32 Corporations Spent More On Compensation For Top Executives In 2010 Than They Paid In Income Taxes

Over the last few decades, executive pay at large corporations has skyrocketed. Today, American CEOs make 263 times the average compensation for American workers, up from the 30 to 1 ratio in the 1970s. In 2010 alone, CEO pay went up 27 percent while average worker pay went up just 2 percent.

At the same time, corporate tax revenue has plunged to historic lows. During the 1960s, for instance, the United States consistently raised nearly 4 percent of GDP in corporate revenue. During the 1970s, the total was still above 2.5 percent of GDP. But the U.S. now raises less than 1.5 percent of GDP from the corporate income tax.

According to a new report called “S.& P. 500 Executive Pay: Bigger Than …Whatever You Think It Is,” put together by the independent research firm R. G. Associates, there are currently 32 companies that actually spent more on compensation for their top executives in 2010 than they paid in corporate income taxes:

Total executive pay increased by 13.9 percent in 2010 among the 483 companies where data was available for the analysis. The total pay for those companies’ 2,591 named executives, before taxes, was $14.3 billion…Warming to his subject, Mr. Ciesielski also determined that 158 companies paid more in cash compensation to their top guys and gals last year than they paid in audit fees to their accounting firms. Thirty-two companies paid their top executives more in 2010 than they paid in cash income taxes.

This isn’t really surprising when you consider that several of the largest U.S. corporations simply paid no taxes at all last year. General Electric, for instance, made more than $5 billion last year, but had a tax rate of -64 percent, meaning it received billions in tax benefits. Boeing hasn’t paid any federal income tax in three years, while CEO Jim McNerny made $19 million last year.

At the moment, a slew of multinational corporations — who already pay exceedingly low taxes — are lobbying for yet another tax boondoggle that would cost the government nearly $80 billion in revenue over the next ten years. With corporate taxes already so low, and corporations flush with cash and paying tens of millions to their CEOs, there’s little reason to grant these huge companies yet another giant tax giveaway.

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SEO Considerations in a Connected Consumer World

On a sunny, warm day in Minneapolis, marketers gathered near one of the city’s best attractions – LakeCalhoun – to learn about “Search and the Connected Consumer”, a view of how people retrieve information online and what that means for the future online and search engine marketing.

Hosted by MIMA, the event featured Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, Search Engine Watch, ClickZ & Search Engine Strategies.

Mike started by educating the audience on the history of the World Wide Web and the Internet (note: they are not one in the same).

The idea of collecting information and making it available to the masses was on the minds of intellectuals/scientists long before it came to fruition into the World Wide Web. For example, in 1945 Vannevar Bush – a prominent scientist and a key person behind the creation of the Atomic Bomb – argued that as humans turned from war, scientific efforts should shift from increasing physical abilities to making all previously collected human knowledge more accessible.

Fast forward to 1998 and consider Google’s mission statement: “To organize the world’s information make it universally accessible and useful” and it sounds pretty familiar.

Next, Grehan spent a few minutes explaining how search engines work via the following 3 steps:

1. Crawling the Web

Most people are aware that Google ‘crawls the web’, the crawlers follow links and collect text. However, the crawlers themselves have very little to do if anything with ranking.

2. Indexing the Web

A crawler comes to a website, content is parsed out and an inverted index is created to identify what terms exist on what pages/documents. Think of an index in the back of a book – “chocolate” appears on pages 32, 157 and 256.

3. Analyzing the Web

Ranking content based solely on instances of keyword phrases on a web page quickly proved to be a flawed method because all a site had to do to improve its ranking was have more instances of the term on a page, whether relevant or not to the end user.

This is where hyperlink analysis for the web came into play as well as the idea of hubs, authorities and communities which identifies how and where different sites within similar communities, are linking and related to each other. Not all links are equal – some links are more equal than others. And some are infinitely more equal.

Hyperlink analysis algorithms make either one or both of these assumptions:

Assumption #1 – A hyperlink from page A to page B is a recommendation of page B by the author of page A

Assumption #2 – If page A and page B are connected by a hyperlink, then they might be on the same topic – they’re related

Search engines look further into link relationships to understand: If page C cites pages A and B, then A and B are said to be co-cited by C

Page A and B being co-cited by many other pages is evidence that A and B are somehow related to each other

Confused? Grehan breaks it down into this easier to understand statement:

Company websites can use keyword phrases and position themselves as the ‘Leader of Whatever’, but Google is asking ‘who else says so?’.

