As if you needed another reason to consider putting more energy into your content marketing efforts.

Arbor Networks, an online security company, recently released a report that shows Google now accounts for 6.4 percent  of all internet traffic worldwide. This is a record for Google, who also announced that its web traffic increased by 1 percent of all internet traffic share since January of this year. The fact that  Google is seeing such impressive gains in market share is made only more impressive when you consider the fact that overall internet traffic has been growing by about 40-45 percent each year.

Right now, only one ISP is ahead of Google in terms of internet traffic share, but a lot of that traffic is actually Google’s as well.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the internet giant had an “excellent quarter” and “continued to show significant momentum.”

That may be an understatement. Experts estimate that Google’s percentage of overall internet traffic share may be closer to 8-12 percent when you consider estimates of traffic offloaded by Google Global Cache deployments.

This news is obviously great for Google, but it could also be great for your business. What better time to consider online marketing services to optimize your web content and really start going after some market share? Wouldn’t you like to be part of the upward momentum?

Just think, if Google managed to snag another 1 percent of global internet traffic share between January and today, even in the face of explosive internet growth, just think of where it could be a year from now.

More importantly, think of where your business could be.

Image from Arbor Networks

This past Wednesday, Google unveiled its new Instant search feature. Instead of having to type in a single search query, users now get to see a whole page of results as they are still typing. According to Google, people type slowly but are able to read quickly. The average user will take 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but 30 milliseconds to scan a results page. Ergo, someone could theoretically scan a page of search results while continuing to type, refining his search in real time.

Blogger Steve Rubel feels that Google Instant marks the beginning of the end for Search Engine Optimization. His reasoning is that with this new feature, Google is now personalizing people’s searches, allowing them to change their search in real time such that no two people ever see the same Web. As you are typing something into the search box, a full page of results will come up, and will change as you continue typing. People will change their behavior based on the results they see, and continue to change and refine their search until they find exactly what they need.

Google has already stated that this new search method would likely change impression volumes for AdWords as well as the distribution of organic keywords. According to the Google AdWords blog, impressions will only be counted if a person hits “Search,” “Enter,” clicks a link on the results page or stops typing for three or more seconds. However, as SEO executive Jonny Cooper wrote in the Daily Telegraph today, those who worry that SEO is now dead thanks to Google Instant are forgetting that Google has not changed its core system for deciding what search results are most relevant. Good point, Jonny.

Cooper does foresee long-tail keywords getting a bump in the rankings as a result of searches getting longer and more specific. Another effect of Google Instant? SEO could become more competitive as people will likely not read beyond the first three or four results as they type. Why would they? These coveted top positions will become even harder and more important for businesses to achieve.

Maybe this all just means we’ll have to work a little harder to produce quality content carefully targeted to a specific audience. SEO won’t die, it’ll just get better. We shouldn’t be too surprised that Google has found a faster, more streamlined way to deliver search results to the public. After all, filtering all the noise out there is a not a new problem, and we expected the SEO game to get tougher instead of easier.

Bottom line? You have to give the people what they want.  Their world—in a Google Instant.

Image from devicemag.com

I think of myself as a writer. I started blogging fairly regularly in high school on LiveJournal, or one of those sites. Through the years, I’ve attempted to keep up with my blogging, using sites like Blogger, Salon.com, WordPress—even designing my own web site on iWeb. You name the platform, I’ve pretty much tried them all!

Each time, I design a pretty new blog and swear to myself that I’ll write something, anything, in my blog every single day. Then, of course, life happens. Work, responsibilities, having a social life all get in the way and my blog falls by the wayside. Now, in my case, no one really gets disappointed. Except of course for my mother, and the one reader I have somewhere in Iowa.

Now, I’m just one person. But if you’re running a business, following my inconsistent content model can spell disaster. Joe Pulizzi wrote an interesting post on Junta42′s content marketing blog last week that addressed a topic you don’t often see on the blog of a content marketing agency: 7 Reasons NOT to do Content Marketing. A lot of the reasons had to do with consistency. If you’re going to start producing content, you need to be committed to providing fresh, informative content on a regular basis, otherwise you look worse than you would if you never started. Furthermore, your content needs to original, relevant, and customer-focused (so stop talking about yourself so much, will you?).

