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Will Google Bring Back Google Authorship?

Posted by MarkTraphagen

Recently, Google Webmaster Trends analyst Gary Illyes surprised many of us with a remark he made during his keynote Q&A with Danny Sullivan at SMX East in New York City. Illyes said that he recommended webmasters not remove the rel=author tag from their site content.

Google had used rel=author as part of its Google Authorship feature that (potentially) displayed a special author rich snippet in search results for content using the tag. Google ended support of this feature in August 2014.

The phrase that made everyone sit up and say, "Did he just say that?" was this: "...because it is possible Google might make use of [rel=author] again in the future."

Even though Google's John Mueller made the same recommendation after he announced that Google was no longer making use of Google Authorship in search (to be precise, Mueller said leaving the tag in place "did no harm"), Illyes's statement seemed to shock many because Google has said nothing about Google Authorship or the rel=author tag since they said they stopped supporting it.

In a subsequent Twitter exchange I had with Gary Illyes, he explained that if enough users are implementing something, Google might consider using it. I asked him if that meant specifically if more people started using rel=author again, that Google might make use of it again. Illyes replied, "That would be safe to say."

Before I provide my commentary on what all this means, and whether we should expect to see a resumption of Google Authorship in Google Search, let me provide a brief overview of Authorship for anyone who may not be familiar with it. If you already understand Google Authorship, feel free to skip down to the Will Google Bring Back Authorship? section.

A brief history of Google Authorship

Google Authorship was a feature that showed in Google Search results for about three years (from July 2011 until August 2014). It allowed authors and publishers to tag their content, linking it to an author's Google+ profile, in order to provide a more-certain identification of the content author for Google.

In return, Google said they might display an authorship rich snippet for content so tagged in search results. The authorship rich snippet varied in form over the three years Authorship was in use, but generally it consisted of the author's profile photo next to the result and his or her byline name under the title. For part of the run of Authorship, one could click on an author byline in search to see results showing related content from that author.

Google Authorship began with an official blog post in June of 2011 where Othar Hansson announced that Google would begin supporting the rel=author tag, but with no specifics on how they might use it.

Then in a July 2011 video, Hansson and Matt Cutts explained that Google+ would be the hub for author identification, and that Google might start showing a special Authorship rich snippet result for properly tagged content.

Those rich snippets slowly began appearing for more and more authors using rel=author over the next several months. During the three years of the program, Google experimented with many different configurations of the rich snippet, and also which authors and content would get it in response to various search queries.

Interest in Google Authorship from the SEO and online marketing communities was spurred even more by its possible connection to Google's Agent Rank patent, first revealed by Bill Slawski. In this patent, Google described a system by which particular "agents" or "entities" could be identified, scored by their level of authority, and that score then be used as a search ranking factor.

Since one of the types of agents identified in the patent was a content author, the patent rapidly became known as "author rank" in the SEO community. The connection with Authorship in particular, though, came from Cutts and Hansson stating in the above-mentioned Authorship video that Google might someday use Authorship as a search ranking factor.

Speculation about so-called Author Rank, and whether or not it was "on" as a ranking factor, continued throughout the life of the Authorship program. Throughout that period, however, Cutts continued to refer to it as something Google might do in the future. (You can find my own take on why I believed Authorship was never used as a direct ranking factor here.)

The first hint that Google might be drawing back from Authorship came at Pubcon Las Vegas in October 2013 when Matt Cutts, in his keynote "State of Search" address, revealed that at some point in the near future Google would be cutting back on the amount of Authorship rich snippets shown by "around 15%." Cutts said that in experiments, Google found that reducing Authorship rich snippets by that much "improved the quality of those results.”

Sure enough, in early December of that year, Moz's Peter Meyers detected a rapid decline over several days in the number of Authorship rich snippets in search results, as measured by his Mozcast Features tool.

Around that same time Google implemented what I called "two-class Authorship," a first class of authors who continued to get the full rich snippet, and a second class who now got only a byline (no author photo).

Finally, in August 2014, this author was contacted directly by John Mueller, offering to share some information under an NDA embargo until the information was made public. In my call with Mueller, he told me that he was letting me know 24 hours in advance that Google Authorship was going to be discontinued. He added that he was making this call as a courtesy to me since I had become the primary non-Google source of information about Authorship.

With that information, Eric Enge and I were able to compose an in-depth article on Authorship and its demise for Search Engine Land that went live within two minutes of John Mueller's own public announcement on Google+. In our article linked above, Eric and I give our takes on the reasons behind the death of Authorship and the possible future of author authority on Google.

Will Google bring back Authorship?

From the day Authorship was "killed" in August 2013, we heard no more about it from Google—until Gary Illyes's remarks at SMX East. So do Gary's remarks mean we should expect to see a return of Google Authorship to search results?

I don't think so, at least not in any form similar to what we saw before.

Let me explain why.

1. Illyes made no promise. Far too often people take statements about what Google "could" or "might" do from spokespersons like Gary Illyes, Matt Cutts, and John Mueller and translate "could/might" to "will." That is unfair to those spokespeople, and an abuse of what they are saying. Just because something is spoken of as a possibility, it does not follow that a promise is being made.

2. It ain't broke so.... So if there are no actual plans by Google to restore Google Authorship, why would Illyes make a point of stating publicly that authors and publishers should continue to use the rel=author tag? I think a primary reason may be that once Google gets any set of people to begin using any kind of schema, they'd rather have it remain in place. Anything that helps better organize the information on web pages is good for a search engine, whether or not that particular information is "in play" at present.

In the case of rel=author, I think it still may be useful to Google to be able to have confidence about content connected with certain authors. When Authorship ended, many people asked me if I were going to remove the tags from my content. I responded why would I? Having them there doesn’t hurt anything. But more important, as an author trying to build my personal brand reputation online, why wouldn't I want to give Google every possible hint about the content with which I should be identified?

3. The reasons why Authorship was killed still remain. As with any change in Google search, we'll probably never know all the reasons behind it, but the public reasons stated by John Mueller centered around Google's commitment to a "mobile first" user experience strategy. Mobile first is a recognition that search is more and more a mobile experience. Recently, Google announced that more of all searches are now done on mobile than desktop. That trend will likely never reverse.

In response, we've seen Google continually moving toward simpler, cleaner, less-cluttered design in all its products, including search. Even their recent logo redesign was motivated by the requirements of the small screen. According to Mueller, Authorship snippets were too much clutter for a mobile world, with not enough user benefit to justify their continuation.

In our Search Engine Land article, Eric Enge and I speculated that another reason Google may have ended the Authorship experiment was relatively poor adoption of the tagging, low participation in Google+ (which was being used as the "anchor" on Google's side for author identification), and incorrect implementation of the tags by many who did try to use them.

On the latter point, Enge conducted a study of major publishers, which showed that even among those who bothered to implement the authorship tagging, the majority was doing it wrong. That was true even among high-tech and SEO publications!

