have been put into “mathematical entities.”

Why is this done?

So the computer can better understand your search query, or what you’re typing into that Google search bar.

Search Engine Land uses the example of someone typing in “Barack” and how this Hummingbird’s changes have allowed all kinds of “Obama” results to come up.

What I find interesting, and a bit alarming, is that Search Engine Land is calling RankBrain the “third-most important signal in ranking.”

Wow, that’s quite the assertion. Is it true?

I don’t think so. In the next paragraph we’re told that “RankBrain is one of the ‘hundreds’ of signals” that determine what results you see. In the same section, however, we’re told that it has indeed become the “third-most important.”

Why?

We’re not told that, and we’re not told why this signal is more important than “hundreds” of others.

And gosh darn, what the hell is this signal anyways?

“A ranking signal is typically something that’s associated with the perceived quality of a page,” the site writes.

After a bit of backtracking on Search Engine Land’s part we’re told that “RankBrain probably isn’t really a ranking signal but rather a query processing tool.”

Did anyone edit this post or was it just brain-farts and ramblings thrown together from a press release?

Overall, sloppy work on the part of Search Engine Land.

The Verge’s Take on RankBrain

Moving over to The Verge we see a RankBrain post that also came out today.

It too follows the same Bloomberg News article that Search Engine Land does and has the same analysis.

The post is virtually identical, except they write “percent” instead of using a symbol. Wow, thanks guys!

The Bloomberg Business Take on RankBrain

So what is Bloomberg saying about RankBrain?

If you head to Bloomberg Business you’ll see a post up today that mentions when RankBrain “sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly.”

When I read that it almost sounds like we’re dealing with another reiteration of Hummingbird, not a new thing. Perhaps Hummingbird was the template for this…I don’t know.

Something else that Bloomberg Business mentions is that “time-starved users, who are mostly searching using their mobile devices,” will likely benefit most from this.

So now we’re seeing a more mobile-dimension to this “algorithm” or “query processing tool” or whatever you want to call the damn thing.

Bloomberg Business mentions that RankBrain “is part of a half-decade-long push by Google into AI,” for the company is trying to “embed the technology into every aspect of its business.”

Yes, AI. Why am I getting images of the company from Terminator 2 changing it’s name to Google?

Perhaps because “humans guessed” top-ranking pages 70% of the time while RankBrain managed to do so 80% of the time.

The Daily Mail’s Take on RankBrain

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of analysis at the Daily Mail in the UK.

First of all, they mention that “more than 3.5 billion Google searches” are made everyday. Few of these are new.

That’s what RankBrain and other Google AI aspects are doing – trying to streamline all those ‘old’ searches so results are more specific to your needs, and show up faster.

Something we’re told is that when RankBrain makes guesses as to user search intent, “it monitors how the person making the searches responds to the results and can adjust its filtering process accordingly.”

That’s the artificial intelligence aspect again.

I like how this article mentions Google’s AI attempts from June, where a computer was trained “to have conversations before posing a series of questions about technical support, general knowledge and even philosophy.”

This was called the “conversation model,” we’re told and was built by scientists at Google Brain, a deep-learning research project that began in 2011.

There were mixed results to this June test, and you’ll get a great dialogue box of Q&A that scientists and the computer went through.

For instance, “what is the purpose of life?” was answered with “to serve the greater good.”

Another one was, “what is altruism?” which was answered with “if you don’t believe in God then you don’t know.”

Wow, where are we going here? Skynet/Google? Maybe it’s time for another Terminator movie (God, am I actually saying that?)

If you’re going to check out any posts on RankBrain, I feel this is the best so far.

Conclusion

I’d like to go back to algo updates and Hummingbird for a moment.

Tom Demers had a post on Search Engine Journal on April 6 called The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Google’s April 21 Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Update.

It’s a great one for people that are worried about algo-updates.

In my book Stand Out I profiled Eric Enge’s Search Engine Land from July 21, 2014, called Assessing Hummingbird’s Impact On Search — 10 Months Later.

In it he recaps the changes that have taken place since the Hummingbird algorithm hit on September 26, 2013.

Enge makes it clear that Hummingbird was “a rewrite of the search platform designed to allow Google to process new types of signals in new types of ways.”

Now, it’s good to remember that Google Panda hit on May 20, 2014, and those Google Authorship changes came about a month later, on June 25. Could Hummingbird have had a role in these?

Enge thinks so, in that Hummingbird would have allowed the new features that those 2014 updates brought about – specifically step-by-step procedure, like you’d see in baking instructions.

It’s what Enge has concluded within the article, however, that really hit me. “The requirements of the mobile searcher are becoming more important to Google than the requirements of the desktop searcher,” he says.

That was a big change, and it’s showing how our technology is driving our content capabilities.

I feel we’re seeing more of an emphasis on the mobile searcher with this new RankBrain. We’re also seeing more with the machine thinking for you.

Already you don’t need to know how to spell and you don’t even need to type in a whole word. Google will give that to you in the search bar, and before you’re even done typing the results will show.