Links help distill the picture and identify votes of authority about your content by others.

The new science of networks and the addition of cyber communities has further impacted the need for quality, relevant links over quantity.

Other factors that influence ranking include Query Chains and User Trails.

Query Chains are Google’s ability to understand the cognitive processes a human will undertake when searching for information.

For example, if ‘enough’ people search for ‘special edition’, then ‘special collections’ and then ‘limited editions’ to find the result they want for limited edition books, Google will eventually serve the results for ‘limited editions’ when someone types in ‘special edition’ knowing what content they are most likely looking for.

Next is User Trail data which is collected by understanding what searchers click on and continue clicking links to additional content vs what they click on and hit the ‘back button’. Too many clicks to the back button for any particular search result can potentially lead to a dip in ranking position.

Now, that the audience was up-to-speed on how search engines work (or have worked to-date) the conversation turned toward the changing end user, aka “The Connected Consumer”.

In short, the end user – me, you, your prospects, grandma and everyone in between has changed and so too did the search experience.

We went from being satisfied with 10 blue links on a search results page to wanting more options and more ways to interact with information more quickly. The now ‘old-news’ roll out of Universal Search is still a significant change in the search experience if we are looking back of the evolution of search.

Images, video and now social updates appearing directly on the SERP (search engine results page) provide a quite different experience for the searcher.

So what can we gain from understanding the premise of compiling the world’s information, knowing how the search engines work and how they are changing? Better insight into how we better approach online marketing and specifically content marketing activities.

According to Grehan, to do this most effectively companies will need to transition from creating content for Google and rather focus on the people they are trying to reach (not the channels in which you try to reach them).

To do this, we need to understand user intent.

Informational

“This applies to the surfer who is really looking for factual information on the web. So they make a query like ‘low hemoglobin’ for instance. This is a medical condition. They are looking for specific info about this condition. That’s very close to classical information retrieval.”

Navigational

“When a surfer really wants to reach a particular website. If they do a query for Best Buy for example. What they probably want is to go directly to the website, as opposed to find a Wikipedia page on the history of the company.”

Transactional

“Transactional searches are when the surfer wants to do something on the web, through the web. Shopping, downloading a whitepaper, finding a service. In this case the searcher wants to find a search result that helps them complete the action or satisfies a need.”

What we do with this information is create content to help satisfy the intent of the searcher, thereby creating quality content that people will find helpful and ultimately may link to/share with their community. And this is perhaps the biggest change in search which is the shift toward information-seeking on social sites. No longer does the end user have to go Google or any other search engine to find information.

The same end user which is placing more trust in 3^rd party content and reviews is also finding ways to side-step browsers and instead accomplishing goals through the Internet/Apps.

In summary, the Connected Consumer is finding new ways to discover and interact with information, placing more value in non-traditional sources. Decision makers no longer act independently of each other but are all the more connected to other consumers, to other channel members and often to brands.

In turn, brands and companies are now vying for central position inside consumer networks and need to determine how they can best create information that satisfies the user intent, is recognized as valuable by other sources and available to the audience in the formats they prefer. This is a model not unlike the Persona Discovery, Consumption and Sharing approach we promote at TopRank Marketing.

Have thoughts on the best ways to connect with the Connected Consumer? Share them in the comments below!

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Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging – BlogWorld Expo New York

BlogWorld Expo is holding it’s first conference in New York this week and I’ll be presenting “Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging” on Tuesday at 10:15am as part of the Social Business Track. This post is a light preview of that session and I hope to see you there.

Is blogging dead? A number of high profile bloggers and news media sites from Scoble to Wired to the New York Times have opined the demise of blogging as a consequence of growing social destinations like Twitter and Facebook.

The reality is that like many other forms of media, blogging is evolving and with the right strategy, highly effective. Short attention spans are served by short form content like Tweets and status updates. When it comes to influence on business, longer form content like that found on blogs serves an essential purpose. Rather than displace the most valuable attention spent on blogs, social sites like networks, microblogging, media sharing, news and bookmarks facilitate awareness and engagement with blog content.

Smart online marketers see this and are putting their budgets and priorities where it matters. According to eMarketer, 1 in 3 businesses publish blogs for marketing and HubSpot’s recent  2011 State of Inbound Marketing reports that more companies rated blogs as “critical or important” (62%) than any other social channel. These investments are paying off: AdWeek’s “Changing Scope of Advertising” infographic cites blogs as the leading source of customer acquisition over any other social channel.

