Many of you may think this is crazy. Those of us who have done it before know that it’s crazy. And yet, we come back year after year because there really is no other experience like it. This will be my fifth year running, and I don’t plan on stopping in the future. I do, however, plan on getting as many people to share in the experience with me as I can. You could say that misery loves company, but it would be more appropriate to say that there’s nothing like a little self-inflicted peer pressure to help you reach your writing goals.

So about two months ago I began persuading, challenging, encouraging, and (in some cases *cough* Dan Bischoff *cough*) brow-beating others at SEO.com to join me in this literary journey. We have about nine of us willing taking on this crazy goal.

Will we be writing the next New York Times best sellers? Who can say? But we will be producing some imaginative, fun stuff. When you write on a deadline like this, you can’t help but be wildly creative.

Matt Cutts is Doing it, You Can Too

Don’t think you can do it? Think you’re too busy? Even Matt Cutts is doing NaNoWriMo this year. You’d be surprised how you can find ways to make time to write your masterpiece (or a close approximation of a masterpiece, anyway).

NaNoWriMo takes a lot of work, and it can be hard to keep your motivation up all month long (especially when your characters start running out of things to say or you have plot holes so big you could park a bus in it … next to a cruise liner), so at SEO.com we started tracking each other’s word counts. We started on a whiteboard, but our designer decided to help us out and created a page that would automatically track us all.

So, in the interest of even more self-inflicted peer pressure, we are inviting you all to check out our NaNoWriMo chart and see how we’re currently doing on our novels. Don’t go easy on us if we start to slack off. Sometimes we will need the extra motivation.

Our NaNoWriMo Progress Chart

Oh, and we included Matt on our chart because we all want to see how he does this month too, but this in no way implies that he is directly affiliated with us. (On the other hand, he did shave our President’s head last year at PubCon… so maybe that makes us pals.)

November is a crazy month for everyone involved with NaNoWriMo, but December is oh-so-sweet when you’ve got a brand new novel you have written yourself.

Join Us!

Now we are doing it again.

On October 29th, we will be holding the SEO.com Tricks & Treats Workshop to help business owners learn about some of the most recent trends in the Search Engine Optimization industry. You don’t have to be haunted by poor website rankings anymore.

In the last workshop, we covered topics that ranged from important link building strategies to optimizing a website’s conversion rate. This time we will be delving into three new areas that will help anyone build their search engine rankings and gain the exposure they need to become successful.

We will start with breakfast and networking in the morning and then move on to the workshops. Ash Buckles will show you how to use the same tools as the pros for keyword research, link building and other strategies. Next, Dan Patterson will go into the details of mixing Social Media and SEO for the greatest impact. Lastly, Dan Bischoff will talk about optimized press releases and how to go beyond traditional media distribution in order to gain more exposure.

After that, there will be an SEO Expert Panel Q&A to answer all your questions about the industry or our company. It will be a great chance to learn about how the industry is changing and what you can do to keep up.

Before it is all over, you will have a chance to meet one-on-one with an SEO expert to go over any questions you may have about your site or how you can start the SEO process. Many previous attendees found this personalized attention one of the best features of the workshop, and this is your chance to take advantage of our experts.

The cost is FREE. You can even get a free custom website analysis if you register before October 20th. We are offering a chance for business owners to learn the ins and outs of the industry at no cost (we are even covering breakfast). The SEO.com Tricks & Treats Workshop is an opportunity to take a fresh look at your website, clear out the old skeletons, do away with outdated zombified strategies and really start to improve your rankings.

MarketingExperiments recently released a report on Twitter usage and trends that detailed a number of ways companies are (or should be) using the platform to reach their customers. Some of their findings create an interesting picture about the type of marketing tool Twitter really is. How is it really being used by businesses compared to individuals? Does personal tweeting prepare you to tweet for your company? Is it really worthwhile?

The MarketingExperiments report cited a few studies about Twitter that present a detailed profile of the network and its users. According to the report in the Harvard Business Review, 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 90% of all tweets. By comparison, in most social networks the top 10% of contributors account for only 30% of the content.

A comparison was drawn to Wikipedia, a platform that doesn’t technically have anything to do with social networking. But it was interesting to note that 15% of Wikipedia editors account for 90% of the edits. These similar statistics could imply that Twitter is becoming more of a one-to-many announcement service, like Wikipedia, than a two-way communication network, as it was intended.

The report offered some other interesting details about Twitter usage. According to The Business Insider, 51% of users don’t even tweet once a month, while 19% will use it once a day or more. And according to Nielson Online, more than 60% of U.S. Twitter users sign up for an account but don’t come back to it the following month.

What does this mean to the average Twitter user? It seems to imply that many casual users just don’t “get it” and that most of the users who stick with it are more tech-savvy and prone to early adoption of new technologies. If your target audience includes this particular type of consumer, you should definitely consider taking advantage of Twitter.

Twitter gives companies the opportunity to monitor, join, or start conversations about their products, services, or the company itself. However, according to some MarketingSherpa research, nearly two-thirds of marketers aren’t monitoring or responding to comments (both positive and negative) about their company. Remember, just because you aren’t initiating the Twitter conversation, that doesn’t mean no one is talking about you.

When consumers tweet about your company, it’s an open invitation for you to listen in on their personal conversations. Monitoring the kinds of tweets going on about your company can provide valuable and usable data on consumer trends and disposition. In a business environment where knowledge is power, this is the kind of information a company can’t afford to miss. And participating in the conversation is a great way to reach out to those consumers.

Once you’ve identified your target users and started building a following, Twitter can become a channel to communicate with your “preferred customers” by offering special deals or insights into the company. Twitter has also become an excellent source for live event coverage, and if you present or attend such events, this is a great way to build followers.