Expect to see that a lot more now that RankBrain is on the scene.

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Taking and Giving a Beating in the Comments

10/13/2015

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I took some and I gave some today in the comments.

The action started at Search Engine Watch in the morning.

The post was called Do you have to come first in search anymore?

I’ll have an analysis of its content tomorrow in the Midweek Roundup. For now, let’s just say that I disagree with most assertions that SEO is the way to go.

I said as much in the comments on this post and we had some good back and forths.

I suppose it was good for Search Engine Watch as well. Most of their posts get a couple of comments. This one has 20 now...and I don’t think we’re done.

After that I made a comment on Moz on their link post today.

God, linkbuilding...I’m so sick of it.

Again, it’s this SEO stuff, this idea that we have to manipulate and optimize, tinker and toy.

Just stop, stop it already.

Every year we have to suffer because these SEO-types need to do their thing. Every year Google rolls out some new animal from its menagerie, and we all pay the price.

Well, I don’t - I don’t pay shit.

I focus exclusively on writing content. Sure, I’m not the best on the block, but Goddamn it I can bark and yip and yap and hopefully that’ll make you think.

It’s argument and persuasion and convincing someone else of your point of view.

That’s what was happening on Moz with another commentor, and I went ahead and agreed with them.

You see, we’re sick of this SEO nonsense and we’re tired of these SEO-types clinging to their high-paying jobs. Those jobs do nothing more than try to convince us we need their over-priced and now wholly ineffective services.

I wish I could stop the desperate SEO-services-types from emailing me and telling me my site is not ranking well, can never rank well.

Then why the hell does my traffic keep going up?

There’s no reply to that one.

You see, you can do it, you can get ahead without the manipulation and the trickery.

It’s called hard work, elbow grease, and putting in a full day.

Yes, these are age-old concepts, but we’ve forgotten them.

We’ve grown lazy, entitled and boring.

I go out each day now and say that in the comments of the big sites and I take a pummeling for it.

Don’t think for one second that I’ll stop, either - I did this for 2 years on my local newspaper before they pulled the plug.

I get the plug pulled quite often.

Just today I posted a rather “provocative” and “offensive” post in a Google+ community called SEO+ - Search Engine Optimization / Website Design.

Well, the moderator didn’t like me hinting that there might be too many non-native speakers putting up spam posts so I was shown the door.

Happens to me all the time.

Maybe I have problems with my approach, my tone, my style.

Maybe I’m just pointing things out that others would not like pointed out, like their shortcomings and how this costs you.

I’ll keep pointing that stuff out, just like I have been on this site for nearly three years now.

I went ahead and pointed out to Neil Patel today on his Content Marketing Institute post that he’d given us nothing new.

When he asked what he could have done I went ahead and pointed out two awesome links he’d missed.

Well, to be honest, one didn’t appear until today, the cool Ciotti post on Entrepreneur on how to write like a pro.

Anyways, I think Patel is too focused on his side projects to give a damn about what’s good for you right now.

Obviously I say what I think and don’t give a fuck.

Is that sustainable...either for myself or for the blogs I visit?

We saw what happened to me back in 2013 when Copyblogger kicked me off their site. I suppose they did that to everyone a short time later, however.

I'm a trendsetter, what can I say.

Many sites don’t allow comments. I suppose that’s good - I’m not sure the “Land” sites especially could take my quick wit or sharp tongue.

It’s because they don’t develop those things. It doesn’t align with their shortcut world.

That’s what SEO is - a shortcut.

Google has told us that the days of shortcuts are over.

My, what will the SEO-types do!

Probably try like hell to convince you that their ineffective services are what you need.

God help us.

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5 Tips for Writing Local SEO Content that Converts

9/24/2015

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Is your site getting the local traffic that it deserves?

It should be.

It’s easy to get it too. All you need to do is figure out your local area, what people are searching for, and how you can key into this.

When you do that you can get your products and services out to the people that are in your local community, or surrounding areas. That increases your influence and can produce more leads, more business, and more income.

So how do you go about getting your site and your content in front of those local eyes?

In this post I’d like to point out 5 aspects of local SEO and local content marketing that will give you ideas for your own site. We’ll use facts, stats, and examples from local SEO campaigns that have worked.

Your site is about to get the local traffic that it deserves!

#1 Mobile is Driving the Local SEO Revolution

People are using their phones more than ever.

We know that “18% of local mobile searches lead to a sale within one day” and “local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors” to your e-commerce store “within one day.”

That was all in a cool Search Engine Land post by Jayson DeMers in August.

Back in May it was reported that mobile traffic had overtaken desktop traffic as well. Mobile search queries were making up 29% of all search, by far the most of any platform.

This represents tablets and smartphones, and that’s what people are searching on most when it comes to finding local products, services, restaurants, places to go, and things to do on the weekend.

Mobile is how local users find out about events, read the news, and catch up on the sports scores. We don’t read newspapers anymore, and few are even watching TV…at least the local networks.

