Several reasons I didn’t blog:

1. A change in my responsibilities forced me to focus attention elsewhere
2. My travel schedule increased
3. I didn’t attend as many events
4. I didn’t feel like it
5. I stopped following RSS feeds
6. Twitter allowed me to get lazy in retweeting
7. The latest mobile social media apps (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) have terrible interfaces
8. My mobile has given me more headaches than solutions; I spend a lot of my mobile time reading and socializing
9. I fell out of touch with several online friends
10. Many of my favorite bloggers slowed/stopped blogging
11. I didn’t prioritize blogging

In the end, it’s just a lot of excuses.

The benefits of blogging

Even with all the benefits of blogging, I couldn’t get back on track with a regular writing schedule. This is something I’m going to change in 2012.

My blogging has dropped to almost nothing but if my first few posts this year are any indication, I’m going to be writing a lot more in the coming months.

The benefits of blogging haven’t changed from years past:

• Fresh content to promote your message to your audience
• Relevant information that relates to your keywords and industry terms
• Multiple content formats (text, images, video, audio, etc.) that help you rank well in the ever expanding indexes that search engines display to users
• Establishing yourself as an expert and staying current in your industry
• Creating a home for all your social media activities to tie back to
• Embedding images, video, audio, etc. while providing greater context for the media you’ve produced
• Attraction of links by other bloggers
• Comments and community-building
• Shares, Likes, and Retweets that naturally build exponential interest

Shortfalls of social media sites

When Google+ launched last year, I started to appreciate what Facebook had been working toward; groups, community, and multiple formats of content (photos, videos, status updates, etc.). I much prefer Google+ over Facebook. As I’ve added people to my circles and followed the streams of data, I realized that Twitter is actually lacking severely without photos & videos, 140 character limit, groups, filters, and other great features we’ve all dreamed about.

You can only have somewhat superficial conversations on Twitter and Facebook. Getting into deep discussions becomes visible to everyone following your feed and isn’t always what you want. For example: I may not want to follow 100 tweets between two of my friends while I’m trying to check in for the afternoon. Natural limitations keep your conversations splintered among multiple status updates and threads. Blogging allows you to keep an original post and each of the follow up comments together.

Twitter and Facebook can then help you get the word out that a conversation is happening on your blog.

Blogging is different. I realized I write because it’s fun; and an outlet. I write on different subject matters and publish them to different audiences to keep things organized and targeted. Facebook and Twitter are then used to promote posts to the masses, whether they want to read about my different blog categories or not. Google+ solves this problem better than any other platform but it’s far from perfect.

My top 5 list of blogging benefits I missed:

1. Author Authority – keeping and building my audience on several subjects
2. Backlinks – promotional and SEO benefits
3. Social shares – authority, promotional, and SEO benefits
4. Guest blogging opportunities – growing my audience as a result of writing on others’ blogs
5. Creating content in multiple formats that help me control the SERPs (search engine results pages) with pages, posts, videos, social influence, etc.

What did you miss last year and what are you going to change?

2011 was a big year for social media. We saw continued growth of sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as the introduction of Google+. Many businesses continued the adoption of using social media as part of their marketing strategies, and now we are seeing the the early stages of what the social graph in search results within Google and Bing look like.

2012 will be undoubtedly be another year of huge growth in social media, and if you have not embraced it in your business, or if you dipped your toes in the water and gave up, now is the time to roll up your sleeves and get moving in the right direction.

Here are a few ideas to ponder as you get ready for 2012.

Invest A Proper Amount Of Time – Don't Short Change Your Efforts:

The biggest investment you will make into your social media efforts is TIME. Stop looking for the easy button when it comes to social media… there isn't one. You MUST put the time in to achieve the results you want. PERIOD!

Create Your Goals – Achieve Your Goals:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so go into social media with a roadmap, and plan on how to achieve your goal. Do you want more followers, leads, sales, site visits, white paper downloads, likes, replies or newsletter signups? No matter what the goals are, if you do not plan for them now, you will lose your way and find yourself not getting what you want out of social media, and possibly giving up on it altogether. Sure, you may find yourself adjusting your goals along the way, and that is OK… but start somewhere.