So there are a lot of benefits to using Twitter, but the platform seems to have trouble attracting longtime, consistent users. What does this say about Twitter as an effective marketing tool? Is it really worth the time and effort to get involved?

The only way to answer that question is to stop and really consider whether or not tweeting will increase your revenue (through special offers and sales notices), build brand or equity (by creating relationships and sharing good experiences), and reduce your costs (by allowing customers to address any problems before having to call the company directly). If you can clearly delineate how your company can use Twitter in these areas, then this is certainly a marketing avenue you should consider.

If you’re interested in following any of the SEO specialists here, be sure to check out their author profile for a link to their Twitter feed.

Content strategy may sound like another fancy-yet-meaningless buzzword to describe the job of the humble copywriter; but, as it turns out, there is a lot more to it than cranking out large word counts and filling in empty spaces on a website. The principles of content strategy are centered on developing a useful and meaningful website that will significantly impact a user’s experience.

Content strategy lays out plans for the creation, publication, and control of useful and usable content. A strategist will take control of the development and incorporation of new or revised content for the site, and define what content should be published and, more importantly, why it should be published.

Many website designers do not take content strategy into account during the early stages of development. When it comes time to publish to the Web, there is often a quick stab at some filler content to round out the site, which inevitably leads to more stale, dissociative, and useless content clogging up the Internet. It is just too tempting to use this type of content and label it “good enough.”

Unfortunately, “good enough” could leave you “far behind” the competition. Internet users are a savvy bunch and website experiences continue to advance, and that will require more sophisticated content. Not just more content, but more relevant, useful, accurate, and meaningful content.

So how does one define “meaningful” content? Does it really matter? Isn’t all content just about climbing the search engine rankings anyway? After all, most website visitors don’t stay long enough to see all the content on a page, let alone read an entire paragraph.

Meaningful content is a unified presentation of words, audio, video, and graphics. Used properly, a website just might encourage a visitor to care about the information on the screen. That means treating it as more than an afterthought and following some important criteria.

Content must be relevant to human visitors. It must be readable, but it must also be delivered in a style and voice that specific customers or demographics will relate to. A content strategy should include a style guide for the site so everyone that contributes content is working within a set structure.

The content must also be useful to machines. All search engine optimization best practices should be followed, including the use of proper keyword density, meta data, and relevant text. These are the elements that will help a site start to climb the search engine rankings where it will be noticed.

Content strategy should make the actual production of the content an effective process. It will establish rules for workflows, updates, and upkeep schedules. This process is all about optimizing company time and resources to ensure that content isn’t being thrown in at the last minute.

Finally, meaningful content will be part of a comprehensive vision for the website. Strategists will determine what the site needs, provide and in-depth analysis of existing content, and identify problematic areas or elements that disconnect the user from the intended website experience.

Content strategy really is about more than just filling up empty space on a website. By accepting content as a crucial part of website design from the beginning stages of development you can create a site that is meaningful to both customers and search engines. And that’s a powerful combination that can lead to success.

Social media marketing doesn’t quite lend itself to such metrics. After all, in a world of anonymity, like an online community, how can you really measure engagement or influence? Is there a way to glean useful, objective data?

The argument has been made that Social Media is far too nuanced and complicated to apply standard data collection models, or that any attempt to quantify results, or focus on direct responses, or overanalyze ROI will miss the purpose of Social Media Marketing.

Giving up on so many wonderful metrics is pretty difficult these days. Web analytics can show us real and actual activity on a website, and if the marketing strategy is not working well, we can immediately adjust for the market conditions. Keywords not climbing the SERPs? Time to change focus. Lots of visitors but low conversion rate? Consider changing the overall web architecture. Bounce rate too high? PageRank too low? Time to increase link building efforts.

Social Media isn’t as easy to analyze and adapt. That’s not to say that it can’t be done, but there are other considerations that have to go into the planning stages. Are you trying to use Social Media Marketing as a component of your SEO strategy, or are you just using it as an outlet for interaction and engagement with the community? Are you positioned to take advantage of observed trends, or do you need exact numbers before you feel confident enough to make changes to your marketing campaign?

Not all of Social Media Marketing is completely intangible, so if you do need those hard numbers, they are still available. Start with the usual list of web stats—page views, unique visits, members, time spent on site, etc., and then include other, more unconventional metrics. These could include:

• Number of posts/ideas/threads, number of comments and trackbacks,completed profiles
• New friends/followers/etc. after 30/60/90 days
• Ratios like members to contributors, posts to comments, and passive readers to followers/friends/etc.

But, from a social media stand point, there really is a little more nuance to Social Media metrics, and most of it centers on identifying trends in behavior. That’s where things get a little rough. After all, we’re marketers, not sociologists. We like usable market data that can immediately improve the marketing campaign and not the wide variables of social trends and possibilities.

The truth is, though, that in the ever-evolving Internet environment you can’t ignore sociological elements in your marketing campaign. The metrics may be comparatively intangible, but a social marketing campaign can do a lot more than generate traffic. Some marketing campaign strategies are good for building clicks – Social Media Marketing, however, is good for building loyal customers.

How do you know, then, if Social Media Marketing is working? If you can’t run the same kind of metrics, and the numbers you can track are a little more subjective than other data, how can you make sure the marketing campaign is targeted correctly?

In the end, it all comes down to your own goals. Your goals should be completely objective and measurable. Social media can directly affect your goals, and if you use the metrics that best support them, you’ll be able to see exactly what is working and what isn’t. You can’t go into social media with the thought that “it’s just a good idea” or “my competition is doing it, so I probably should.” You need to know what you want to achieve and how social marketing can help you get there. You might not be able to track everything you want, but you will always be able to see accomplishment when it happens.