Key Messages of Your Niche Provide Focus for Content Promoted from the Blog to Networks and Channels of Distribution.

Blogs are perfectly suited as social media information hubs for companies or individuals that want to dominate their niche online. Blogs can play an essential role in an integrated search, social media and content marketing strategy that directly influences consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing. But with literally millions of blogs published online and mainstream media getting involved, how does a blog stand out, let alone dominate their niche?

The first step is to understand what your niche is.  Formalize your unique selling proposition (USP):  How is your content unique and how does it serve the needs of the people you’re trying to reach better than any other blog?  What does your blog stand for?  What specific can you focus on that represents demand (search keywords) and topical discussion (social)?

The mechanics of a coordinated blogging effort that leverage search, social and content marketing involves:

• Goals & objectives


• Key message and differentiator – USP


• Persona development


• Search and social keyword research


• Editorial plan mapped to search and social content


• Optimization


• Link analysis


• Social channel development


• Intersection with online PR, media relations, advertising


• Content promotion


• Real-time, adaptive


• Monitoring, measurement & refinement

Whether you’re frustrated with the performance of current blogging efforts or you’re starting a new blog and want to maximize effectiveness, following a coordinated online marketing approach with a focus, can force multiply the effect of a company’s ability to “Be where customers are looking” (search), “Be where customers are talking” (social) “Be a source of influence, trust and engagement” (content). The result? You dominate your niche because all signals of credibility point to your social hub whether it’s via search, social, media – push or pull.

For the full presentation, you’ll have too attend BlogWorld New York this week. Hope to see you there.

Sometimes I like to open presentations common questions people have on the topic. What questions do you have about making more out of your business blogging effort? What challenges do you have in your efforts to dominate your niche?

 

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Morning Briefing: June 22, 2011

By a 44 percent to 34 percent margin, more Americans say they believe they are worse off than when President Obama took office. The Bloomberg poll finds that more than “half of respondents say their children are destined to have a lower standard of living than they do.”

GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty warned his fellow Republicans to stay hawkish on Afghanistan, saying he fears a “retreat” towards “isolationism.” Echoing Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Pawlenty specifically went after Mitt Romney, whom Pawently thought was not gung ho enough about the endless and highly unpopular war.

Yesterday, South Carolina passed a tough anti-immigration law that requires police to check suspects’ immigration status following an arrest or traffic stop. While Democrats argued the bill set up “another avenue for racial profiling,” the GOP-led legislature passed the bill 69-43 and sends it to Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) who “confirmed she will sign it.”

A new study released by Nature Communications estimates that global warming could cause the temperature-related deaths of as many as 15,000 Europeans by 2070. The researchers estimate that deaths will be worst in southern Europe.

Leon Panetta was confirmed by a 100-0 vote in the U.S. Senate to be the next Secretary of Defense. “Leon Panetta heading up the Department of Defense is just a home-run choice,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

The Florida Education Association (FEA) filed a class action lawsuit against Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) Monday over his “unconstitutionally imposed” 3 percent pay cut on teachers to balance the budget. The FEA is joined by the Police Benevolent Association, the largest union of law enforcement officers in the state, in alleging that the pay cut “breaks promises made to these employees when they chose to work to improve our state.”

Congress may vote on a pair of Libya resolutions this week that were drafted by House Republican leaders in response to President Obama’s assertion that he doesn’t require congressional consent to continue with the over three-month long Libya mission. One resolution would authorize the use of force. The other would demand an end to U.S. combat engagement in Libya.

And finally: Former President Bush finally got in the Guinness Book of World Records, but not for what you might think. The former Texas Rangers owner donned sunglasses last night in the team’s stadium to help break the record “for the most people wearing sunglasses in the dark at the same time.” Yes, George W. Bush wears sunglasses at night.

For breaking news and updates throughout the day, follow ThinkProgress on Facebook and Twitter.

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19 Ways to Promote Your Next Speaking Event

Attending and speaking at conferences can be a goldmine for content, networking, publicity and lead generation. While many companies might rate a “B” on achieving these outcomes, the speakers could do a lot better by effectively promoting their presentations. The more people that attend a presentation, the more opportunity there is for:

• Your session to be liveblogged or covered by an industry journalist


• To persuade prospects to contact you


• To persuade clients to explore other services


• Attract new employees


• Inspire new vendor and partner relationships

There are many other possible outcomes, but I think you get the idea. Here’s a list of 18 ways to promote your next speaking engagement and possibly make it a more meaningful and relevant experience for those attending.

