What Is Remarkable Content?

Web content in any form, be it text, audio or video is the driving force of millions of web sites and blogs. Content creation strategies have changed significantly with the passage of time. Whether you are writing for a niche blog or a company blog, your readers are going to judge your products and services through your content. What are the traits of quality content? How does it differ from average filler content?

Here are some of the characteristics of remarkable content that has the power to convincingly influence the readers.

Provides Immediate Value (Highly Relevant)

Good content always provides solutions to readers' grievances. Every niche has a closed set of audience that has certain demands, questions and inquiries about the subject. Whatever is your niche, your readers almost always have some burning questions waiting to be answered. It's all about anticipating readers' expectations and delivering the goods accordingly.

Remember, it's not just about providing the solutions, but how easily and quickly readers can apply those solutions to get the desired results. Quality content not only deliver the solution, but also present it in such a way that a layman as well as an expert, both can understand and implement it with ease.

Unique Voice

If your blog niche is highly competitive, things can become more difficult as you may be rehashing the content. Uniqueness is another important element of quality content. If zillion other blogs are also talking about blogging tips, what different are you going to offer to your readers? The difference lies in your perspective and how you elaborate and interpret it. If a reader gets the feeling that he or she has already read this before somewhere else, your content is merely a replica of a topic already covered effectively by somebody else.

The freshness of content directly relates to the uniqueness associated with it. If 10 people are talking about remarkable content, more or less their points at macro level will be similar. Yet one of them may be able to impress his audience more than the others. That's where the uniqueness of content plays a big role.

Appealing Presentation

The third most important element of quality content is the way it is packaged and presented to the readers. Visual appeal has the power to make an average piece of writing, a masterpiece. Use of typography, images, quotes, bullet lists and highlighted sections makes the content sticky and attractive.

Businesses across the world package the same product in different ways to increase their sales. It's a successful strategy that works very well in presenting the old wine in a new bottle. Same thing applies to web content. Package it in an attractive shell and you are bound to get more readers in due course of time.

Closely Connected (Engagement With Audience)

Passive writing is never welcomed by majority of readers. A great post directly relates the topic with the reader. This direct engagement makes a strong connection with the audience giving them the required confidence in relying on the provided solution. Having said that, one must keep in mind the negative implications of getting too much personal and informal while writing for a niche or company blog.

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Digg Vs StumbleUpon: The Inside Scoop

Since the emergence of Web 2.0 sites, social media has emerged as a cornerstone in promoting online businesses. Whether it's a small personal blog or a mainstream web site of an industry giant, all are using SMM (social media marketing) to get more business with minimum efforts. Digg and StumbleUpon are two of the most heavily used services and are known to deliver promising results if used in a correct way. Companies are hiring dedicated social media experts to leverage connections from these sites. Let's dissect various dimensions of these two popular social media services and try to compare the inside scoop.

The Big Difference

StumbleUpon is well known to send consistent traffic, whereas Digg is better known to send a surge of traffic whenever a post manages to hit the front page. Through StumbleUpon, you can start receiving traffic from day one of registration, whereas on Digg you may hit the front page if you are lucky enough to be appreciated by the Digg community on the very first day. Normally, on Digg you are not going to hit the front page frequently unless you have strong network supported by some power users.

Traffic Quality

There are numerous case studies done by various social media experts on the quality of traffic an article receives after getting popular on both these sites. Almost all of them suggest that traffic coming from StumbleUpon has lower bounce rate and more pages/visit than Digg's traffic. This clearly suggests the volatile nature of traffic from Digg.

Sometimes, a popular story on SU gets several waves of traffic spread across several days to several weeks. As long as people thumbs up the story waves of traffic flow in consistently.

Voting System

At macro level, both SU and Digg works on the same principle of voting system that involves general web community giving their support to a submitted story. In recent years, Digg has refined and changed their voting algorithm several times to remove any shortcomings in it. It is observed that the home page of Digg is dominated by handful of power users who control about 70-90% of this premium space. This raises several questions about the transparency of their voting system. StumbleUpon voting system appears to be much more transparent and dynamic. Even a new user has equal chances of getting their story go viral on SU.

The difference in method of voting also plays a major role in how stories get popular on both these social media services. While Digg presents the submitted stories as a central database in one location, StumbleUpon users get random web pages according to their preferences, which are filtered and pushed by their algorithm. Digg community observes a sheep mentality phenomenon as flocks of new users blindly vote popular stories submitted by power users to get some favor for their submissions. On StumbleUpon, when a web page is presented to the user, almost 90% of the users do not care to know how many stumbles has been already received by this story and who has submitted it. This increases the chances of fair voting solely based on the quality of submitted story.