Create A Content Calendar – Plan Your Content In Advance:

Set up a calendar and plan your content. Each month decide what type of content you will be posting. Will you be blogging, if so how many times per week? How will you engage your audience, will you maybe run a contest on your Facebook page, how about a poll, or a question of the day? How about creating a video each week? Does your company have a particular marketing message for the year that you should sync up with? In the end you want to create content that people will engage with, share with their friends, and provide value to all involved. 

Side note: Keep in mind that people do not care to be advertised to… so use the simple 80/20 rule. Talk/share interesting things, or engage your audience 80% of the time, and talk about yourself (self promotion (20%) of the time.

Track And Measure Your Posts:

If you use Google Analytics on your site, use the Google Analytics URL builder tool and create campaigns. Track all links going to your site from all the social networks you post on. You can test what social sites work best, what time of day is best to post, and what type of content resonates best with your audience. Obviously you will be able to track ROI of your efforts here as well. Everything has some sort of value, whether it is a lead, a fan or follower, or an actual sale, you can attribute a dollar amount to almost any action on your website. Make your time investment in social media pay for itself!

The Best Social Media Tool Is You:

While I was at SMX in Arizona earlier this month, there were many presentations on different tools you can use for social media. Anything from automation, to tracking and engagement tools… but at the end of the day, we all agreed that the best tool is you. You, as in THE HUMAN ELEMENT. At the end of the day, I am not a fan of automation for the sake of automation. But, if you choose to automate anything, just be sure you are available to answer any replies people may leave. No one likes to follow an account that does not reply or engage.

In future posts I will break down each one of these ideas into more detail, as well as have additional information, as these ideas are just the tip of the iceberg to get you thinking about social media in 2012 and beyond.

Please leave your comments below as I would love to hear from you. And if there is anything in particular you would like me to cover in future posts about social media marketing, please leave those in the comments as well.

Until next time… Doc

PS… Be sure to follow SEO.com on Twitter, friend us Facebook, circle us on Google+ and join us in the conversations.

It was only a matter of time but in less than 90 days Google+ has gone from being invite-only to available to everyone! The announcement made today on the Google blog also includes announcements for expanded Hangout features and search options.

In nearly 3 months, the Google+ project has seen 91 different improvements, which according to Google’s Vic Gundotra is a result of user feedback. “For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal,” wrote Gundotra.

The changes, which include Hangouts on your phone and live broadcasts for Hangouts, brings the total number of improvements to Google+ to 100 and will roll out over the next day. But they are not stopping there. Get a sneak peak of what’s next for Google+. And if there’s something you missed, previous updates can be found here.

Twitter arrived on the scene July of 2006. As of 2011 it has more than 200 million users and 1.6 billion tweets per day. It sure has grown. But can Twitter sustain its growth and weather the storm of the web and its own users?

Twitter has a number of powerful benefits including: networking, branding, research and promotion. Yet even with the golden eggs, there are many frustrations, irritations and problems.

Twitter has shown signs of Myspace #failure such as:

• Twitter and Myspace both allow people to be anonymous.
• To grab attention many profiles are becoming lewd. It’s apparent if you check any “follow back” hashtag such as #ifollowback you see every other profile picture is a scantily dressed woman.
• Both have had very fast growth. (Crash and trash?)
• Both allow people to customize their pages. (See images below)
• Quantity of followers is valued over quality of relationships. The quality of the relationship and communication (purpose of Twitter) can be lost due to the measurable number of followers.
• Many fake profiles. According to Matt Burns, “…You have Tina Fey, who has publicly acknowledged it’s not her on Twitter, yet her fake account currently has over 216,000 followers.”

As Jeremy Schoemaker wrote, “It’s like someone emailed all •*¨¨*•-:¦:-•*MySpAcE UsErS AnD tOlD ThEm ThEy CaN AnNoy PeOpLe In ReAl TiMe•*¨¨*•-:¦:-•*”

Twitter has a number of other problems:

• Many programs are available to automate thousands of Twitter accounts. How many of your followers are bots?
• Twitter users are subject to large amounts of spammed “bird turd” from followers, direct messages and trending topics.
• Twitter’s source of revenue is still being tapped. Recently Twitter announced promoted Tweets, advertisements which Twitter described this way: “…tweets may be visible within a user’s timeline if that user follows the advertiser.”
• Even when following only 500 people there is no way to keep up with the loads of information. Tweet platforms are needed to find relevant information.

With its rapid rise, hype and previously mentioned issues, Twitter could pop the social media marketing bubble like web companies killed the 2001 dotcom era.