Yes, mobile is really the way to think globally while acting, and searching, locally.

#2 Geo Targeting Produces Leads and Campaign Ideas

I’ve been talking quite a bit about Geo targeting lately and you might have read my post Analyzing Your Geo Anaylitcs to Boost Traffic and Create Sales.

What’s so great about using Google Analytics’ Geo feature is that you can pinpoint small geographic areas.

I used Montana as my example, and it was clear which major cities were giving me traffic. I also learned the smaller locales that were giving me traffic.

Now, Montana is a huge state, the fourth largest in the country. It’s only got 1 million people, however.

What if you’re in California? You’re going to have to narrow it down a lot more, and that’s why cities or metropolitan areas might not be enough.

Think about Los Angeles. That’s just too big and really, most of the smaller cities surrounding it are crammed into that one area. This can cause local SEO efforts to overlap, something that makes analysis tricky.

I found this post called Complete Guide To Multilingual And Multiregional SEO to be very interesting. It’s about using different languages and such to get your site seen by more people. It was written by Amit Kothiyal and appeared on TIS India on March 2.

Something else that’s good to consider is multilingual and multiregional SEO and how it can help get you even more traffic.

“Once, you have understood where you are targeting for performing multilingual and multiregional SEO,” Kothiyal says, “the next step is to select the URL structure strategy and domain.” You can do that with geo targeting.

Intrigued? The post is worth a look, especially for multilingual areas like Los Angeles.

#3 Use Google Maps to Target Local Search Areas

One of my favorite aspects of writing local SEO content are the small geographic areas.

The best way to find those spots is with Google Maps. I say this because most of the time you’ll be writing about areas you haven’t a clue about.

For instance, what do you know about West Michigan?

I don’t know a single thing, myself, but one day I got a content writing job for a real estate company that was based there.

They needed four pages of content – sales, management, handyman, and an about us page. They had bare bones content when I first saw the site and their goal was to have 200 to 250 words.

Right away I knew that wasn’t going to cut it, not in the competitive real estate market of Michigan.

Now, I know nothing of Michigan other than it’s cold in the winter and they make cars there. With Google Maps, however, I can zoom in on key areas.

Thankfully for this site I knew that Grand Rapids was the city, so I typed that into Google Maps’ search bar and got this:

Grand Rapids will serve as our key local SEO area

Looks like a pretty big area, huh? Is there anything that might help me narrow my search down?

In this case, yes. On the current about us page it mentions properties in Eastlake as well…whatever that is.

No problem, let me find directions to Eastlake from Grand Rapids by using the dialogue box in the upper left-hand corner of Google Maps.

This is what I get:

Lots of people live around Grand Rapids, and we want to pull them in from search as well

Dang! Far from narrowing my search arrow, it’s actually expanded it.

Well, is there anything I can do, and is it really that bad?

Let’s zoom in and see if we can’t find the main suburb areas that are between these two metro areas. Perhaps there are some local SEO opportunities here.

Figure out your primary (red), secondary (blue), and out of the way (black) areas so that you know what locations your current local SEO campaign should focus on

Alright, so what I’ve done is circled various small towns, cities, or suburbs that are between these two locations.

Here’s the color breakdown:

Red: These are the primary areas that I’ll want to target. They’re closest to both Grand Rapids and Eastlake and they’re also on the water, which is likely a more populated area. That means more people will be searching from those areas and for those areas.

Blue: These are what I consider secondary areas. They’re a little further away and perhaps not as reliant on those two larger metro hubs that I’ve selected as my base. They are likely keying into search criteria based on both Grand Rapids and Eastlake, however, and I’m going to work off that.

Black: These are out-of-the-way areas that I probably won’t focus on too much…for now. If this was my own site or if I was a full-time employee for this company, I’d want this. It’ll tell me where I can direct my efforts months from now when much of the current geographic area is exhausted for me.

So at this point I’m going to write down all of those towns/cities/suburbs into a list. That will go right onto my content page so potential customers can see that we service a wide geographic area here in Western Michigan.

When you do a lot of handyman or cleaning services content, this stuff helps. People are in outlying areas and if you can include those areas on your page, Google will notice. That means your site gets clicked on more.

#4 Businesses with Reviews Soar Ahead on Local Searches

Businesses that have reviews are going to do a lot better than those that don’t, at least when it comes to Google search.

We know from an August Jayson DeMers post that “88% Of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.”

Sites that have reviews shoot up the SERP like no other. When it comes to local listings, this is doubly so.

Local listings are just the type of the iceberg. “We have a rich, blended page of results with multiple forms of paid adverts, organic results, news, images, local listings, and so on,” Marcus Miller told us in a September 4 Search Engine Land post called Local SEO Is Not An Island (Or At Least It Shouldn’t Be!).

The point is, you have a lot of ways to pull in your local SEO traffic. Reviews, however, are the best way.