Alt that points to a messy and lopsided signal, not the kind of signal a search engine wants. At the end of the day, Google couldn't guarantee that a result showing an Authorship rich snippet was really any better than the surrounding results, so why give it such a prominent highlight?

Despite Gary Illyes saying that if more sites used rel=author Google might begin using it again, I don't see that doing so would change any of the conditions stated above. Therefore, I believe that any future use of rel=author by Google, if it ever occurs, will look nothing like the Authorship program we knew and loved.

So is there any future for author authority in search?

To this question, I answer a resounding "Yes!"

Every indication I've had from Googlers, both publicly and privately, is that author authority continues to be of interest to them, even if they have no sound way to implement it yet.

So how would Google go about assessing author identity and authority in a world where authors and publishers will never mass-tag everything accurately?

The answer: the Knowledge Graph, entity search, and machine learning.

The very first attempts at search engines were mostly human-curated. For example, the original Yahoo search was fed by a group of editors who attempted to classify every web page they came across. But as the World Wide Web took off and started growing exponentially, it was quickly obvious that such attempts couldn't scale. Hyperlinks between web pages as a means of assessing both the subject matter and relative authority of web pages proved to be a better solution. Search at the scale of the web was born.

Remember that Google's actual mission statement is to "organize the world's information." Over time, Google realized that just knowing about web pages was not enough. The real world is organized by relationships between entities—persons, places, things, concepts—and Google needed a way to learn the relationships between those things, also at scale.

The Knowledge Graph is the repository of what Google is learning, and machine learning is the engine that helps them do that learning at scale. At a simple level, search engine machine learning is the development of an algorithm that learns on its own as a result of feedback mechanisms. Google is applying this technology to the acquisition of and linking together of entities and their relationships at scale.

It's my contention that this process will be the next evolutionary step that will eventually enable Google to identify authors who matter on a given topic with their actual content, evaluate the relative authority of that content in the perceptions of readers, and use that as a search ranking factor.

In fact, Matt Cutts seemed to hint at a Knowledge Graph-based approach in a June 2013 video about the future of authorship where he talked about how Google was moving away from dependence on keywords, from “strings to things,” figuring out how to discover the “real-world people” behind web content and “their relationships” to improve search results.

Notice that nothing in a machine learning process is dependent upon humans doing anything other than what they already do on the web.

The project is already underway. Take a moment right now and ask Google, "Who is Mark Traphagen?" If you are in the US or most English-speaking countries, you'll probably see this at the top of the results:

That's a Knowledge Panel result from Google's Knowledge Graph. It reveals a couple of things:

1. Google has a high confidence that I'm likely the droids, er, the "Mark Traphagen" you're looking for. There are a few other Mark Traphagens in the world who potentially show up in Google Search, but Google sees that the vast majority of searchers who search for "Mark Traphagen" are looking for a result about me. Thanks, everybody!

2. Google has high confidence that the Mark Traphagen you're looking for is the guy who writes for Search Engine Land, so that site's bio for me is likely a good instant answer to your lifelong quest to find the Real Mark Traphagen (a quest some compare to the search for the Holy Grail).

If Google can continue to do that at scale, then they can lick a problem like assessing author authority for search rankings without any help from us, thank you very much.

How does all this fit with Gary Illyes's recommendation? I think that while Google knows it ultimately has to depend on machine learning to carry off such projects at scale, any help we can give the machine along the way is appreciated. Back in the Google Authorship I days, some of us (myself included) believed that one of the real purposes for the Authorship project was to enlist our help in training the machine learning algorithm. It may be that rel=author is still useful for that.

What might Authorship look like in the future?

Allow me to speculate a bit.

I don't expect we'll ever again see the mass implementation of author rich snippets we saw before, where almost anyone could get highlighted just for having used the tagging on their content and having a Google+ profile. As I stated above, I think Google saw that doing that was a non-useful skewing of the results, as more people were probably clicking on those rich snippets without necessarily getting a better piece of content on the other end.

Instead, I would expect that Google would see the most value in identifying the top few authors for any given topic, and boosting them. This would be similar to their behavior with major brands in search. We often see major, well-known brands dominating the top results for commercial queries because user behavior data tells Google that's what people want to see. In a similar way, people might be happy to be led directly to authors they already know and trust. They really don't care about anyone else, no matter how dashing their profile image might be.

Furthermore, for reasons also stated above, I don't expect that we'll see a return to the full rich snippets of the glory days of Authorship I. Instead, the boost to top authors might simply be algorithmic; that is, other factors being equal, their content would get a little ranking boost for queries where they are relevant to the topic and the searcher.

It's also possible that such author's content could be featured in a highlighted box, similar to how we see local search results or Google News results now.

But notice what I said above: "...when [the authors] are relevant to the topic and the searcher." That latter part is important, because I believe it is likely that personalization will come into play here as well. It makes sense that boosting or highlighting a particular author has the most value when my search behavior shows that author already has value to me.

We already see this at work with Google+ posts in personalized (logged in) search. When I search for something that AJ Kohn has posted on Google+ while I'm logged in to my Google account, Google will elevate that result to my first page of results and even give it a good old-fashioned Authorship rich snippet! Google has high confidence that's a result I might want to see because AJ is in my circles, and my interactions with him and his content show that he is probably very relevant and useful to me. Good guess, Google, you're right!

It is now obvious that Google knows they have to expand beyond Google+ in entity identification and assessment. If Google+ had taken off and become a real rival to Facebook, Google's job might have been a lot easier. But in the end, building machine learning algorithms that sniff out our “who's who” and “who matters to whom” may be an even better, if vastly more difficult, solution.

So to sum up, I do expect that at some point in the future, author authority will become a factor in how Google assesses and ranks search results. However, I think that boost will be a "rich get richer" benefit for only the top, most reputable, most trusted authors in each topic. Finally, I think the output will be more subtle and personalized than we saw during the first attempt at Authorship in search.

How to prepare for Authorship II

Since it is unlikely that Authorship II, the future implementation of author identity and authority in search, will be anything like Authorship I, is there anything you can be doing to increase the odds that Authorship II will benefit you and your content? I think there are several things.

1. Set a goal of being the 10X content creator in your niche. Part of the Gospel According to Rand Fishkin these days is that "good, unique" content is not good enough anymore. In order to stand out and get the real benefits of content, you've got to be producing and publishing content that is ten times better than anything currently on page one of Google for your topic. That means it's time to sacrifice quantity (churning out posts like a blogging machine) for quality (publishing only that which kicks butt and makes readers stand up, take notice, and share, recommend and link).

2. Publishers need to become 10X publishers. If you run a publishing site that accepts user-generated content, you've got to raise your standards. Accepting any article from any writer just to fill space on your pages won't cut it.

3. Build and encourage your tribe. If you are authoring truly great, useful stuff, sooner or later you will start to attract some fans. Work hard to identify those fans, to draw them into a community around your work, and to reward and encourage them any way you can. Become insanely accessible to those people. They are the ones who will begin to transmit the signals that will say to Google, "This person matters!"