Before you write one word, you need to know what the end goal of your content marketing effort is. Do you want to increase traffic? Improve conversion? Inform? All of the above? Tailor your strategy—you have a strategy, right?—to fit this end goal. And make sure everyone involved, even at the highest levels, is involved in the process and knows exactly how and why you are producing your content.

Maybe I should follow this advice for my personal blog. I wouldn’t want to disappoint mom.

Image from christthetruth.files.wordpress.com

This coming Monday, May 31st, the United States will commemorate Memorial Day with a long weekend, parades, barbecues and of course, white outfits. Better yet, the weather has promised to be ideal, at least here in the Northeast. However, did you know that this year, Memorial Day will share the limelight with another holiday? It’s true. May 31st is also Quit Facebook Day, at least for the 23, 384 Facebook users (as of this writing) who have committed to deleting their accounts come Monday.

Maybe you’ve heard about Facebook’s problems of late. Complaints about the social networking giant’s treatment of its users’ information have been brewing for a while, but hit a crescendo around April when CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be deepening its connections with partner sites—whatever that means. Consumer watchdog groups, members of Congress, and the Federal Trade Commission have all expressed concerns over Facebook’s privacy policies, or lack thereof. Recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policies, including cutting the number of settings from 50 to about 15, and reducing the number of pages users have to sift through from 7 to 3, have not satisfied the more vocal critics.

In addition to the bad PR, this whole privacy fiasco—and things like Quit Facebook Day—could spell money trouble down the road as well. The bulk of Facebook’s revenue comes in the form of advertising dollars. Advertisers love Facebook, and its 400 million global users. When a user creates a Facebook profile, information gets handed over to the site—and its partners. Yes, and you didn’t think anyone really cared that you like to travel, take long drives, and eat ham sandwiches, did you? Somewhere out there, however, is an advertiser that cares very much. It is this information that allows advertisers to easily break down users’ demographics and tailor their advertising—this gives them a huge ROI.

What Facebook has seemingly failed to do is find that happy medium between respecting its users and providing advertisers with useful information. If Facebook just hands over users’ information to the advertisers willy-nilly, then eventually people will stop using the site, and advertisers will move on to the next big thing. However, if Facebook overcompensates and becomes less advertiser-friendly, the same outcome will occur. If Facebook had just respected its users’ information from the very beginning,  advertisers wouldn’t have gotten used to having such free reign over their market. See? There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Of course, 23, 384 people out of 400 million isn’t likely to make a huge dent in Facebook’s wallet, but Quit Facebook Day could be a sign of a trend, and Facebook needs to learn to walk a razor-thin line between its commitments to its users and to its partners.

Lesson learned—know (and respect) thy audience.

Image from sdow.semanticweb.org

Let’s be honest, when Apple unveiled its new, giant version of the iPod Touch, err…iPad on January 27^th, the usual sense of wonder and sparkle just wasn’t really there. The initial excitement quickly became overshadowed by jokes about the name, and by the realization that the iPad did, indeed, appear to be a really big, more awkward iPod Touch.

This particular writer’s opinion aside, the fact remains that the iPad is just the next step in an ongoing content revolution. Maybe you thought that content was just about as accessible as it was ever going to be. Think again. With the iPad, the reliability and convenience of a computer meets the gadgetry of an iPod Touch, meaning that essentially every method you could employ to reach your target audience is now accessible to them in one place.

Perhaps you’re using an ebook as part of your content marketing strategy. Perfect. The iPad’s iBooks app lets your readers tap right on your book on their simulated bookshelf and read it right there on the screen. Your company’s podcasts can be downloaded on iTunes and listened to right away as the iPad also serves as an iPod. With the YouTube app, promotional and informational videos can be accessed at the tap of a finger. The iPad is also capable of using all the same apps that your consumers may already be familiar with. Have you looked into developing your own mobile apps?