Community Behavior And Content Pattern

Digg is well known by the harsh comments given by the community members. Some of them even cross the limits of decency. The same problem is evident in StumbleUpon but at much lesser scale.

Digg community content preferences are also very interesting. It has been observed that stories related to search engine optimization are buried frequently on Digg, while articles on Apple, iPhone and Windows are loved by Digg community. This phenomenon has triggered creation of Digg-friendly content by large number of web publishers. StumbleUpon's community content preferences cannot be given easily because of the dispersed nature of voting system with no visible submitted stories trail at a central location.

Digg or StumbleUpon, Which is the best?

If used correctly, both have the potential to give huge exposure to your web site in quick time. All it takes is a proper marketing strategy with tailor made content to leverage the power of these excellent social media services.

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How To Track Social Media Traffic of Your Blog

Nowadays, visits from various social media sites contribute a large chunk of total traffic received by a blog. We invest lot of our time in social media marketing without analyzing which social media platforms are giving the best results and where we should invest more of our energy to get the maximum benefits. Fortunately, Google Analytics provides some powerful options to monitor social media referrals.

There are several methods to view social media referrals via Google Analytics. Below are the 3 most common methods to see SM referral data. One of these methods requires Firefox add-on, while other one requires a simple filter to exclude traffic other than coming from social media sites.

Method - 1 (Analytics Referral Sites): The first method is the most easiest one. By deafult GA provides statistics for all the referral sites.

To see this data, go to your analytics dashboard. Select Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites from the side menu. The only extra work required is ignoring non-social media sites present in this report. Normally, social media sites are on top in this report and are easily spotted as shown above.

Method - 2 (Greasemonkey Social Media Analytics Plugin): The second method requires two Firefox add-ons. One of them is the popular Greasemonkey script that works as a driving engine for Analytics social media plugin.

To use this add-on, you must have new ga.js code installed on your blog. Once both these add-ons are installed in your Firefox browser, you can view various social media vote counts directly in Google Analytics reports as shown above. The developers are adding new social media services with each new version of this add-on.

Method - 3 (Custom Segments): Third method uses regular expressions and custom segments to get traffic report of selective social media sites. You can either choose to group traffic from all social media sites in a single segment or you can create a separate segment for every social media site.

Combined traffic in a single segment - To create a segment that shows combined traffic coming from a group of social media sites, follow this simple procedure.

1. Create a new custom segment.
2. From 'Dimensions', expand 'Traffic Sources'.
3. Drag the 'Source' statement to your custom segment.
4. Choose 'Matches regular expression' for 'Condition'.
5. Write the following regular expression in field 'Value'.

linkedin\.com|facebook\.com|twitter\.com|delicious\.com|digg\.com

Separate each site name with a pipe symbol as shown above, prefixing backslash before every dot in the domain name. You can add as many social media sites to it separating each one with a pipe symbol. The only restriction is the length (256 characters) of regular expression allowed in Google Analytics. To accommodate more sites in your expression, you can group them into two parts and can create two custom segments.

Separate segment for single site - The procedure for creating a custom segment for single site is same as shown above. Only the regular expression will change.

Let's suppose you want to create a separate custom segment to track all referral traffic from Facebook. Simply use this regular expression.

facebook\.com

Make sure you have prefixed the backslash before the dot in the domain name. If you want, you can create custom segments for all major social media sites to get a clearer picture about their performance. Remember, if you create too many custom segments and apply all of them in your traffic reports, it may clutter your graph reports.

Once you have created all your custom segments, you can apply them to your regular reports.

This is how your reports will look after applying the custom segments. You can clearly see all the segregated data giving you a better and clearer picture of traffic trends on your blog. After analyzing this vital data, you can introduce necessary changes in your social media marketing strategy to get better results.

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8 Reasons Why Digg May Not Work For Your Blog

Social Media has completely changed the way traffic was pulled to the web sites. Today, even a day old blog can get thousands of visits from social media sites on the first day of its launch. This was like a dream a decade back. Digg and StumbleUpon are two of the most successful social media sites that send tons of visitors in quick time.

Although Digg sends huge amount of traffic in a short span of time, it is comparatively hard to get success on Digg. It requires lot of time, strong network and right kind of content to be successful on Digg. Let's see, why Digg might not be the right place for your SMM efforts.

Wrong Niche - Digg users are well known to pamper and promote specific type of content. This includes tech news, Apple, iPhone and breaking news. If you are blogging about a different topic that inherently does not go well on Digg, you are never going to taste the success of Digg front page. I've written a guide about (How To Create Digg-Friendly Content).

Inactive Digg Profile - If you want to succeed on Digg, you yourself should be an active digger. This ensures that you are well aware of latest happenings and the trends going-on on Digg.

Poor Digg Network - No matter how good is your content, unless you do not have a strong network of Digg users including some power users, you will not get consistent results with Digg.