There’s a lot more sections as Miller mentions in that post, and these include:

Sponsored results;
Reviews;
The map feature.

Many of those are now given to us in the “snack pack” size, which is also sometimes called the “local stack.” Here’s what that looks like:

Sites with the most reviews will get to the top of the Local SERP

I’m getting most of the local search features with this search for “Missoula restaurants,” though there’s no map.

As you can see, reviews are critical, and the restaurant with the best shows up first.

Something else that’s interesting is that the sponsored results on the right just point to restaurant guides and not an actual place to eat. So much for sponsored results, at least in this market!

Clearly, reviews are critical for local SEO. Businesses that want to succeed need to find ways to encourage their customers to leave reviews. If they can do that they’ll soar past competitors who can’t or won’t.

#5 Images Continue to Do Well in Local Search

I don’t read enough about how images can get you traffic and that’s a shame.

One way that gets my site tons of traffic is having images with good captions, good file names, and that are just plain useful.

One of the best posts I’ve seen for optimizing your images for title tags, alt text, and keyword variation was in April on SLR Lounge. It’s well worth a look.

The posts discusses a photography website and mentions that images can give your site a “significant boost.” The reason for this is that image results “use a different algorithm than organic search.” Because of this “you can potentially rank well in image searches for your keywords, even if you’re not doing so well in the organic results.”

That’s a pretty good tip, and it’s why I always have lots of images on this site. I go with a lot of Montana history on Big Sky Words and I have images that few others have.

Many of these I had to get from files at places like the library or the historical society. And you know what? When people click over to the “image” section of search, they find me.

Images are a great way to reach local searchers that are interested in seeing what they’ve been hearing about.

Sites specializing in events, history, activities, and especially the outdoors will benefit from this. Really, though, it’s so easy to take a picture and put it on the computer. It’s even easier to find an image elsewhere – or better yet, several images – and make a composite post with them.

It comes up in search, and Google notices this. That drives your site up in the rankings for those keywords and categories.

Don’t discount images – too many other sites do and it costs them local traffic and traffic from the larger surrounding areas.

**Conclusion: For Small Businesses, All SEO is Local**

Why Local SEO Is About to Become Even More Important was a June 25 post on Entrepreneur by Jayson Demers. He talks about how local SEO has grown a lot since the late-July 2014 Pigeon algorithm update.

Demers makes it a point to mention that “Google loves small businesses,” and may give them an edge in the rankings. I think this is great, for them and me.

Small businesses need agile and effective websites with content that draws in likely prospects.

You can do this through local SEO content that focuses on your unique niche, allowing you to move up in the rankings.

For some businesses, getting from page 3 to page 1 in the SERP could mean huge revenue boosts, and possibly the hiring of additional workers.

It all comes about because so many are looking on their phones for information, and Google keys in on their geo location and shows them business results closest to them.

That’s how we can get rid of our outsourcing problem with jobs and money going out of state, out of country.

That’s the power of the internet, and that’s what can be delivered when you harness the power of local SEO.

Is your site getting the local traffic that it deserves?

It will now, don’t you think?

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Analyzing Your Geo Analytics to Boost Traffic and Create Sales

9/11/2015

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Are you using the Geo Analytics feature on Google Analytics?

Here’s where you’d find that on the main screen:

Google Analytics' Geo Analytics feature is your friend

You want to go ahead and click on "Location" to bring up this cool looking map:

Wow, I have a global reach! Still, I'm not going to ramp up my Africa efforts just yet.

The darker the blue color, the more traffic you’re getting. I’m getting most of mine from the US for the month of June, 5,028 hits to be exact.

You can see that by hovering over the area, and you’ll also see the maximum on that bar on the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

Besides that, you’ll get a detailed spreadsheet of information below the map.

This is hard to read because I resized it for a Social Media Today guest post, but I never heard from them. Bummer.

When I click on the US on that continent map I’ll be taken to this map:

Looks like I'm reaching every state of the union

Again, it’s pretty easy to tell where I’m getting most of my traffic, and I don’t even need to hover – 1,542 hits is reported on the analytics bar.

I also know that the smallest geographical area on the map (a state in this case) only gave me 5 hits. I’ll also get that cool spreadsheet to tell me bounce rate and average session duration, like we saw above.

So it’s clear that Montana is the state I’m getting most of my traffic, which isn’t surprising – I write about local politics and the state’s history.

A lot of my evergreen content is geared towards the state as well.

Don't call the doctor, just the SEO guy

Looking at the map, you can see those larger urban areas of the state. Montana has six major urban areas, and my traffic from them breaks down likes so:

Missoula: 555
Helena: 384
Kalispell: 121
Bozeman: 117
Great Falls: 100
Billings: 32

There’s one other major city in the state, and that’s Butte, which is giving me 28 hits. Again, all of that is given to me in the spreadsheet.

I went back two months later (July 29 to August 28 results) and looked at those results again.

Global hits went from two 5,028 to 4,583, a drop of about 9%. For the US, my traffic had gone from 1,542 hits to 1,406, the same 9% drop.