4. Work as hard offline as you do online. Maybe harder. More and more as I talk with other authors who have been working hard at building their personal brands and tribes, I'm hearing that their offline activities seem to be driving tremendous benefit that flows over into online. I'm talking about speaking at conferences and events, being available for interviews, being prominent in your participation in the organizations and communities around your topic, and dozens of other such opportunities.

BONUS: Doing all four of those recommendations will reap rewards for you in the here and now, whether or not Google ever implements any kind of "author rank."

The natural power of the fact that people trust other people long before they will trust faceless brands continues, in my opinion, to be one of the least understood and underutilized methodologies in online marketing. Those who work hard to build real author authority in their topic areas will reap the rewards as Google begins to seek them out in the days to come.

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What is semantic search and why does it matter?

A way to deliver highly accurate and relevant answers to all of your questions, or simply a way to keep a user on Google?

How to Integrate Traditional & Digital Marketing

Posted by SamuelScott

It's October 26, 1985. The top song in the United States is Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love for You." The top weekend movie at the US box office is "Jagged Edge," starring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges. And Marty McFly was about to travel back in time in "Back to the Future."

(photo: Back to the Future Day)

Yes, for any Mozzers who do not know, Back to the Future Day—the exact date when Marty went to the future in the sequel to the original film—is today!

Also in the mid-1980s, the Internet was largely confined to the US military and large higher-education institutions. Most marketing at the time, of course, occurred via print, magazine, TV, and radio mediums and channels in what is now often called "outbound marketing."

Why, then, is this relevant in 2015? One problem in digital marketing is that many digital marketers do not have much education or experience in traditional marketing and communications. If you mention the 4 Ps or ask about the promotion mix at most SEO conferences, you'll probably receive blank stares in response.

It's important to know what marketers did before the Internet because many of the strategies that had been developed and honed since the early twentieth century are still applicable today. So, to help the community, I wanted to give a high-level overview of traditional marketing and communications and then provide discussion topics for the comments below, as well as actionable tasks for readers to start integrating traditional marketing principles into their digital strategies.

By the end of this post, you'll have a solid sense of the following:

• What is the difference between marketing and communications?
• What is the integrated discipline "marcom?"
• What are the 4 Ps?
• What parts comprise the promotion mix (within the 4 Ps)?
• When should I do outbound and inbound marketing?
• How do the Internet and digital marketing fit into all of this?
• What about SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, growth hacking, and linkbuilding?
• What actionable things can I do?
• Why did Marty McFly's mom and dad not recognize him from the 1950s when he had grown into a teenager in the 1980s?

This post is related to an earlier Moz post of mine on the marketing department of the future—I will address the connection between the two essays below. I hope you're excited! Where we're going, we don't need roads—just a little bit of time.

All "Back to the Future" photos are from the official site

The basic points to remember

Here are two of my favorite quotes in the sidebar of the blog of advertising industry veteran Bob Hoffman:

Marketing does not really change that much because people do not change—and anyone who says differently is selling something. Countless gurus, writers, and keynote speakers have proclaimed that "inbound marketing is the future," "social media has changed everything (a parody of TED talks)," and "advertising is dead."

But some examples from Hoffman prove otherwise: Traditional live TV viewing is not "dying" at all, and most people are not using DVRs to skip TV ads. Traditional "outbound" TV advertising is often still important enough that in one example, Pepsi lost a lost of money and dropped to third place in terms of market share when the company moved its entire ad spend from television ads to social media.

The point is that no marketing strategy or tactic is always best for every purpose, product, brand, or industry. Sometimes TV advertising should be a part of the promotion mix; sometimes not. Sometimes content marketing is the best way to go; sometimes not. Sometimes modern "inbound" methods deliver the greatest value; sometimes it's traditional "outbound" ones. More on that below.

Here, I wanted to take us back—back to the past to show the future where we have been, why it matters, and how we should incorporate it into digital marketing.

A full list of resources is provided at the end for those who wish to learn more.

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The marcom workflow

This flowchart is a high-level overview of the step-by-step process that I will describe in detail below. For those who want a quick summary, here is the workflow that marcom executives typically use:

1. List all of the external audiences with whom your company communicates
2. Remember that current and potential customers are just one of your audiences
3. Determine the specific messages that you want to communicate to each "public" based on your audience research and buyer personas
   
   For customers:
4. Establish product-market fit
5. Decide on a pricing strategy
6. Choose how you will prioritize direct marketing, personal selling, advertising, sales promotion, and publicity in your promotion mix in general and then allocate your resources accordingly
7. Determine which online and offline communications channels you will prioritize within your promotion mix and then allocate your resources accordingly
8. Create the needed creatives, sales collateral, and marketing content
9. Transmit the marketing materials over your selected channels to your audience
10. Measure and audit the results
11. Return to steps 3–8 as necessary and adjust to attempt to maximize revenue, sales, ROI, or any other metric based on your business and marketing goals

Marketing vs. communications

Traditionally, marketing and communications had been entirely different functions that each had their own departments. Marketing focused on issues such as customers, sales, and brand awareness. Communications (often called public relations or external relations) dealt with everyone else in the outside world with whom the company interacted, such as the government, community, media, and financial analysts.

In other words, communications (another word for PR) as a whole is the act of communicating with any relevant external group of people. Obviously, companies would usually not want to say the exact same thing to customers, influencers, the media, the government, and the local community.

Today, however, more and more companies are combining Marketing and Communications under a single department (often called "marketing communications" or "marcom") to become more efficient and ensure that all messages are consistent among all audiences and across all channels.

The key to understand: Publish and transmit unified, integrated messaging on and across all online and offline marcom channels including websites, social networks, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues.

SEO pro tip: When relevant, include your desired keywords—using natural language rather than keyword stuffing, of course—in your messaging everywhere (for the co-occurrence benefits; websites seem to rank more highly for search terms when links to those sites appear on pages that also mention those terms!).

Remember:

Communication is one person speaking with another. Marketing is one type of communication.

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The 4 Ps in traditional marketing

In a unified marcom strategy, all of a company's audiences need to be included strategically. However, because Moz's readers focus mainly on marketing rather than PR, I will focus the rest of this essay on "customer relations" (or "marketing") specifically.

After creating the overall marketing messages that a company will communicate to current and potential customers, the next step in traditional marketing theory is to focus on the 4 Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. (Note: This process is not set in stone. Sometimes the 4 Ps will be determined before the overall marketing messaging is decided.)

Product

Not a bad product!

Product strategy, according to Study.com, is essentially maximizing product-market fit—the degree to which a product or service satisfies the demand for it. In the modern, inbound world (and most specifically in terms of SaaS products), product strategy has been rebranded as "growth hacking." For those who are interested, Ryan Holiday goes into more detail in "Growth Hacker Marketing."

The process generally follows these steps:

1. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), traditionally called a prototype.

2. Get a core set of early testers/users to establish product-market fit. Show them the MVP and quiz them on what they like, what they don't like, what would be more useful, and what is not necessary. Revise the product and get more feedback, revise the product and get more feedback to have a product that is constantly improving.