But Twitter isn’t going away. Even with its annoyances, Twitter should have no problem sustaining its growth (that is unless a better birdy platform comes along). Just as the telegraph was replaced by the telephone because of better service, the demise of Myspace was due to the superior platform of Facebook.

For now, tweet away and feel free to follow me.

Social Search features links shared by your friends on the web based on the relevancy to your search. An annotation will show up under the link stating where the link appears and which of your friends shared it.

In order to see Google+ posts in your search results you must be signed into a Google account and the posts must be public.

Peter Shankman — the skydiver and PR guy who gained fame by founding HARO (Help a Reporter Out) — spoke in Salt Lake City last week about social media marketing and building trust around a brand. The guy has great ideas that can help any business thrive. Thanks to OrangeSoda for bringing him to town. The highlights:

Content First — Viral Can’t be Forced

Some guarantee viral campaigns. Truth is, nobody can. When it comes to something going viral, you are not in control. Everyone else is.

“If it’s good content, people will read it,” Shankman said. “You cannot make anything go viral. You can make something good and by default it will go viral.”

Of course, information is everywhere trying to grab your attention. Articles, infographics, videos, advertisements, Tweets, status updates and e-mails hit you as soon as you wake up in the morning. How do you get your customers’ attention from millions of daily messages?

“Learn to write,” Shankman said. “Bad writing will destroy America.”

Shankman pays his employees to take writing classes. Bad writing makes you look like an idiot. To stand out, “you just have to be 1 percent smarter than everyone else,” he said.

Transparency

There is no privacy anymore – especially online. You can’t hide. Everything is out in the open; every mistake, every decision, every action, every response, every success. To establish trust around your brand, your company needs to be completely transparent.

“Trust has never been more important,” Shankman said.

Transparency will disarm negative news or discussions. It lets you get in front of any potential crisis or problem before it gets out of control. To establish trust further, “small businesses must push the leaders and the individual personalities of the company.” People trust individuals more than a corporate image.

Relevance

Whether it’s developing a product, creating content, or defining your message, it has to be relevant to your audience.

It’s about “giving exactly what the customer wants when they want it,” Shankman said. To find out what that is, “ask them how they like to get their information. You never control the direction of your company. Figure out where your customers want you to go.”

Often, businesses don’t ask their audience. It’s easy to do, and ensures more of your customers will get what they want when they want it. And it will help you become more relevant to your audience.

Brevity

Be brief.

Shankman said (paraphrasing): The average attention span in the ’80s was about 3.5 minutes, or the length of a MTV video (if you are older than 30, you might remember when MTV actually played music videos). The average attention span today is 140 characters, which relates to about 2.6 seconds.

People are bombarded with messages every day and their time is pulled in various directions. They don’t have much time for length. Keep it short and sweet.

Top of Mind

Shankman says marketing and PR today is about connection and developing real relationships. He uses social media to become top of mind to his customers, so they will think of him first when they need his service. He credits a lot of his consulting work just by connecting with people through social media.

Every morning he opens up Facebook, looks at his followers’ birthdays, and wishes them happy birthday. It’s a small thing but it keeps them thinking of him.

“Eighty-percent of everything you do should be about your audience,” Shankman said. “The only thing you should focus on about yourself is breathing and eating.”

Treat Customers One Level Above Crap

Most people expect to be treated poorly by companies. That gives an advantage to any business.

“Treat customers one level above crap and they will do the PR for you,” Shankman said.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in the Social Media Basket

Twitter and Facebook may be gone tomorrow. Each social site is just a tool to connect and share a message. That tool could change tomorrow, or be completely gone tomorrow, along with all your followers and fans. Sure there are a lot of people on social media, but social media doesn’t cover near the audience that we think it might. Shankman compared those who are active in social media to those who are text messaging.

“9/11 and American Idol defined the importance of text messaging,” he said. “Ninety-seven percent of people text message, while 4 percent of the country is on Twitter, and only 1 percent of those people are active on Twitter.”

Focus on building relationships and the principles of communication and public relations. Don’t focus entirely on a specific tool.

Blogging comes in many forms from corporate blogs with a controlled message to personal blogs with information about that latest weekend retreat with friends. Businesses often find it difficult to provide the necessary resources to blog consistently with a message that is satisfactory to upper management and provide enough value to both marketing and SEO departments. This is where outsourcing can play a role in your blogging strategy.