Poor Hosting Plan - Did your site crashed when you first tasted success on Digg? Sometimes, a cheap hosting plan with heavily loaded shared server is overwhelmed by the traffic surge from Digg and eventually takes down your site temporarily. This is a very annoying situation since your hard work gets wasted. If you are serious about Digg, make sure you have a good hosting plan and your blog is well-optimized for speed through cache plugins and various other techniques.

Wrong Submission Time - This applies to almost every social bookmarking activity. Submit your content in peak hours to get the better results. Research has shown that Tue, Wed and Thu are the best days to submit your content on Digg. Time can be as flexible as morning office hours to late noon.

Self-Promotion - If you are consistently digging your own content for prolonged period, it will be buried by Digg system and eventually your domain may get banned for indefinite period. It's better to play safe than wasting time in sending endless reconsideration requests to Digg.

Indulging in Digg Vote-Exchange - If you are aggressively asking for Digg votes in exchange for your votes on various media platforms, your content is destined to be buried on Digg. A little push by power users is acceptable. Except that, let the voting count inflate organically.

Junk-Promotion - Now this is quite obvious. Sell crap and you will get the same from the other end. Digg community is very sensitive to spammers. Do not submit your every single post to Digg just for the sake of submitting. Keep your pillar posts saved for mid-week publishing time and let your best content rule the Digg chart.

What's your experience about Digg and the traffic you receive from it? Do you think alternate social media platforms are slowly replacing Digg?

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Video-Blogging: An Effective Way To Pull Traffic And Create A Personal Brand

Text has always been the dominant communicating medium on Web and still continues to be so. With the introduction of new technologies, share of multimedia content has grown significantly. One such medium is video that has firmly established its roots in the world of blogging. Video blogging (vlogging) is getting popular nowadays with more and more bloggers coming out with their own vodcast series.

Vlogging not only helps attract readers much easily, but also has the power to create your personal brand. Many famous bloggers have used it successfully to reach new heights in their blogging journey. They have also used popular platforms like YouTube to market their blogs through informative and entertaining videos.

Getting Started with Video Blogging

Video blogging is simply using video as content for your blog. Some bloggers use it occasionally mixed with their regular posts, while others have dedicated video blogs (vlogs) producing series of vodcasts. In either case, the posting and distribution mechanism is almost the same. Since it stimulates several sensory organs, the viral appeal of a video post is extremely strong. Like every article is not a pillar post, similarly every video post can't be a cliffhanger. The success of a video post largely depends on the subject and the presentation skills of the blogger. A poor video presentation can ruin a blogger's hard earned reputation in a minute.

Requirements For Video Blogging

Presentation Skills - This is the most important pre-requisite to create appealing video posts. You must posses' excellent presentation skills that includes clear pronunciation, flair to speak, understanding of tone changes, convincing power and above all your ability to record and edit the recordings. Some people are born with exceptional speaking and presentations skills. Others can master it with regular mock presentations. I'll strongly advice you to defer your video post publication, until you do not get positive feedback about your test recordings from your close friends or some trusted fellow bloggers.

Hardware - If you want to post a high quality video, you would require a good quality camcorder or a powerful webcam. A camcorder will give you a slightly better picture quality than a webcam. If you are making the video indoors, correct lighting plays a big role in creating clear recordings. As a general rule of thumb, make sure light source is behind the webcam or camcorder with direct focus on your face. The distance and intensity of light source can be adjusted by doing some test recordings.

Software - There are several free and commercial video editing software. Normally, a video is recorded at higher bit rate to get a high quality picture, which is later compressed to reduce the size of the video. I personally found Camtasia Studio the best among all for creating videos for web publishing. Almost every commercial editing software supports easy creation of YouTube compatible video formats. It is the most preferred and widely used video format on web.

Server and Bandwidth - Since video eats up significant bandwidth, your web-hosting plan should be able to cater the needs of video blogging. Nowadays VPS hosting solutions comes at affordable rate and provides quite good service for high traffic sites. If you are planning to do regular series of vodcasts, I'll recommend switching to VPS solution rather than sticking with a typical shared hosting plan.

Preparing a Video Post

An ideal video post addresses an issue that solves a critical problem of the intended audience. Generally, bloggers divide the topic into several sections and create a video series . Often these series are as long as 10-15 videos per series.

Scripts - If you are inexperienced, writing a rough script for each video can help you in making the recording process much easier. This script may not be like a film script, where you have to chant every single word as it is. A general outline with main points can do the work if you are comfortable in expanding those points on the fly. If you still struggle to do that, full script is the only solution.