3. Incorporate sharing and growth naturally in the product. Push new users to refer friends for a discount. Put social sharing buttons inside the user dashboard.

4. Experiment with the different ways to get "traction" to see what gets the most users quickly at the lowest cost. It could be advertising, organic traffic, media coverage, or any other potential marketing strategy.

Once you have established product-market fit, how will you communicate the value that the product provides on all online and offline marcom channels, including websites, social outlets, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues?

Price

Thankfully, this ended up not happening.

Pricing strategy is not only a purview of the finance department—it is also a part of marketing. If, for example, a company wants to earn $100 in revenue, it can sell one "widget" for $100 or 100 "widgets" for $1 each. Each tactic requires a different marketing strategy.

A high price communicates high value and rarity (think about the high prices of diamonds, which are essentially shiny, useless rocks marketed to rich people) while a low price shows affordability and availability (think about Walmart and its value-based marketing to the less-rich Everyman). In a marketing context, the pricing strategy will also need to take into account items such as the size of the market, the cost to produce the product or service, the level of competition, the economics of the target market, and whether the company wants to market itself based on quality or value (or perhaps both).

Once you have decided on your pricing strategy, how will you incorporate that element into online and offline channels, including websites, social outlets, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues?

Place

Distribution (how Place is now known) is the decision on how to transmit a product to customers. It might be setting up a lemonade stand on the corner, using franchisees, or mass producing widgets and then selling them to intermediaries, who then resell them.

In the Internet Age, when products and services can distributed, purchased, and consumed or used almost immediately from anywhere, this traditional part of the 4 Ps is becoming less important.

Promotion

One way to promote yourself is to get in the mass media.

Promotion is "raising customer awareness of a product or brand, generating sales, and creating brand loyalty."

Promotion is also the most complex part of the 4 Ps because of the decisions that marketers make when deciding which methods are the best ways to achieve those three goals. The promotion mix has always consisted of five elements: direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, and publicity. Based on the product, industry, goal, and target audience, each element is given a different weight and priority both online and offline.

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The promotion mix

For a second, forget about "SEO," "content marketing," "social media marketing," and the other terms that are frequently used among digital marketers. Here are the five elements of the traditional promotion mix described in specific detail.

I will use specific definitions from my old MBA marketing textbook ("Principles of Marketing" by Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong) because, as I will explain below, how we define our terms greatly affects our marketing success.

Direct marketing

Direct marketing is "direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships." Direct marketing "includes catalogs, telephone marketing, kiosks, the Internet, mobile marketing, and more. "

Advertising

Advertising is "any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor." Advertising "includes broadcast, print, Internet, outdoor, and other forms."

Personal selling

Personal selling is "personal presentation by the firm’s salesforce for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships." Personal selling "includes sales presentations, trade shows, and incentive programs."

Sales Promotion

Sales promotion is "short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service." Sales promotion "includes discounts, coupons, displays, and demonstrations."

Publicity

Publicity is "gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via the media."

To learn more about publicity, read "The Father of Spin," a biography on the person who essentially invented the practice in the early-twentieth century. As described in Amazon's description, he did "publicity campaigns for American Tobacco, Ivory Soap, United Fruit, book publishers, manufacturers of eggs and bacon, and the platforms of presidents from Coolidge to Eisenhower." (Marketing can be done for good or evil ends—I will leave the choice up to the readers.)

For a modern example, see this Kickstarter campaign to build a miniature version of the hoverboard that was shown in "Back to the Future II":

Perhaps inspired by the Kickstarter, Lexus is also releasing its own hoverboard and getting a lot of publicity as a result. How much brand awareness and how many links and social shares and followings do you think they have gained as by-products?

Creating the best promotion mix

The chart above presents an overview of the uses, benefits, and drawbacks of each element of the promotion mix. Answering some of the questions below can help to determine which of the following are relevant to one's marketing goals and show companies to allocate resources to each element appropriately.

• I need to introduce a new product to a new market (advertising)
• I have a product that’s under attack by competitor’s products, and I need to retain my current customer base (sales promotion)
• I have a product that is highly specialized, technical, or expensive (personal selling)
• I need to correct false impressions or counter false claims made about my product (publicity)
• I need to create greater brand awareness of my product (advertising)
• I need to communicate new features to increase consumption by present customers (direct marketing)
• I have a product with a long sales cycle (personal selling)
• I need to generate more "buzz" or word-of-mouth business (sales promotion or publicity)
• I need to build a new image and reposition my product (advertising)

Companies will generally allocate different weights to each part of the promotion mix based on how they answer these types of questions. Here is an example from the Edward Lowe Foundation, a US non-profit organization that helps to encourage local entrepreneurship:

Whichever elements you choose, how will you incorporate them into your desired online and offline channels, including websites, social outlets, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues?

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Don't get distracted by buzzwords

Now, I have been discussing external communications, the 4 Ps, and the promotion mix—all of which have been used by traditional marketers since before the Internet had even existed. But why is this important to digital marketers today?

In my earlier Moz essay on the integration of PR and SEO (from when I was working for an agency), I explained the traditional communications process in this manner:

Here's what I had written at that time:

A sender decides upon a message; the message is packaged into a piece of content; the content is transmitted via a desired channel; and the channel delivers the content to the receiver. Marketing is essentially sending a message that is packaged into a piece of content to a receiver via a channel. The rest is just details.

The Internet is just a new set of communications channels over which marketing promotional mixes are executed. As Kotler and Armstrong note in my old textbook (emphasis added):

As noted earlier, online marketing is the fastest-growing form of direct marketing. Widespread use of the Internet is having a dramatic impact on both buyers and the marketers who serve them. In this section, we examine how marketing strategy and practice are changing to take advantage of today’s Internet technologies.

"Digital marketing" is really just doing direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, or publicity via a specific collection of communications channels that we call the Internet.

The myth of "social media marketing"

I think I see Friendster and Orkut in there.

There is no such thing as "social media marketing" as a thing unto itself. (Please notice that I put that phrase as a whole in quotes.)

• Take the Lexus Back to the Future hoverboard's Facebook page. All of the posts that are gaining likes, comments, and shares are not examples of "social media marketing"; by definition, it is "publicity" (via an online channel) because it is "gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via the media."
• If I export a list of people who mention "widgets" on Twitter and then tweet to each person to sell them widgets, that is not "social media marketing." By definition, it is doing direct marketing (via an online channel) because I am establishing "direct connections with carefully-targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships."
• If I respond to customers who are asking questions on Facebook or Twitter about how my company's product works, then I am not doing "social media marketing." Obviously, I'm doing customer support.

"Social media" is not a marketing strategy. Social media, just like the telephone, is a communications channel over which marketing, PR, customer support, and more can all be performed. After all, there's no such thing as a "telephone strategy."