For my traffic in Montana, it decreased as follows:

Missoula: 487
Helena: 334
Bozeman: 138
Kalispell: 131
Billings: 79
Great Falls: 62

So we have a slight drop in my lead city of Missoula, as well as my second largest city, Helena. Bozeman has gone up enough hits to overtake Kalispell as the third largest metropolitan market I have.

Billings has also moved up, quit significantly over Great Falls. Butte has fallen from the rankings entirely, and has actually been taken over by a different city, Livingston.

Why did this happen?

In June I put out a total of 40 posts on my site, while in July I put out 28 and in August I put out 35. That may have cost me, and I feel that it being August, the last month of summer, also cost me.

I personally feel that many sites feel a slight dip during certain times of the year, such as the last month of summer and around holidays like Christmas.

This Webmaster World commentary from 2006 seems to bolster my argument.

I’m sorry, but for some unknown reason, there are hardly any articles on the affects of summer on website traffic.

Analyzing Social and SEO Trends with Geo Analytics

What I’m really looking for with this information are trends.

For instance, I could be targeting these cities with my statewide SEO services. Something we talk about on my site a lot is politics, so if it’s an election year and you’re running a statewide campaign, this could be very helpful.

Tracking where your campaign website is doing well and in what cities it’s not can be the make-or-break in an election today.

That’s why that extra city of Butte interested me. That’s a Democratic stronghold, and if my site isn’t doing well there, that’s a problem.

I need it to do better there, so that might mean some content geared toward that city’s news stories, or a service that’s missing, or even some image posts that might pull in hits from Google Image (one of the most underrated traffic generators, in my opinion).

The point is, you’ve got a wealth of information here with this Geo Analytics tracking on Google Analytics. An added bonus is that graphical user interface.

Let’s face it – Google Analytics can be off-putting. The more graphs and visual representations of numbers, the easier it is, and the more people will use it.

Let’s take a look at another example, this one looking at California. I get very few hits from this state, just 59.

But wow, look how things are so much more clustered together than they were in Montana!

Wow, that looks impressive...until you read the number

Those are dense population centers, cities crowding together. Imagine if you were getting not 59 hits, but 59,000, or 590,000.

How would you use Google Analytics and their Geo Analytics function to figure things out…or even keep your head from exploding?

I went in a couple days after these initial maps and looked at just that day, July 3. It was only 3:00 PM when I did so, and I’d had 110 total sessions, 71 of them (65%) coming from the US.

No, it's not unexplored territory in the 1800s - it's my website's reach

As you can see from the map, many states aren’t giving me any traffic at all.

The most hits are still coming from Montana, but with just 25, we know it’s only 35% of my total traffic for the country. Florida, not California today, looks like it’s giving me quite a bit of traffic, 9 hits, but still 12%.

What’s going on there?

For me, FL is nothing to write home about

There’s nothing too impressive about the map, since the traffic is so low, but it’s clear that 44% of my Florida traffic is clustered around two metropolitan areas – Jacksonville and St. Augustine. Now, what pages are they looking at, and how did they get to my site?

For that you’ll have to stray over to the “Content” section of Google Analytics. In my case, they were looking at one of my evergreen articles, one on eBook cover designers.

Chances are good that some friends in Florida sent messages on social media about that article. It might be a good idea for me to include a Florida writer’s hashtag the next time I promote that post.

Real-Time Geo Analytics

Another great feature is the Real-Time option that Google Analytics gives you. There’s also a location feature, and you can actually see how many people are on your site right now, and where they’re at.

See the location of users in real time with Google Analytics

You can also see which pages those users are on, something that can really give you an idea of which geographical or local SEO targets you’re reaching, and right in the midst of a campaign.

Measuring real time users with Google Analytics Geo feature

Remember, my site is small potatoes. Your site might have hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of visitors at any given moment.

When you know your social media posting schedules and you’re in the midst of a hot campaign – perhaps one that’s butting right up your competitors’ – you can react quickly, see what’s working and what’s not, and act accordingly.

Want more information?

The New Geo Network Dimensions in Google Analytics was a February 2015 post on Daimto that has some tips that explores this more.

How to Navigate the Google Analytics Location Report was a June 2013 Search Engine Watch report with some tips as well.

Both are great resources for increasing your knowledge about this.

Conclusion

Why use this Google Analytics feature?

If you have a business, or political campaign, you’ll want to look into what Geo Analytics can do for you. All of these features are in Google Analytics now, and you can use them for free.

If you have a team, someone should be on this, figuring out how to get your message out better so it benefits our goals.

If you’re a solo entrepreneur, Geo Analytics allows you to see smaller markets and how they react to your content. This allows you to tailor advertising to the utmost effect, saving you time and money and a lot of frustration.

Like most cool features that are pointed out to you, however, probably the hardest part is just using them. It’s easy to nod our head and say, ‘wow, I should do that,’ but sadly, so few of us do.