Editing - Once your recording is completed, you have to do all the necessary edits. This includes removing unwanted frames, amplifying voice at selective places as per the requirements, adding captions and background music, adjusting the speed of frames at selective points and last but not the least compressing the video and making it YouTube compatible.

Publishing - Once your video is complete, it is ready to be published. There are two approaches to publish it. Either you upload it to services like YouTube and Viddler and get the embed code directly from the site or you upload the video to your own web server. Remember, if you are embedding the video directly from Youtube, it may not be visible to your feed readers and they have to actually visit the actual post to be able to watch it. Here's an excellent tutorial about inserting multimedia content in a WordPress post.

If you are already doing video posts, what significant difference you noticed in readers' engagement and reactions? Do you prefer to host your videos on third-party site or your own server?

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How Contextual Linking (Internal) Can Improve Your Blog Rankings

Great content automatically attracts quality backlinks. The basic criterion for a web page to rank high in SERP's is the number of backlinks pointing to it. Inbound links from other domains carry more weightage than internal links referring relevant content within the same domain. Keeping this in mind, normally we spend more of our energy in acquiring backlinks from external sources completely ignoring the power of internal contextual linking.

Here we are interested in getting more and more backlinks for weaker pages (non-performing content) in our archives. Since this content is average or below average, there are very little chances of getting quality backlinks (vote for exceptional content) organically.

A non-performing post doesn't necessarily represent poor content. Sometimes, the overall structure and poor selection of keywords keeps the post way low in SERP's.

If you have a large archive, a complete rewrite of all these pages will be a suicidal attempt to revive your blog rankings. So what other options are left...? Buying paid links? Desperate trading of social media votes? The former will make big daddy Google angry and the latter may get your domain banned on various social media sites. In either case, it will be a huge loss. Contextual linking is an ideal option that can give the much-required boost to these non-performing posts. It not only helps in elevating the SERP rankings but also helps spread the link juice evenly across your blog content. Let's see how to do it.

Contextual Linking Fundamentals

The basic idea behind contextual linking is (in-text links) cross-linking your blog posts in a specific manner. This way you are going to increase the number of backlinks for every inter-linked post. Every time you link to a post this way, reciprocity is not a necessity. Successful and effective contextual linking involves careful selection of links crafted according to needs and requirements. There are two basic principles while creating a contextual link.

Right Anchor Text - The selection of anchor text plays a big role in creating a well-optimized contextual link. Since they are created within the normal flow of content, choosing the right keyphrase is extremely important. The chosen anchor text should clearly indicate the topic of content it is going to refer. Do not make it too long (ideally, 2-3 words), and at the same time make sure you have included primary keyword within the phrase.

Content Relevancy (Context) - The second important factor is relevancy of both web pages connected via this link. There should be a similarity or co-relation between the subjects of discussion. The most important area is the surrounding text of the link. The more it's relevant to the referring page, the more is the SEO value of that link. Since your linked pages will be relevant, the probability of a reader clicking that link will also be high, helping in inflating your page views.

Contextual Linking Strategy

If you have not linked your posts earlier, you must do some preliminary analysis to figure out the right linking pattern. An ideal strategy is to link out to weaker pages from the top performing content. This way, you will be passing on link-juice from high-rank pages to weaker content giving them the required boost.

Let's assume you have a popular post about blog monetization with PR4. This post appears on first page of SERP's for several highly competitive keywords. Naturally, this post brings consistent organic traffic for you and will continue to do so for long time to time. Let's further assume that you have two more posts on blog monetization. One of them talks about direct advertising, while other one is all about affiliate marketing. Both these posts receive almost negligible traffic with no presence in SERP's.

Now you have a perfect situation where contextual linking can be used to spark some life in these dead posts. All you need to do is to link out to these two posts from your high-ranking post. Choose two relevant keyphrases from within the text of this post and create links to the weaker posts. This will not only give added backlinks from a high rank page, but will also divert traffic coming on that page.

Linking Patterns

There are severals ways you can link your blog posts. The two most common methods are:

Random Cross-Linking Approach - In this approach, you have to randomly pick all the related posts and link out wherever you feel a link will serve the purpose. Although this is a cumbersome process, especially if your archive is large, but gives very good results in boosting the rankings and traffic.

Top-Down Approach - The second approach is most widely used and preferred approach for majority of bloggers. I also use this approach. In this method, you normally do not touch your old posts. Whenever you write a new post, you create 2-3 contextual links to older posts in your archive. Here I must stress that just for sake of creating links, do not alter your original article or try to forcefully stuff any keyphrases. Just write your post in normal flow without thinking about any linkouts. Once your post is completed, almost every time you will automatically find scope of linking to older posts.

What's Your Linking Strategy?

I'm sure you do link your blog posts on regular basis. If yes, what is your preferred approach while linking out? Have you experienced any boost in rankings after linking your posts?

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