Why words matter

As a former journalist, I take pride in being very precise with language because it is always important to communicate ideas 100% accurately, fairly, and objectively. Within the articles that I contribute to the digital marketing community (and sometimes in the comments on others), I often discuss the definitions of terms because being precise with our language is the best way to help all of us do our jobs better.

If you want to integrate traditional and digital marketing—or, to be more accurate, if you want to market over digital channels—here are some examples of what to do:

• Stop studying "social media marketing." Start studying the best practices in "direct marketing," "customer support," or any other desired activity and then apply those ideas whenever you use social media channels. In the coming years, publicists, customer support representatives, and others will naturally incorporate social media into their existing functions. "Social media" is not going to be a job unto itself.
• Stop studying "linkbuilding" and "doing content marketing to earn links." Start studying the best practices in "publicity" because 99% of natural, quality, and authoritative links come as natural by-products of getting the media, bloggers, and people in general to talk about you online. The same principles of publicity apply regardless of whether I am using the channel of the telephone, e-mail, or social media when communicating with the media.
• Start studying the best practices in personal selling and sales promotion, and apply those principles whenever you do personal selling or sales promotion over digital channels.

Selecting the channels for your promotion mix

What channels would the makers of "Back to the Future" use to market the film in 1985 compared to 2015?

After you have decided upon your communications messages, determined the 4 Ps, and selected your promotion mix, only then is it time to select your channels by answering these questions:

• Can our audience be best reached online or offline (or some degree of both)?
• Based on the answer to the first question, which channels within each category should we use? (For example, the offline channels of TV, radio, newspapers, or magazines, or the online channels of advertising networks, social media, or online communities?)

The rule of thumb is to "go where the target audience lies"—whether it's online or offline or both—but it's more complicated than that. Channels themselves have their positives and negatives. Here are some examples based on executing the promotion mix online or offline:

• Advertising: The results and ROI of traditional offline advertisements are difficult to track precisely, but people generally pay more attention to them. Online advertising is easier to track, but the industry is rife with alleged fraud (a Moz essay of mine), and more and more people are using ad blockers.
• Direct marketing: Is it best to grow an e-mail list, to run searches on Twitter to isolate groups of people who are interested in what you offer, or to send a sales catalogue and track who purchases products? The answer will be different for everyone based on the audience.
• Personal selling: If you're selling, say, diamonds or expensive enterprise software, fewer people might buy following a Pinterest campaign compared to using the telephone or even meeting someone in person.
• Sales promotion: Offering quick discounts needs to convey a sense of urgency, so it's important to use channels that will reach audiences immediately. Therefore, it makes more sense today to use mobile marketing over snail-mail, for example.
• Publicity: Traditional and digital PR are increasingly two separate entities. As I explained in a Moz post on PR 101 for digital marketers, publicity in the past has focused on writing pitches, creating media lists, and pitching reporters and bloggers on a story. However, gaining attention for a company today may require using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks to ensure mass exposure to a creative campaign.

Now, I understand that Moz's audience is focused almost entirely on digital. But digital is not always the answer. Take this question from Hoffman, the retired ad agency CEO:

First, I want you to think about your refrigerator.

Think about all the stuff that's in there: The cheese, the eggs, the juice, the jelly, the butter, the beer, the mayonnaise, the bacon, the mustard, the frozen chicken strips...

Now think about your pantry. The cereals, the beans, the napkins, the flour, the detergent, the sugar, the rice, the bleach...

Now answer these questions:

Do you "share branded content" about any of this stuff?
Do you feel "personally engaged" with these brands?
Do you "join conversations" online about this crap?
Do you ever "co-create" with any of these brands?
Do you feel like you are part of these brands' "communities?"

Now answer me this: If you don't, why in the f------ world do you believe anyone else does?

The specific product and industry is important to keep in mind while selecting channels. Big consumer brands usually benefit the most from traditional channels. After all, Pepsi lost a lot of money when it moved all its ad spend from TV to social media. SaaS products, in one example, might be completely different. Again, the key is to test to see what works.

The rest of the marketing process

The 4 Ps, promotion mix, buyer personas, and channel research are only the strategic first-half of the marketing process. As I explained in my earlier essay on the marketing department of the future, the rest of the process consists of creating online and offline marketing collateral and content, transmitting it to the audience, and then auditing the results.

Examples of creatives

• Direct marketing: producing sales collateral to give to prospects directly
• Advertising: creating online and offline ads
• Personal selling: designing presentations and webinars
• Sales promotion: creating coupons, landing pages, and more
• Publicity: writing online and offline by-lined articles or capturing a publicity stunt on video

Transmission & audit

The next step is to transmit the creatives to the audience over the selected online or offline channels.

Once a full marketing campaign has been executed, it's time to audit the results. A company might find, for example, that a combination of offline advertising, online direct marketing, and a combination of online and offline publicity works the best. Or it could be something else entirely. The only way to know is to test.

A hypothetical example

Here are four examples—one hypothetical and three real ones—of the different ways that traditional and digital marketing strategies can be integrated.

One comment I left a few months ago on another Moz essay on creating demand for products was this:

Moz sells, in part, "SEO software." Say SEOmoz (as it was called in the beginning) had been launched in 1995. There would be little keyword volume for "SEO software" for this reason: No one knows that "SEO" exists in the first place, so there would obviously be no demand for "SEO software" specifically. Moz would probably have had only one customer—Danny Sullivan. :)

So, in such a scenario, if I were to sell SEO software in 1995, I would first do a PR and advertising campaign to generate awareness of SEO in general and SEO software specifically. I'd bet that search volumes would increase in due time. Then, once people know that both things exist, then you can start to capture prospects and move them down the funnel via inbound marketing.

"Outbound marketing" and "inbound marketing" will always be needed because outbound marketing creates demand while inbound marketing fulfills demand. In my opinion, studies that purport to show that inbound marketing is always better than outbound marketing only tell part of the story. If traditional, offline advertising is so ineffective, they why do I still see thousands of ads everywhere I go every day?

Three real-world examples

An American pizza restaurant

As I once explained in a BrightonSEO talk (see a summary with slides on my website), a small pizza parlor in Philadelphia got the best results—a lot of brand awareness, hundreds of high-quality links, and thousands of Facebook "likes"—by thinking not about "SEO" or "social media marketing" or "content marketing," but rather good, old-fashioned "publicity" within the promotion mix.

The local business—whether intentionally or not—got a lot of local news coverage by allowing people to "pay it forward" by purchasing slices to give to people in need. The news coverage snowballed into national coverage in the United States and the business owner appearing on the talk show "Ellen."

The pizzeria did not produce one piece of "content," or even have a blog at all. For most small, local businesses (especially restaurants), I'd invest in a good, creative publicist over "content marketing" any day. Still, it's crucial that one's marketing toolkit contain every potential strategy and tactic because different promotion mixes work best for different companies and industries.

Pizza Hut Israel

Yes, I've got a soft spot for pizza.

While I was writing this post here in Tel Aviv, I received this e-mail and saw this Facebook post:

(That's Pizza Hut Israel selling a pizza with a crust made of bite-sized pieces filled with cream cheese.)