Using contractors familiar with your industry is a great way to build unique content, open a dialog with your audience, build a community and generally step into the new form of customer communication.

Areas where outsourcing can assist in blogging include:

• Blogging ideas
• Market research
• Content research
• Ghost writing
• Editing
• Blog commenting

2. Twitter Management

Managing your Twitter feed can be a time-consuming project that may seem wasteful to some. Others see the value and rely on its ability to communicate quick bursts of information that don’t require a full blog post. Some ask whether people on Twitter have any attention span or whether the benefits are enough to pursue. With more than one million people joining weekly and billions of tweets happening monthly, it cannot be ignored by any marketer.

Relying on a contractor to provide every tweet to your audience may not be viable but there are other activities that can provide a wealth of benefit to your social media endeavor including:

• Friend management
• Better audience engagement
• Market research
• Pre-scheduling specific tweets (sales, events, etc.)
• Setup for appropriate feeds to automatically tweet (blog posts, photo uploads, etc.)

3. Facebook Management

Facebook includes more than making friends and tagging friends in pictures. Building out product pages or creating groups around products are two great ways to increase exposure to your audience through fans and friends. Creating Facebook pages and managing communication within your community requires a certain amount of time of expertise to spread the company message without alienating your fans who are visiting Facebook to catch up with friends or arrange the next night out.

Great ways to include contractors within your Facebook strategy are:

• Friend/Fan management
• Community creation and participation
• Group creation and management
• Photo uploads
• Video promotion
• Event promotion
• Product launches

4. Bookmarking

Although many social bookmarking services provide little link building value in SEO, there are perfectly valid human traffic reasons for utilizing bookmarking services online. People still visit and use bookmarking sites such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Etc. and the residual effect can be massive if you front page at Digg, Reddit, SERPd, etc.

Creating a personal bookmark, however, is not going to generate any sizable traffic to your site from a single user. But getting the attention of those that use these sites and offering them an easy alternative to bookmark your page and share it with their friends can have exponential effect on click-thrus. To gain the attention of the masses, and potentially land on the front page of a high traffic media site, requires a little seeding and promotion and this can be outsourced to contractors.

Sometimes this requires creative thinking to provide something of considerable value so your audience will be interested enough to take the desired action of bookmarking your site. This is often referred to as linkbait or viral marketing and will provide huge value to your SEO efforts as well as traffic, audience participation, community growth and so on.

5. Video marketing

When video marketing is discussed by businesses, it often spurs a conversation about the difficulties, costs and quality associated with producing videos for promotional purposes. Truth is that any point-and-shoot camera and a few minutes of idea generation will launch you into video marketing campaign that can captures million of visitors to your site. Think about the Will It Blend video series that was discovered and shot in an afternoon with less than $100 in expenses.

Contractors can be extremely helpful in the following ways:

• Idea creation
• Market research
• Determining viability
• Video creation
• Submissions (YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream, etc.)
• Social promotion

6. Document Marketing

Every business has more marketing material than they can possible publish and provide customers and prospects at any given time. Sometimes, this information can be easily re-purposed for blog posts, videos, etc. But taken as is, quickly edited to include links to pages on your site, it can be uploaded to several sites such as DocStoc, Scribd, YellowDocuments, etc. where links will flow and the search engines can see the visibility of your brand on social sites that link to you.

Moreover, promoting these documents through other social media avenues can add considerable site mentions to your overall online marketing campaign. It gives you the opportunity to completely dominate your space and brand your name and images to your audience no matter how they find you.

Outsourcing this is so simple and anybody can be trained in a matter of minutes to perform:

1. Document creation
2. Editing for links based on mapped URLs
3. Submissions (DocStoc, , Scribd, YellowDocuments, etc.)

7. Online PR

Online press releases are one of the greatest forms of social and PR marketing that can assist in brand development, SEO, audience awareness, community positioning and so on. Done right, online PR brings huge dividends by getting picked up by national and international newspapers and news stations. This will not only increase the credibility of your company but it will help you dominate the search engines for primary keywords.

The benefits of online PR extend beyond traditional press because the ability to produce and distribute each release is both easy and affordable and hundreds of news stories are generated out of each release.