Don’t let that happen this time. Start looking into your Geo Analytics with Google Analytics. Your site and business will perform better as a result.

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Social Media Politics is Now Available

6/26/2015

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Are you thinking of running for office?

Maybe you think 2016 is your year. The country is pissed off, Congress is broken, and there’s more money in politics than ever before. Yeah, maybe it is your year.

So what are you going to do? First you’ll probably talk it over with your family, then kick it around with some friends. Eventually you’ll sign those papers and file ‘em and then it’s off to the races.

Now what?

If you’re like most people, you’ll announce your candidacy, send out some letters asking for money, and then…nothing. You’ll sit there, waiting, waiting until it’s closer to election day and you can campaign.

Wrong!

You need to be on social media, you need to have your candidate website attracting attention, you need to make people know who you are!

That’s what social media is for, and that’s what my latest book talks about. Social Media Politics: Using the Internet to Get Elected is a 194-page book with 11 chapters on everything from:

A Basic History of Social Media;
Setting up Your Social Accounts;
Making Posts that Draw Attention;
Figuring out How to Make People Care;
Creating a Following;
Identifying Your Opponent’s Strengths;
Exploiting Your Opponent’s Weaknesses;
Integrating Social with Regular Election Efforts;
Making Mistakes and Moving Past Them;
Using Google Analytics for Your Campaign Website;
Manipulating the Media for Free Advertising.

You’ll get a lot more than that, but that’s the gist of it. Each chapter has several subheadings and you get real examples from the 2014 campaigns.

If you’re going to run for office, this book will give you ideas. It’s $4.99 and available on Amazon, being published to iTunes, and will be available in print format in a few days.

Stop wondering how to get elected and start making it happen today. Buy this book and make your election dreams come true.

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Stats, Spats and History Chats

6/18/2015

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I’m not in a good mood today, and I blame Weebly.

Weebly is the provider I use for this website. They give me all these layout options and once a year I pay them about $70 or so. That means I can keep putting up blog content, and since I make more than $70 a month from this site, it’s a pretty good deal.

That is…until things go south. I’ve written about Weebly and my problems with them before, specifically in a post called How Weebly Website Analytics Reporting is Off by Over 1,200%.

That was back at the end of January, and the whole issue was that Weebly cut their stats in half. In effect, everyone that was getting 1,000 unique visitors was suddenly getting 500. Did these people just go away? No, websites thought they had that many people, but then Weebly pulled the rug out from under them. Yep, the company had been lying to its customers.

Weebly would never admit to such, and it’ll say it made a mistake. Actually, they’ll say nothing, as was the case this weekend when stats went haywire. They said nothing, sent no emails, and hoped no one would notice. Well, how the hell do you not notice this?

June 10, 2015, Weebly stats crash

Yeah, on June 10 I had zero visitors. I find that hard to believe, mighty hard to believe.

So I sent them some emails:

Weebly made it clear they didn't know what the problem was, and that they would cover it up

What I’m talking about with those stats are the unique visitors. Last week I was getting around 600 a day. Then we had this “Weebly Adjustment” and I’m getting about half of that.

Weebly unique visits now half of what they were...no explanation given

I have no idea why this is, Weebly is telling me the issue is fixed, but my posts are still wildly off.

I'm sorry, but 9 hits in 2 days is not correct

I’d like to add that I haven’t paid Weebly in about 2 years, as they give me a free year of service after incidents like this, because I complain so much. Hey, I’m not paying for this. I run a business, and when people don’t get what they want, they complain to me. Why is Weebly so special?

They have support staff that listens to the complaints, unlike me, the owner of my business. I don’t know where the owner of Weebly is, but it sure as shit isn’t in the office fixing the company’s problems.

Something else I’m ticked off about is the Montana Meth Project, which Flathead Memo has talked about recently. What that site brings up is that the head of the Montana Meth project is being paid $130,770 a year…and the program doesn’t work.

Amy Rue heads up the Montana Meth Project and makes $130,770 a year doing so

Yeah, that’s our friend Amy Rue, the executive director that’s got quite the resume. How did she get this job? I guess it was because of her high-minded friends, people like Tom Ridge and Tony Blair and the Vanguard Group.

More than likely, however, it was her good friend Lisa Bullock, who’s also on the failed program’s board.

The governor's wife is also on the Meth Project board. One of the men responsible for our terrible journalism environment in Montana is too.

Lisa Bullock pops up in some interesting places, like organizations that profit off of our healthcare marketplaces. She and her husband make a lot of money for their Montana service, a lot. Unfortunately, this meth program uses our instilled fear of drugs to keep up a war that affects few, wastes millions, and has little to show for its efforts…besides enriching those at the top. I sure as shit know our law enforcement isn’t having an easier time, but then few of them are paid so exorbitantly.

4&20 Blackbirds continues to deteriorate. The people “running” the site can’t save it. They can’t post!