Now, what is this? It's not "e-mail marketing" or "social media marketing." Pizza Hut here had decided to do a sales promotion via the channels of e-mail and Facebook. It was the company deciding upon a certain promotion mix (likely for the reasons described above) and then choosing to execute that promotion over the channels of e-mail and social media.

Logz.io

Logz.io cofounders CEO Tomer Levy (left) and VP Product Asaf Yigal (right) at AWS re:Invent 2015

In another example, we at Logz.io offer predictive error detection in our ELK-as-a-service cloud platform for DevOps engineers, and we have found that the best results for us come from a combination of personal selling and publicity.

The personal selling is when we sponsor and speak at conferences for DevOps engineers and system administrators; the publicity is when we publish and then publicize informational articles and guides in major publications and on our website. (For example, our CEO, Tomer Levy, wrote about different open-source DevOps tools on DevOps.com, we've published a guide on how to deploy the ELK Stack, and I discussed how to use server log analysis for technical SEO here on Moz.)

Again, every company and industry is different. It's important to test every possible promotion mix to see what delivers the greatest ROI for you. Within the marketing industry, there are many self-interested parties that advise one promotion mix or another. The best thing to do is to test everything and see for yourself. I hope these three examples will help to get you thinking.

Now, where's SEO?

I've discussed my opinions at length in the other essays of mine to which I've linked here, so I will just summarize here so I will not always repeat myself: "SEO" is now technical and on-page optimization. The more that one understands traditional marketing, the more that one sees that (good) "off-page SEO" tactics are really just doing good traditional marketing. Almost any "off-page SEO" tactic that anyone can name is simply direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, or publicity by another name.

The reason it is important to understand this concept is that, as Google's algorithm becomes smarter and thinks more and more like a human being, it's becoming imperative to think more and more about building a brand among people over the long term rather than chasing an algorithm and directly trying to get high rankings in the short term. To help the community, my goal here is for SEOs to stop thinking so much about SEO specifically and to think more about marketing. After doing all of the needed technical and on-page SEO, the best results—higher rankings, greater backlinks, and more engagement—will come simply as by-products of building real brands that have a lot of authority and engagement.

Today, this is what will happen if you try to manipulate, outsmart, or otherwise chase Google's algorithm:

Summary

If you've read this far, I'm glad that you found my thoughts to be interesting! I'll leave you with this final idea:

How would you market yourself if the Internet didn't exist? Answer that, and it'll help your online marketing too.
— Samuel Scott (@samueljscott) August 25, 2015

Complete List of Resources:

• Principles of Marketing by Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong (textbook) (pro tip: buy a prior edition for a lot cheaper than the new edition)
• Public Relations: Strategies and Tactics by Dennis L. Wilcox and Glen T. Cameron (textbook) (ditto)
• The 4 Ps of the marketing mix—Product, Price, Place (now called Distribution), and Promotion
• "Growth Hacker Marketing" (the integration of product and marketing) by Ryan Holiday
• The promotion mix—advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, publicity, and direct marketing
• Creating a promotion mix: The Edward Lowe Foundation and the Chartered Institute of Marketing of the U.K. (PDF file)
• Publicity: See my prior Moz essays on An Introduction to PR and The Coming Integration of PR & SEO as well as my Mozinar on the latter topic. In addition, read "The Father of Spin"
• The Marketing Department of the Future (another Moz essay of mine)

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How do I get a search box to appear in my site’s search results?

I've now realised there's something else missing from my site’s search results… my very own search box within the sitelinks.

I Want to Speak at Your Conference, Now What?

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

I love working with all kinds of speakers at Moz, whether for big shows like MozCon or our biweekly webinars, Mozinars. I also get out there and speak myself. Many people ask me how to become a speaker in our industry or if they can speak at one of Moz's events. The truth is, speaking is hard. And putting yourself out there is awesome.

So, you're ready to take a step toward being onstage. What should you be doing?

Have a speaking goal

A speaking goal will keep you focused on what you want to get out of speaking. Goals may vary event to event, or encompass both short-term and long-term dreams. And yes, they may change over time.

Here are some goals either I or speakers I've worked with have had:

• Conquer my fear of public speaking.
• Share my incredible new idea with a crowd of like-minded people.
• Share my field with an adjacent audience.
• Show my expertise in a field.
• Get new clients or a new job.
• Get other speaking gigs based on how well I do.
• Speak on the MozCon stage.
• Learn how to deliver a dynamic presentation the way speakers like Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds do.
• Speak in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 people.

What's your goal?

Come up with pitches!

Keep a document of ideas that you'd like to speak (or write) about. Don't wait until you see the announcement that a conference is now accepting pitches or until you receive outreach about speaking, as you'll probably suffer from idea block.

Research the conference you want to speak at. Figure out who its audience is. Look at past topics. If possible, attend the conference before you toss your hat in to fully understand what it's like. Make sure you're the right speaker. Some conferences have requirements, such as being a sponsor, having a certain title (VP, Director, CEO), making sure speakers fit a code of conduct, preferring actionable talks to inspirational ones, etc.

Great pitches clearly communicate your topic to the people throwing the conference. Sadly, many pitches come in as a teaser written for an audience to get them to attend your session. A conference runner and selection committee need to know the actual meat of your presentation. They want to make sure the topic's details are ethical, match their audience needs, meet knowledge level requirements, and more. Think of how different a link building session at Blackhat World would be compared to SMX.

Stay informed on when pitches go live for the conference. This means you can be prepared to submit your idea immediately—not worrying about the deadline—and will ensure you don't miss it. For example, the pitches for MozCon community speakers always go live three months prior to the conference date. For the upcoming MozCon in 2016, they'll be on our blog in June.

Build your speaking portfolio

I can't stress the importance of having a speaking portfolio enough, especially if you're interested in talking at conferences with closed selection committees, such as MozCon. Speaking portfolios show off your hard work and put actual, concrete examples in the hands of event organizers. It will also set you apart from others.

A search for "marketing speaker" on LinkedIn gives 43,000 results:

For "SEO speaker" on Google, 8.9 million results are returned, and Scott Wilson dominates the knowledge box:

What should you put into your portfolio?

1. A decent, professional headshot

For any conference you're speaking at, you'll need to send in a headshot. You'll want to make sure yours looks good both on your portfolio and in comparison to your fellow speakers. Be prepared when you're selected as a speaker. Don't be the one who sends in a headshot taken at a party with someone else obviously cut out of it or from when you last renewed your passport.

There are plenty of professional photographers who will take headshots for you. Make sure you get both the rights to use them and the high-resolution version. If you can't afford one, check out Kick Point's guide to taking a professional headshot with your phone. While you want to present your best face, make sure the photos actually look like you. It's okay to photoshop a pimple, but own and love your wrinkles, big ears, or whatever else you're worried about.

Some speakers also might add a memorable touch to their photos, which they then bring to the stage. For instance, Ruth Burr Reedy's headshot features a green blazer that she often wears onstage when speaking.