Of course, with internet capabilities, your company’s web site with all its content, widgets, etc., will be instantly available along with your company’s blog, newsletter, social media sites and every other aspect of your content marketing plan. And if you don’t already utilize some of these assets, maybe you should consider it! The moral of the iPad – Diversify!

Of course, with the unveiling of the iPad, many more products along the same lines will no doubt be hitting the market in the coming months and years. As content becomes more streamlined and easily accessible, you will definitely want to make your content marketing assets more mobile friendly. This might sound daunting, but the more people use these kinds of devices, the easier it will be for you to get your brand out there, reach your target consumers, increase traffic, inform, earn trust and build revenue!

Welcome to the new decade, folks!

Image from Los Angeles Times

Byron White, President of ideaLaunch, and Carolyn McKibbin, Director of Content Services, presented a Webinar entitled “Tracking Content ROI”  at the BrightTALK Content Marketing Summit on January 20^th.

Byron started by going over some of the basics behind content marketing and the factors that can make it challenging if you don’t have a solid strategy. The goal of content marketing is to engage, educate, and earn the trust of potential clients or customers. The idea is that once potential clients or customers come to see you as a trusted source of industry information, they will move out of the “potential”category and become converted.

Readers, however, are moving at a faster pace than ever nowadays, so Byron explains that we need to be catching people “on the fly.” Using content assets like applets, webinars, desktop downloads, RSS feeds, Podcasts, mobile apps, widgets and gadgets (all with marks of your brand identity), you can easily, quickly reach out to today’s discriminating consumers.

Carolyn then took over and began her portion of the Webinar discussing the importance of researching how a particular client stacks up against its competition. Detailing this helps pinpoint opportunities for improvement. Then, a content and SEO plan is created. This process begins by going after the “low-lying fruit,”—keywords between positions 11-50 in Google that will give clients the best chance of reaching higher listings.

Clients should be involved the whole way as well, going through keyword lists and choosing “golden keywords,” some that have higher rankings than others. Those with high rankings are referred to as primary keywords and will do the work of improving client rankings for their web site, and other, secondary keywords, help to buffer the primary keywords by providing them with relevancy that tells the search engines what that page is talking about.

Using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter is an effective way to find out what people are saying about your clients and their industry. This insight will help you to develop an effective content strategy and find the right content assets to formulate that strategy. Content should always be time-stamped and scored to determine the effect that it is having for the client

Return on Investment (ROI) can be measured in a lot of ways. Increases in listing position, sales, traffic, warm leads, conversion rates, and decreased user acquisition cost all point to positive ROI. All of this should be correlated with your content assets to see what has had the most effect and when. You can also track your landing pages—looking at traffic, repeat visitation and the length of time people are spending on your site. Like Byron says, “If you’re not tracking your landing pages, you’re living in the dinosaur age.”

Image from buffalocoin.com

In my daily blog perusal, I came across a Junta42 post about content marketing predictions for 2010. I swear, I do read other blogs. This post just happened to almost perfectly fit in with a conversation we had here at an ideaLaunch pizza party yesterday.

I know I can’t do the post justice, but to sum it up quickly, it basically says that video will be used much more in marketing for 2010, marketing will go more and more mobile, companies will outsource their content, quality will trump quantity and there will be much more offline content.

I was heartened to read that and then read through the actual responses that Junta42 received to its question: “What is your prediction for how brand marketers will create and distribute their own content in 2010?” I even saw crowdsourcing mentioned as one thing marketers will use more in 2010. How ‘bout that?

I digress. What does this all mean for us? Yesterday, a colleague, Holly and I were discussing our itsy-bitsy attention spans. Such a massive amount of information is thrown at us every single day that our attention spans now resemble a hummingbird on Red Bull. Repeated requests to check out someone or some company on Twitter, invitations to Facebook groups, YouTube clips, viral marketing campaigns—it’s a jungle out there. We’ve been left stranded, wandering in a land of noise. We’ve developed an ability to weed out the important, relevant (to us at least) content, but a side effect of that is an attention span that is merely a fraction of what it once was. We even admitted, with a tinge of shame, that our attention spans are so short, we sometimes don’t even click on YouTube clips because we just don’t have the time.