1. Submit to event listing websites like Upcoming and lanyrd


2. Contribute a guest post to the conference blog


3. Run a house ad in your newsletter


4. Publish on your Newsroom


5. Promote the event on your own blog


6. Publish a “Top 10 List” of resources relevant to your industry that would cause those resources to link back to you


7. Distribute press release(s) through a news distribution service (We like our client, PRWeb for that)


8. Create a fulfillment piece (Report or Guide) to act as a giveaway for promotions and during the presentation


9. Find a way to identify attendees and make them an offer


10. Incent any tweeting or liveblogging during the session


11. Guest post on other industry blogs & mention your session


12. Collect speaking endorsements


13. Run Social Ads on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (appropriate to your audience)


14. Do a giveaway during the session


15. Ask attendees of the session to do something, where the outcome is a creation that benefits all, & recognizes the participants


16. Promote your speaking testimonials from conference organizers, industry influentials and attendees


17. Invite journalists and bloggers that are on the press list to sit in on your session and then do an interview after


18. Tweet and update Facebook, LinkedIn that you are speaking, about what and when. Tweet during the intermission right before your session using the conference #hashtag. Many people don’t plan what sessions they’ll attend and “go with the crowd”. A last minute tweet may catch their attention


19. At the end of your presentation, mention the next event you’ll be speaking at

What did I miss? What tactics do you find to be the most effective for promoting speaking events at conferences?

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Jon Huntsman: ‘Redefining Marriage Is Something That Would Be Impossible’

One day after saying he would respect New York’s decision to pass a law legalizing same-sex marriage, former Utah Gov. and Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “redefining marriage” is “impossible” and stressed that he does not support marriage equality for gays and lesbians:

HUNTSMAN: I think redefining marriage is something that would be impossible and it’s something I would not be in favor of. But I believe, just subordinate to marriage we have not done an adequate job in the area of equality and reciprocal beneficiary rights. I’ve spoken out about that, my support of civil unions, some people like it, some people don’t.

Watch it:

In 2008, Huntsman signed legislation expanding domestic partner benefits for Utah’s unmarried couples, including gay people. He has endorsed civil unions since February 2009, and recently told ThinkProgress that he intends to continue supporting them despite the fact that it may hurt him with social conservative voters.

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Gingrich Calls For Audit Of Fed While Also Urging Repeal Of Legislation That Audits The Fed

In an email to supporters this morning, presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) tried to revive his troubled campaign by delving into monetary policy. “In a speech this morning in Atlanta,” he wrote, “I called for the repeal of the Dodd-Frank legislation and dramatic reforms in the operation of the Federal Reserve, starting with a full-scale audit of its activities.” Gingrich might be interested to learn that the Dodd-Frank legislation he wants to repeal already mandates an audit of Federal Reserve activities as well as featuring important governance changes to reduce privately owned banks’ influence over monetary policy.

But beyond the contradictory premise to audit the Fed while repealing Fed-auditing legislation, Gingrich also dove deep into the current conservative fad for inflation hysteria, tight money, and higher unemployment:

At a time when a dollar today only has 76% of the value it did 10 years ago, it’s vital that Congress return the Federal Reserve to a sole focus on its original mandate — protect the value of the dollar — in order to protect every American from the hidden tax of inflation.

It’s true that the dollar’s value has declined substantially over the past 10 years. Gingrich might have noted that all of the net decline happened during George W Bush’s presidency. But this has little to do with the actions of the Federal Reserve, and much to do with America’s large trade deficit with China and with oil exporting countries. A further decline in the value of the dollar would boost America’s net exports and create jobs. So would the sort of measures to curb America’s oil consumption that drilling has observed, the intention of the Fed’s 1913 founders was precisely “to channel credit preferentially to productive uses” and certainly not to further entrench the interests of the rentier class of high-income bank executives.

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BlogWorld NY: @JasonFalls No BS Guide to Advertising & PR for Bloggers

While initially sitting in a SEO session, I quickly switched once I saw that Jason Falls was presenting. Jason is one of those speakers that gives great advice and he’s funny.