You will probably want to get a new headshot at least every other year. The reality is that we age, changing both our personal styles and our looks. The worst comment I've ever received was someone asking me the age of my headshot because I "looked so much younger" in it. It was only two years old, but I'd changed my hairstyle, which made me look older. (Also, when remarking on someone's headshot, don't make sexist comments like these.)

2. Have a speaking bio ready

Another general request from conferences will be to send in a bio about yourself. You want to keep it short and relevant for the audience you're speaking in front of. No one wants to read a bio that's longer than your topic pitch.

Here are some examples of my own bios:

Longer with a broader audience: Erica McGillivray is a die-hard geek who spends a ridiculous amount of time being nerdy, both professionally and personally. At Moz, she's the senior community manager and wrangles a community of over 500,000 members, co-runs the annual MozCon, and works on whatever else is thrown her way. She's also a founder of GeekGirlCon, a nonprofit run by volunteers that celebrates and supports geeky women with events and conventions. In her spare time, Erica's a published author and has a comic book collection that's an earthquake hazard.

Shorter with marketing-focus—Erica McGillivray spends a ridiculous amount of time being geeky, both professionally and personally. At Moz, she's the senior community manager, wrangling 500,000+ people and co-running their annual conference MozCon. Erica also is a founder of GeekGirlCon, is a published author, and has a comic book collection that's an earthquake hazard. Follow her at @emcgillivray.

Shorter with pop culture-focus—Erica McGillivray spends a ridiculous amount of time being nerdy, both professionally and personally. She's a senior community manager and wrangles over 500,000 community members for a local startup. Erica's also a founder of GeekGirlCon, a published author, and has a comic book collection that's an earthquake hazard.

3. Share your slide decks

SlideShare makes sharing your decks 100% super easy. While some conferences will share your decks, you don't want to make your decks hard to track down. You want results like Rand's when your name is Googled with the words "slide deck":

If you don't want to use SlideShare, there are other services out there. Or you can just upload it to your own site. Make sure you use a PDF version of your slide deck for the upload on whatever service you use; otherwise, your typography will look terrible on other people's computers who don't have those fonts installed.

Example slide decks show off how well you can build knowledge into a deck. It shows your style, and it can also show how you've grown as a speaker. You can say that you always present "actionable tips," but a deck speaks to what you really do.

What if all your decks are proprietary or unshareable to the public? It's time for you to create a deck for your portfolio. Maybe later you'll present it at a conference. Or maybe it's just a piece telling the world that you can indeed create a great deck.

What if all your decks are more interesting when presented? I definitely subscribe to having less words on the screen, which can mean that presentations become almost meaningless without the audio.

Ian Lurie does a great job at adding text—in an obvious way—to slides that make no sense without his voice:

This is extra work, but can really boost you as an expert. Not to mention that your audience will love you for giving them access to your deck later.

4. Get a recording of you presenting

Nothing says more about your qualification as a speaker than a recording of you presenting. It shows off your style, your confidence, and your radness. However, there can be lots of challenges around getting a recording. Many conferences in our space which have great speakers, like Pubcon, SMX, and State of Search, don't record sessions or most sessions. And other conferences, like MozCon and SearchLove, do record conferences, but sell the videos so they're private.

How do you get a recording?

A. Do it yourself. Record one of the presentations you've already planned on giving (or maybe that sample slide deck you built). Even if it's just you and the camera, it's better than nothing. One of my own speaking recordings is me practicing a talk in front of a handful of coworkers.

B. Ask if your recording can be shared privately. In the case of MozCon, speakers have asked and then used their videos to privately show conference runners their work. This is a great option when you're pitching, but isn't ideal when you're setting up a page to show off your good work.

5. Put it all together on a webpage

Since most of us haven't done so much speaking that we're easily Googled to find decks and videos, like Rand Fishkin, putting all your information on one page is paramount. Plus, it makes all your assets easy to link.

Chris Brogan uses his LinkedIn page (plus how to contact him):

Erika Napoletano's site makes it easy for you to understand her style and requirements for a speaking gig:

Kerry Bodine's site displays her videos and tells you which events she's spoken at and will speak at:

Ask the conference organizer questions

Once you're in, you want to be prepared for show day. Unfortunately, a lot of conferences don't give you all the information. Here are five standard questions I ask conference runners when I'm speaking in order to be fully prepared, although you may have other needs:

1. What are the show's hours? What time is my speaking slot? Are there any special events for speakers to attend (parties/networking, speaker-only gatherings, etc)?

You'll want to know this information as you book your travel. You'll want to make sure you're on time for your talk, not completely jetlagged (if crossing time zones), and build in opportunities to meet your speaking goals.

2. How many people are attending this conference? Can you share some demographics about who your audience is?

You want to be prepared for both the audience size and their specialty. If you're in front of a group of 20, you can easily do interactive elements in a way you cannot in a room of 1,000+ people. Likewise, you want to tailor your talk to the audience with examples and knowledge levels that they'll relate to.

When Dr. Pete Meyers spoke at SMX Sydney, he Australiafied his slide deck:

3. Do you use fullscreen 4:3 format or widescreen 16:9 for presentations?

No one wants to create an entire slide deck and then find out it's in the other format. Let me tell you from experience, changing the formatting in PowerPoint or Google Docs stretches or squashes your images in horrifying ways. Also, as a speaker, you should know what the differences between these formats are and how to properly set up your slide deck software for each format.

4. What sort of setup is the stage? Podium or no podium? Wireless mic with a battery pack, handheld wireless mic, or wired standing mic? Will the projection happen from my own computer or your A/V system?

All these questions ensure that you're prepared with the right equipment and that you dress appropriately. You don't want to run to the Apple Store at the last second when there are no proper cables for your Mac laptop. And if you're wearing a wireless microphone, you want to make sure there's a place to put the powerpack—like a pocket or belt—which, if you're wearing a dress, may not be part of your outfit.

5. Is there a due date for slide decks?

Getting your deck and anything else you've agreed to provide a conference with on time is paramount for your own time management and making the conference runners happy. Conference organizers prefer smooth working processes, as there's already enough that can go wrong with live events. The last conference I spoke at, the deck was due during my summer vacation. I made sure my deck was done ahead of my time off because I didn't want to spend my holiday creating it.

Practice, practice, practice

Nothing makes your presentation better than practicing the talk. Try to practice in front of people so you know if your jokes land or when you need to pause to resonate points. (My cat never laughs at my jokes!)

By the time you've gone through your talk five to ten times, you'll have it down much better. It will be more natural, hopefully without the stumbles and other pitfalls that occur with not having your points down. We all have parts we're great at and others we're not. That's okay, but let's work on them.

Have fun!

Never forget to have fun when you're preparing to speak. Whether you're deciding to pitch your first event or you're a seasoned speaker, you can rock it!

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Preparing Your Killer Content Marketing Pitch

Posted by EricEnge

When you first start in content marketing, you usually have little to no audience of your own for your content. If you're a major brand, you may be able to develop this quickly, but it's still extremely helpful to get visibility on third-party sites to grow your reputation and visibility as a producer of fantastic content, and to also net links to your site.