It takes more than just a post a week to make a website. The current “leadership” there doesn’t have what it takes. I expect we’ll see that site dry up like some husk on the side of the road. You’ll visit from time to time, but you’ll keep seeing that same July date mark, that same tired post. Maybe it’ll be a farewell post, a sorry post, a ‘we fought the good fight, but just couldn’t do it’ kind of post.

So one less site in the Montana blogosphere and nothing coming up to replace it. I don’t know what those old writers are going to do – get a life, I suppose.

Oh well, maybe it’s for the best. Montanans don’t really want news, and they sure as shit don’t want political commentary. Opinions are not wanted, and facts are not found. There’s no reporting from Helena anymore, and even yesterday KTVH Channel 12 there put an ad out for a new News Director. Seems even Al Marks might be hanging it up.

Here in Missoula Sherry Devlin is finally out, as the Missoulian is looking for a new editor. I fully expect Devlin will be forced to train her replacement, a replacement that will be making half her pay, sans benefits. I personally believe that Lee and other companies like them use the threat of the severance package being severed to force now-valueless workers to train the ‘next generation.’

That’s my opinion of course, so please don’t sue me, Lee.

Failure

Let’s talk about Obama for a moment.

What happened!?!

This guy used to be a byword for hope, no he’s just a synonym for sell-out. I’m ashamed of him, I’m ashamed to call him American. I’m not ashamed to question whether he is America or not, because he sure acts like a traitor.

I mean…why, Obama, why? Why do you insist on TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership?

There’s another bill up before the House today, and I’m positive Zinke will vote for it. But the real question is…

Why is Obama pushing these terrible trade deals on America?

Why is he seeking to eliminate jobs so those jobs can open up in places like Vietnam for one-tenth of the pay?

Why are the job retraining programs being cut from this latest version of the bill?

It smells so bad it’s not even funny. It’s clear that Obama is not a Democrat, but then I’ve been saying many in the Montana Democratic Party aren’t Democrats.

You can’t hurt workers – you help workers!

But we’ve forgotten even this simple truth, this easy to understand belief. Now Democrats in America just do all they can to hurt workers, just like Republicans and their outsourcing.

It’s a real shame, and I’m not sure I want to be a Democrat anymore. What’s the point? What’s the point when you see this, when you see the Democratic president push for policies that hurt this country, and that even Republicans say are bad?

And then to not even see your fellow Democrats speak out against this man?

We had leaders in this state, back in 1937 when Senator Wheeler spoke out against FDR and his plan to add new justices to the Supreme Court. It wasn’t popular, but it was right.

We’ve forgotten that, and it’s killing us.

Not everything is making me angry. I’m finishing up with this big project for a guy in Asia, a book on selling products on Amazon. That means the rent will be paid for July and I can push on, doing what I do, driving everyone crazy, and keeping those people asking, ‘why won’t he get a job?’

Because I have a job. I get paid, and though I don’t sit in an office and don’t collect benefits and don’t have retirement, I’m happy.

I like what I do!

I get up early and look forward to “going to work.” Most people don’t, and that’s why they give up, get angry, or lash out. I do those things too, but I like it.

I like bashing politicians and telling people how stupid they are!

And you know what? Most Americans are just like me. Right now Congress has about an 8% approval rating, so this is gold. Why do you think you see Jon Tester’s staff putting stuff on Twitter all day? They know people hate Congress, and they have to work really hard to get that win in 2018.

I don’t – I don’t have to do shit. I actually try to make their lives more difficult. It’s because I know that politics is no different from a game of tug-of-war. You’re pushing and pulling candidates to do what you want. It’s always easier to pull, and more effective. Pushing often gets them to do the exact opposite of what you tell them to. And sometimes, that’s exactly how you get what you want.

I’m getting stalled on my Montana book again. Here’s what the Table of Contents looks like so far:

Modern Montana history books

I’m not sure if I’ll include all that, as the book is already up to 400 pages and I’ve hardly added any images at all. I might have to save some things for the next volume…I don’t know.

Right now the 1930s and the 1940s are done. That means they’re written and in order, I just have to go through and clean it up and read through it again.

For the 1950s, things are a mess. About 75% of the writing is done, but things really need to be organized. Some things still need to be tackled, such as the early history of the CIA as it morphed from the OSS, and the funding connections for all that. A short history of the Middle East is also something I need to do, though I have most of the rough notes and just have to tie it together.

It’s a good book, and I hope to have it done soon. I don’t feel as though I need to rush, mainly because few of you are waiting to buy it. The first book has sold 192 copies so far, while the latest book has only sold 20 copies. Even the book before that only sold 39 copies…so it’s clear that people aren’t that interested in the more modern history of Montana, like I thought they’d be.

That’s a real shame, as you can see from this graph.

My Montana History Book Sales

That’s still 316 total sales of my four Montana books, which is pretty good. I like it. That’s a lot better than I thought I’d do when I started writing this series back in March 2013 when I was living in China. Now I’m more than halfway done, with the fifth book due out soon and only two more after that.

What could you do if you put your mind to it?