The lowdown on this session: How bloggers can better understand the world of advertising, marketing and PR to avoid common mistakes.  How can we learn from the crappy behavior of the bloggers before us.

There’s a low cost of entry to become a blogger. Basically, all you need is a pulse and an internet connection. But, just because you’re a blogger, doesn’t mean you’re a diva. When you start to evolve as a blogger is when you attract an audience. You’re still not a rockstar, but you’ll be making progress when people are paying attention to you and engaging.  For perspective, many advertisers require a minimum of 100k pageviews per month. If your blog isn’t at that level, you’re still building.

Blogger eg0 = trouble. Getting some attention and audience is an accomplishment but it’s not a reason to be a dick.  Jason statistic: 15-20% of people in a given vertical think they’re god’s gift to blogging.

The conflict comes for the vast majority of bloggers who are not marketing bloggers or have marketing expertise.  They don’t understand how the world of marketing and advertising works.

Soliciting money is advertising sales. (Paid Media) Any time you solicit money from an organization for space or exposure on your blog, that’s advertising. FTC requires disclosure of any kind of advertorial or ads.  When you take money for publishing editorial content, you will degrade some trust with your audience – but not lose it.

The discussion you have with securing advertising on your blog might be with a media buyer, or with a larger organization, a media agency.  This includes ads for media as well as advertorial.

Public relations is earned media.  PR agencies or staff within companies may pitch stories to bloggers. There are PR software companies like Vocus, Cision and My Media Info that will aggregate contact information for influential bloggers within particular verticals. PR can be an information resource and go between with a brand that you want to write about. PR doesn’t buy advertising (or they shouldn’t).

Blogger Horror Story 1: After being pitched, a blogger responded demanding that instead of the blogger writing about the brand, that the brand should advertise on his blog.  While the blog was topically relevant, it didn’t have anywhere near the audience that the brand’s media buyers would consider.

Blogger Horror Story 2: Jason pitched a blogger about a brand he represented and the blogger responded saying that to have a conversation, she’d charge a consulting fee.  Basically, this blogger responded to PR pitches with a consulting pitch.

The situation where bloggers have built up a certain size of audience and consider themselves a diva is where blogging douchebags came from.

Blogger Horror Story 3: Fortune 25 company, big brand, wide array of products. Identified 15 bloggers and pitched them to go to an industry conference – all expenses paid (airfare, hotel and conference). While at the event, the brand wanted to show the bloggers their products.

A week before the event, one of the bloggers left a message saying they’ve decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and requested more airline tickets. Then the blogger threatened that if the brand didn’t do this, there would be editorial repercussions on her blog.

Jason says there’s a high concentration of this type of blogger in the gaming and the mommy blogger groups.

The problem with this minority of bloggers is that brands end up not wanting to deal with bloggers at all.

As you build an audience and gain reputation, it’s important that there’s a difference between being a proud person and being a jackass. There’s an attitude of entitilement plus ignorance about how advertising and public relations works.

Trust: Your audience trust you less if you’re paid for creating brand content. There’s a perceived bias.

Respect: Mutual between bloggers and the brands that communicate with them. Loss of respect means loss of relationship and the benefits that come with that.

Reality: Jason shows a series of graphs that represent mainstream media reach compared to blogs – blogs barely show up, let alone compete. (There were no sources cited in these graphs and that was very disappointing, especially from a professional like Jason)

Bloggers have a place in the advertising and media world online, but in the majority of cases, do not come close to having the same reach or clout as mainstream media. Many bloggers that gain a certain size of audience and degree of influence start to overestimate their authority and impact, plus many don’t understand how relations between advertising and advertisers, media/publishers and public relations work.

What Bloggers and Brands need to consider:

• Ethics and impact of pay for play – disclosure


• Think of bloggers as journalists


• The effect of advertising and PR on your audience


• There’s no right way, only a right way for you

Opportunities for bloggers:

• Make PR be helpful. When you get an irrelevant pitch, offer PR feedback.


• If you want advertising, ask for the media buyer, not the PR person.


• When discussing advertising opportunity with a brand, make a compelling argument with facts from a third party on your audience and community.


• Partner with other blogs.

Opportunities for brands:

• Understand the power of niche


• Make all outreach relevant. This is a huge problem and persists across many verticals.


• Know & respect bloggers have differences. Some bloggers are not PR friendly, so don’t pitch them.