This can come in the form of third parties linking to content on your site, or getting guest posting or columnist opportunities on those sites. A key stage in that process is creating a pitch to the site in question, in order to get them to say "yes" to whatever it is you're requesting.

The hardest part of writing any pitch isn't the creation of the pitch itself. It's the legwork you have to do in advance. Successful pitches are all about preparation, and frankly, there needs to be a lot of it.

To illustrate this, I'm going to walk through the process using a fictitious landscaping business, describing what they might need to do to start successful pitching of the content they plan to create.

Step 1: Competitive research/identify topic areas

You aren't ready to pitch until you understand what else is out there. You need to visit major sites and see what they're writing about landscaping and related topics. You also need to see what your competitors are doing in terms of content marketing.

If your competitor has been proactively doing content marketing for two years, it's a good idea to see what areas they've been focusing on. For example, if the competitor has already established themselves as the thought leader in Do-It-Yourself (DIY) landscaping, perhaps your initial focus should be on something else.

Perhaps you can concentrate on specialty areas, such as prepping your yard for a wedding reception, a graduation party, or the integration of an in-ground pool into the yard.

I'd start by pulling raw data from tools such as Open Site Explorer, and getting the Domain Authority data on the links they have. I did this for one landscaping business, and here's a snapshot of the highest-authority links they have:

For this company, it would be interesting to see what they're doing with ThisOldHouse.com. That looks like a key relationship for them, as they've received 131 links from that site. Ultimately, what you would do next is dig into the details of each of these sites, find out why the competitor got the links, and uncover what it tells you about your opportunities.

Step 2: Identify target sites

Who covers topic areas similar to yours? Have they published third-party contributions before? You can obtain some of this from the competitive research you went through in Step 1. But, to take it further, I did a search on "landscaping ideas":

This brought up a bunch of high-authority sites to check out. As a next step, I collected data on their Domain Authorities, and then dug into whether or not they accepted guest posts. The search query I used to get information on whether a site accepts guest posts looks something like this:

After doing that, we can assemble the data into a table that looks like this:

This now helps you understand who to potentially pitch. Important note: Don't limit yourself to guest posts. With very high-authority sites like many of these, you may want to explore becoming a columnist. Pitching a column may be even easier than pitching a guest post, as it suggests that you are interested in a long-term relationship, which may be of greater interest to the target site.

In addition, explore whether or not the sites in question do interviews of experts on different topics. This could be another way to get your foot in the door.

Step 3: Line up your experts

Having a legitimate expert writing for you is a crucial part of any pitch. Successful off-site content marketing requires you to get placement on some of the top sites covering your market. You won't succeed at this unless you have someone creating content for you that really knows their stuff.

It's great if the subject matter expert (SME) is you, or someone working for you. This makes pitching your expertise easier. However, if no one inside your business has the time, you can rent (contract) the expertise. Either way, make sure your author is a legit SME.

If you need to rent your SME, there are many ways to go about identifying someone. Here are some potential approaches to use:

1. Search the sites you identified that accept guest posts, and find out who is writing them. A query such as: "guest post" site:bhg.com is pretty effective for this.
2. Search related hashtags on Twitter, such as #landscaping and #gardening, to see who's sharing related content.
3. Try other Google search queries, such as "landscaping design articles" or "landscaping books," and identify the authors.
4. Search Amazon directly for landscaping and gardening books.

You get the idea. Once you have identified a bunch of people, you have to start figuring out who might be a potential author for you. Keep in mind that you'll need to pay them to write on your behalf, and you'll have to help them line up places to write, as well.

You don't need the absolute top name in the market, but you want someone who can credibly write unique and valuable content for you (you want what Rand calls 10x Content).

Step 4: Identify the target topic

Once you have your writing team identified, work out with them what types of content they can help you create that meets these three goals:

1. Fits your competitive strategy per Step 1.
2. Might be of interest to your target sites.
3. Matches up with what your SME can write.

The topics you pitch need to be different for each site. Let's say we've decided on BHG.com as one of our sites of interest. As a first step, you can try searching the query "site:bhg.com landscaping" (quotes not required):

This does not yet solve the problem for us, as it shows over 6,000 results. The good news is that this site covers the topic a lot; however, you're looking to see what gaps there may be in their coverage, and then see if you can pick something that will be supplemental to what they already have published.

Since 6,000+ posts is a lot to look at, let's see if we can simplify it a bit more. Here's a follow-up search:

This idea assumes you're able to create content around the topic of landscaping for colonial homes. Assuming you are, you can go through this and start trying to figure out what type of content you can create that the site hasn't seen before.

This is an essential part of the process. Your goal is to come up with a topic that comes across to the editor you pitch as offering unique to value to their site. This is what the first four steps have been about. Don't go past this step until you have the first four steps nailed.

Step 5: Research the people you will pitch

We're getting close to pitch time, but we have one more research step left. First, figure out who it is at the target site that you are going to pitch. Usually, identifying the editorial staff is pretty simple. In the case of this CountryLiving.com site, they have an About page, which shows us who their editors are:

Next, start researching the various editors. Do they publish on the site? Read what they've written. Are they active on social media? Start following them there. Advance points for establishing credibility by having meaningful interactions with them about their articles in their social feeds before ever sending them a pitch. At a minimum, make sure you learn what you can about their likes and dislikes.

Step 6: Craft the pitch

Finally, we get to write our pitch! Steps 1 through 5 are about making this step the easiest of them all. Let's start with three rules:

1. Personalize every pitch. No automatic pitch-building whatsoever.
2. Know what your key value proposition is, and lead with it.
3. Keep it short. Get right to the point, and don't waste their time.

Those are the three most important things to remember. To satisfy rule two, start figuring out what the lead of your pitch is. Brought in a well-known expert? Lead with that. Groundbreaking study? Lead with that. Filling a void in the content-published-to-date on the target site? Lead with that.

This is where your pitch is won or lost. The major pitch elements are:

1. Your lead value proposition up front.
2. Something that shows you've done your homework.
3. The specific nature of the request.
4. Additional required background.

Here's an example of a pitch:

Even though I've included some areas that need filling in, don't confuse this with being a template that you auto-populate. The comments you make on what they've already published and the nature of what you're suggesting to them are all custom.

Also, if your author or your business is really well-known, then that might be the lead value proposition, rather than the content. In that case, lead with those facts, cover the proposed article topic in the second paragraph, and structure the email differently.

Summary

As I noted in the beginning, successful pitches are all about the preparation. Treat each opportunity to pitch someone as special and rare. After all, if you sent them a crappy pitch, and it shows you didn't put in any special effort, you may have burned that bridge permanently.

That can be very costly, especially as your reputation and visibility continues to grow over time. Do all the upfront work correctly, and the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts will be greatly amplified.

We all like to get an edge on our competition, and one of the best ways to do that in content marketing is to master and perfect your pitching process.

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