2 Comments

Want Explosive Website Traffic Growth? Then Why Aren’t You On Google+?

5/25/2015

3 Comments

By now you’ve probably noticed my use of Google+. Perhaps you’ve noticed the Google+ badge I’ve got on the sidebar, as well as the Google+ follow button I’ve got on the homepage.

What I especially hope you’ve noticed, however, are the number of followers I have.

Right now I’ve got just under 7,000 followers, which is up from the 480 followers I had when I wrote a post last May called Increasing Your Social Media Presence for Free.

So how’d I get an extra 6,500 people to follow me over the past year? Simple, I followed some fast and easy social media principles of sharing relevant and quality content that people actually care about.

Mainly though, I got a bunch of people that aren’t interested in me to follow me. (Ugh…circle shares – if you’re on the network, you know what I mean) That’s one of the problems with Google+, and you get low engagement because of it. But boy, do you get some traffic boosts by sharing on Google+, as you can see from my May 2014 website traffic:

May 2014 Analytics

Actually, last May I only had 85 links from Google+, but a lot more from Google, which indexes your content a lot faster if you share it on its social arm of its company. Now let’s compare that to my May 2015 traffic:

May 2015 Analytics

So this month you can see I’ve gotten 9,510 direct hits from Google so far, with 133 coming directly from their social network. Wow, that’s hardly an increase at all over the past year, just 85 hits to 133, or a growth of 156%. When you look at my traffic from Google, however, it’s gone from 2,394 to 9,510, or an increase of nearly 400%.

(In case you’re wondering what that spike in traffic on May 7 was, that was a story NBC ran on Tom Brokaw and his battle with cancer. When people look for Tom Brokaw and Montana, I get the lion’s share of the traffic, as I profiled in my post The Power of Evergreen Content).

Oh, and in case you noticed...Google+ can in no way compete with Facebook when it comes to referral traffic. I mean, more than 1,100 Facebook referrals this month compared to the 133 of Google+? Still, most of my traffic does come from Google, just the search engine, not the social network.

So what are the social media and marketing principles that you can use to get your site huge increases in traffic as well?

I’m happy to tell you that you’ll find them in my collection of social media, SEO and content marketing books.

Oh, and please don’t forget that you can get Google+ for Authors and Bloggers for free…just sign-up for my email list.

So...what’s the catch? Um…All you’ve got to do is sign-up for my email list and you’ll get a PDF, .mobi, or .epub – there is no catch on that book (you can buy it too).

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your site!

3 Comments

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​#1 Rand will do 52 posts this year

​#2 Hashtags in Titles will Fade #Away

​#3 Barry Schwartz’s Content will Get Shorter

​#4 We’ll Stop Using [INFOGRAPHIC] in Our Titles

​#5 Google+ Will Lose More Users as People Flee the New Mobile Design and Current Users Die Off

​#6 Melissa Mayer will Finally be Fired from Yahoo

​#7 More Sites will Close Comments

​#8 We’ll See A Pull Back from Email Marketing

​#9 Twitter Goes Back on Share Counter Takeaway

​#10 SEO Sites Focus More on Content Marketing and Social Media

​Conclusion

​You Might Also Like

#1 Google Likes to Unroll Algorithm Updates Around Thanksgiving

#2 Google Could Be Interested in Hitting Spammers Where it Hurts

#3 Google Doesn’t Want to Be Malicious, It Doesn’t Want to Surprise

​Conclusion

Search Engine Land’s Take on RankBrain

The Verge’s Take on RankBrain

The Bloomberg Business Take on RankBrain

The Daily Mail’s Take on RankBrain

Conclusion

#1 Mobile is Driving the Local SEO Revolution

#2 Geo Targeting Produces Leads and Campaign Ideas

#3 Use Google Maps to Target Local Search Areas

#4 Businesses with Reviews Soar Ahead on Local Searches

#5 Images Continue to Do Well in Local Search

Conclusion: For Small Businesses, All SEO is Local

Analyzing Social and SEO Trends with Geo Analytics

Real-Time Geo Analytics

Conclusion

Writing Blogby Greg Strandberg

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My Books(By Publication Date, New to Old)

Archives

#1 Rand will do 52 posts this year

#2 Hashtags in Titles will Fade #Away

#3 Barry Schwartz’s Content will Get Shorter

#4 We’ll Stop Using [INFOGRAPHIC] in Our Titles

#5 Google+ Will Lose More Users as People Flee the New Mobile Design and Current Users Die Off

#6 Melissa Mayer will Finally be Fired from Yahoo

#7 More Sites will Close Comments

#8 We’ll See A Pull Back from Email Marketing

#9 Twitter Goes Back on Share Counter Takeaway

#10 SEO Sites Focus More on Content Marketing and Social Media

Conclusion

You Might Also Like

Conclusion

**Conclusion: For Small Businesses, All SEO is Local**

Writing Blog
by Greg Strandberg

My Books
(By Publication Date, New to Old)