• Have a plan for when you get requests for advertising

Check out Jason’s community online: ExploringSocialMedia.com

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BlogWorld NY: @JasonFalls No BS Guide to Advertising & PR for Bloggers | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Politifact Is False: Every Poll Shows Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed

At DeSmogBlog, Chris Mooney debunks Politifact’s “false” rating of Jon Stewart’s claim that “every poll” shows Fox News viewers to be the “most consistently misinformed.” Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, explains that all five studies done on the question find that watching Fox News and believing political misinformation — on the Iraq War, global warming, health care legislation, and other contentious political issues — are strongly correlated.

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Blog Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Social SEO Success

At BlogWorld Expo in New York this week I presented a session about Dominating Your Niche with Social Content and SEO.  It was crammed with information and I know there are many online marketers looking for practical advice on business blogging and blog marketing that didn’t attend.  Based on the blog marketing we do here at Online Marketing Blog and in the consulting that I do, here are  7 practical steps online marketers can take for social media and SEO success with a blog.

All marketing efforts should start with a goal and means for measuring success, so I do not get into specifics on those tasks in this list, but focus more on the content and promotion.

1.  Social SEO Personas

While blogging evolved out of personal expression, business blogging is less about corporate egocenticism and more about empathy with customers. Customer centric content for blogging is more relevant and does a much better job of engaging. In the way that direct marketers segment customers by key characteristics, online marketers that blog can create buyer personas to create more relevant experiences for their readers.

Personas are customer profiles (preferences for information discovery, consumption & sharing) that represent groups of customers that a brand wants to engage and do business with.  Information from Personas drives keyword research & optimization, content plan and promotion. More about persona creation here. So one of the first things a blogger should do after defining objectives and general audience, is to understand who they’re trying to reach by developing personas.

Collect data through reader / customer surveys, analytics, social monitoring and other tools to form a profile. That profile represents topics, behaviors and preferences that can translate into search keywords, social topics, social channels, editorial calendar and promotion plans.

2.  What is your unique selling proposition?

When people (or search engines) visit your website, is the primary topic crystal clear? With the increased competition in search and for attention in social conversations, it’s essential for blogs to stand out.  Being able to articulate your Unique Selling Proposition helps distinguish your content the value of your blog content for people and search engines. The screenshot above shows a blog that is crystal clear in it’s focus. The result is reflected both in popularity and search visibility (#1) for highly competitive phrases like “digital photography“.

Developing a Unique Selling Proposition for your blog (h/t SEOBook) is pretty straightforward: Identify the key benefits of your blog’s content and how you will address customer/reader pain points. As you communicate your USP, be specific, concise & show proof. It’s also important to live your USP so that it’s a key component of your messaging.

3.  Search & Social Media Keywords

Personas and your USP represent the intersection of customer interests and the goals for your blog. In order to activate your blog content for effective discovery via search and social media channels, it’s essential to create a search phrase keyword glossary for Search Engine Optimization purposes and a social media topic glossary for Social Media Optimization.

SEO Keywords: Resources like Google’s keyword research tool are a great start for finding which words and phrases are in demand, relevant to the content you’re publishing on your blog. It’s tempting to be egocentric and use whatever language you want, but if there is an expectation to attract significant search traffic and an interest in using language that resonates with a community in search of what you have to offer, keyword optimization of content is very appropriate.

Social Topics: Social topic tools that work like a SEO keyword tool are very rare and a to really get into useful source information, there’s a lot of manual research necessary. However, to get started, tools like socialmention.com offer a list of social keywords (bottom left of search results page) that can be downloaded as a CSV file for use in your Social Topic Glossary. Social keywords represent topics of interest to the people your blog is intended to reach and engage. By researching these topics and the specific language the community uses to express their interest, your blogging can be more effective at being relevant and shared on the social web.

The SEO Keyword and Social Topic glossary provide guidance towards editorial plans and specific phrases/topics can be mapped to content for search and social media optimization. It’s a great management tool that keeps SEO and SMO efforts accountable.

4.  Create a Content/Editorial Plan

Keywords inform content and documenting an Editorial Plan for your blog can ensure that content is true to the goals of the business and interests of the community that reads it. An content plan also offers ideas and guidance, months in advance, which is priceless when bloggers hit creative roadblocks. This is inevitable, and after 7+ years of blogging myself, I can’t vouch enough for the guidance of an Editorial Plan.