It appears that in 2010, maybe things will be better. Businesses seem like they are beginning to understand the err of their ways. If Junta42’s predictions come to fruition, businesses will target their audiences more effectively and develop relevant, authoritative content. More importantly, that content will be of higher quality and usefulness. Perhaps this seeming evolution of content marketing is the logical next step. Perhaps it is because of all the noise that we, as consumers, are becoming more savvy and discriminating. Now companies have to change to adapt to the new set of needs their consumers have as a result of former marketing efforts. It’s the circle of life, people.

In the meantime, these changes likely won’t occur at midnight January 1. Just like cleaning up the Times Square confetti, these things take time.

Image courtesy of livedesignonline.com

Junta42 recently had an interesting blog post regarding the concept of crowdsourcing—which it calls “the buzzword of 2010.” What is crowdsourcing, you may ask?

I’m glad you asked.

The term crowdsourcing was first coined by a 2006 Wired magazine article by Jeff Howe. Essentially, it’s when a brand reaches out to consumers to either solve a problem with one of its products, or even come up with new products or technologies. Get it? It’s like outsourcing, but to a crowd.

An example would be the uTest Bug Battle, a quarterly software testing competition where software testers from all over the globe compete to find bugs in today’s most popular web browsers, mobile phone apps, gaming apps, etc. As a result, bugs have been discovered and subsequently fixed in Facebook, MySpace, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox … the list goes on. Perhaps due to the time of year, the most recent Battle took place in November, where software testers competed to find bugs in the world’s top internet retailers: Amazon.com, Walmart.com and Target.com. Happy Holidays!

Seems genius, doesn’t it? I thought so too. The Junta42 post seemed to think so as well, but also seemed to suggest there was a rivalry between proponents of content marketing and those of crowdsourcing. But why would that be?

Perhaps it’s my youthful ignorance, but let’s put aside the issues of the economic downturn and shrinking marketing budgets. Wouldn’t combining content marketing with some sort of crowdsourcing endeavor be a great opportunity? Like Junta42’s post says, you need to use quality, targeted content marketing to reach your perfect target audience. Ideally, your content will educate your consumers on your specific industry and your own particular line of products or services. Your consumers will grow to trust you and rely on you for information. After you have educated your audience, you present them with a problem or challenge related to your niche, and you watch your little babies fly. They brainstorm and come up with an array of solutions for you. You grow to trust them. You sleep soundly at night knowing you have reached your target group of consumers, and they feel a sense of pride and ownership over their new ideas. Talk about a strong, healthy and productive business-consumer relationship!

At the end of the day, isn’t that the whole point of marketing anyway?

In case you haven’t heard (or noticed), Twitter announced today that it changed its prompt question from “What are you doing?” to “What’s Happening?” The question has been shortened by only 2 characters, but represents a big shift in the way people, companies and organizations are using Twitter.

You didn’t even know there was a question there, did you? Don’t feel bad. I didn’t notice it either. But it’s still kind of a big deal.

“What are you doing?” has been the question to which users are meant to respond in 140-character snippets since Twitter started. “What are you doing?” inspires responses like “heading to class,” or “developing content marketing strategy,” or “getting my nails done, then maybe drinks with the girls.” The new question is a sign that the people over at Twitter (the Twitterati?), are seeing that users have now taken control of the social networking tool and are making it work in ways that benefit them. Businesses use Twitter to advertise to millions of potential customers for free, offering promotions, deals and other incentives. Bloggers use Twitter to share ideas and increase traffic to their sites. Companies use Twitter to advertise for jobs, to reach out to new markets and network with similar companies through tweeting and retweeting industry buzz.

“Having a cup of tea, then heading to bed”—ha, that is so yesterday. Well, not really. People are still using Twitter the same way they used it yesterday, but this seemingly small change signals the huge shift in social media that has taken place in such a small amount of time. “What’s happening?” seems cool, hip, current, but yet remains vague enough so that it fits with whatever a particular user is tweeting about.

The social media revolution is in full swing, and the Twittrati have noticed.

photo courtesy of http://www.thewwwblog.com/retweet-guide.html