Keep in mind, such a plan is a guide – not a set of hard and fast rules.  It’s effective to schedule recurring themes with posts, like “Thought Leadership Monday”, “Practical Tips on Tuesdays”, “News Roundup on Fridays”. But it’s also important to allow for wildcards, because opportunities will come up spontaneously based on events within your company or the industry that require blogging. And you don’t want to delay publishing important news or a reaction to news, just because it wasn’t planned for that day.

The Editorial Plan defines the application of keywords in topics to be covered, categories, titles, tags and how/where/when the posts will be promoted. It also allocates for the future repurposing of appropriate blog posts.

5.  Search & Social Media Optimization

Optimizing content for search on websites like Google and optimizing social content for ease of discovery and sharing within social channels is essential for reach and engagement of blog content. Optimizing for search & social media is the one two punch of blog marketing. If SEO efforts are initiated with an existing blog, then a SEO audit would be completed, including a review of the blog templates and configuration, existing content, internal links and links from other websites. If you’re starting a new blog, then SEO would be baked in to the editorial plan via the keyword glossary.

Optimizing for search is about helping search engines do a better job of connecting readers with your content. It’s not about tricks or manipulations. It’s about providing search engines and people what they need to find, consume and be inspired to share your blog content.

Optimizing for social media is about search as well, as in the search that’s possible within Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. But SMO is also about optimizing content editorially to resonate with social audiences. It’s about ease of discovery and sharing through things like feed distribution and widgets that make it easy to ReTweet or post to the reader’s favorite social sites.

SEO and SMO are about making life easy for both search engines and people to connect with, interact and share your blog content.

6.  Links: Internal and External Acquisition

Links between pages and links acquired from relevant websites in the industry provide a good user experience and strong signals for search engines when they crawl, index and rank web pages. Following best practices for internal linking is one of the most impactful things a blog can do to help website realize SEO benefit.  For example, a tips blog that cross links the keywords relevant to specific products being sold gives readers and search engines a quick and relevant way to move from editorial about how to use and get benefit from a type of product to a page that actually sells the product.

Attracting links from other relevant websites as pictured in the diagram above is essential for attracting new visitors to your blog, directly and indirectly because of the effect relevant links have on search engine visibility.  What’s important to remember is that links to your blog home page are important, but relevant links into specific category or individual blog posts is essential  External link sources that are relevant to broad topics that link to your home page or category pages provide the user (and search engine) with a very relevant connection.  Links from niche sites to your specific blog posts do the same.

There are myriad ways to attract links for blogs ranging from commenting and guest posting to creating content that attracts links from other bloggers and the media.

7.  Content Promotion

Content isn’t great until it gets shared. A lot. That doesn’t mean a blogger should aggressively promote every post. It does mean that when a particular post is especially promotable (you would know this because you planned for it in your Content Plan) then it warrants special attention.  Blog content can be promoted in a variety of ways and effective promotion is tied to the quantity and quality of the networks you’ve built. That includes readers and subscribers of your own blog, an email list, Facebook Fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn and other relevant sites where people with common interests interact and share.

Some content promotion is automatic, like RSS feeds, syndication of blog posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or content syndication partnerships. Other content promotion might be tied to the content itself, like using industry thought leaders to crowdsource insights into a topic (your keywords) of importance to your readers. Those participants will often help you promote the post. You can also reach out to your network and suggest or share relevant posts they might be interested in. Commenting and being social on/offline are also effective promotion methods.

The bottom line with content promotion is that great content that isn’t promoted vs. mediocre content that is promoted in a relevant way, will often lose in terms of traffic and therefore meaningful engagement with a greater number of readers. The amount of content being published on a daily basis creates levels of competition never before experienced, so promotion is essential to stand out and get noticed. But it has to be content that’s WORTH promoting.

Summing it all up.

The implementation and refinement of these steps is a work in progress. The web continues to change in terms of technology and how people use it. It’s essential that companies follow an adaptable online marketing strategy when focusing on the social web and search engines. Opportunities will reveal themselves in web analytics and social media monitoring and the promotion efforts outline above apply to those real-time marketing situations just as well as tasks included in a Content Plan. Hopefully these guidelines are useful to you and if you need more specific information, you’ll likely find it in blog posts we’ve published in the past. At TopRank Marketing we do this kind of consulting on a daily basis so there’s a lot of rich information published in our archives.

What other types of insight about blogging and blog marketing would you like to see? What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve had (and maybe overcome) when it comes to implementing blog marketing tactics like those mentioned in this post?

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