The sensitive nature of press releases requires more scrutiny but contractors can help with:

• Market research
• Keeping up with current affairs
• Story development
• Social promotion
• Gathering quotes and product information
• Editing

There are other areas of social media and certainly more ways that outsourcing to contractors can benefit your business so please share whatever I missed here today in the comments below. And, if you feel so inclined, give this story a tweet, bookmark, Stumble or whatever promotion tickles your fancy.

The sad thing is that a lot of the things we recommend should have been done during the Web development phase the first time around.

No matter how much the SEO world tries to get the information out there, a lot of Web developers don’t understand the basic concepts of SEO. This in turn leads to sites being developed that an SEO team will later have to tear apart and fix.

So whether you’re designing a new site in-house, using some kind of template site-building system, or hiring an outside firm, here are 18 things that you’ll want to make sure are in place before you launch your site. It will keep us SEO guys from giving your site an overhaul later. By following these guidelines you’ll have a much more search engine friendly web design from the beginning.

1- Perform Keyword Research Before Developing the Site

SEO starts with keywords. And if you’re planning to market your site in the search engines, you should know what keywords you want to rank for before you even start building the site. Make sure this is done FIRST.

Here are some other posts that talk about how to properly do keyword research:

• Keyword Research Gems from PubCon
• How to Create a Huge Keyword List
• Use All the Tails in Your Search Marketing Strategy

2- Put Non-www to www Redirects in Place

It amazes me how many sites load with and without the www in the URL. The problem with this is that it creates an automatic duplicate of your site, and can waste a lot of link value as people link to both versions. Decide which version of your URLs you want to use, then 301 redirect everything else to the preferred version.

3- Use a Static, Keyword Based URL Structure

Dynamic URLs can cause a lot of problems if not handled right. So rather than going through all of the headache that they cause us SEO-types, just set your site up with good URL rewrites so that you don’t have dynamic URLs in the first place.

More posts about URLs:

• Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure
• 3 Common URL Problems and How to Fix Them
• Absolute URLs – Better Safe Than Sorry?

4- Have Unique URLs for Each Product/Service

Even if a product or service can be found multiple ways on the site, make sure that there is only one unique URL for each product or service your company offers. This helps to eliminate unnecessary duplicate content problems.

5- Include Redirect Capabilities

You never know when you’re going to want to take a page down and redirect it to something else. The mistake a lot of sites make is that they just take a page down when they don’t need it any more. When this happens you lose the link value that page may have gained while it was live. So do yourself a favor: make sure you can 301 redirect that old page to a new page that can use the juice.

6- Create a Custom 404 Page

Having a custom 404 page makes it so that if someone lands on a 404 page, they at least know they’ve reached the right site. Without a custom 404 in place, they may just assume the site is down and move on to your competitor’s site.

Here is an example of a custom 404 page:

7- Include Keyword-Rich Alt Attributes

Alt attributes are very easy to overlook. But if you use them the right they can be another signal to the search engines to tell them what a page is about. One quick tip on this one: don’t abuse this attribute by using a keyword phrase on every single bullet point image or stuffing a bunch of keywords into the attribute.

8- Make Room for Sufficient Content

Sometimes designers and developers get carried away with the look and feel of the page and forget to include room for text-based content. That’s what the search engines read, so you have to make sure there is a logical place for that content. Ideally, plan on having at least 150-200 words of optimized content on any page you want to rank well.

You should also make sure that your content is structured right. Have one H1 tag at the top of the main content, and then break out other sub topics with H2-H6 tags as appropriate. Make sure to use your keywords in these headings and in the content, but once again don’t overdo it.

9- Set Up Internal Linking Structure

I think that internal linking is one of the most commonly overlooked things for most sites. In fact, Ken Lyons wrote a great post about it that goes into more detail than I can in this post: Want More Link Juice? Here’s an Easy Way to Get It

10- Decide on a Consistent Title Structure

A site should use the same title structure throughout the site. Pick your convention and stick with it. A good format to follow is to have a phrase that includes main keywords for the page and describes what the page is about, followed by a separator (- or | are common), and then your brand name. For example, “Professional SEO Services for Organic Website Optimization | SEO.com”. Keep these titles to under 65-70 characters so they don’t get truncated in the search results.

11- Include Meta Descriptions on Every Page

Since most of the search engines can choose to use your meta description as your snippet in the search results, you should have a unique one written for every page. Include the main keywords and a call to action to encourage clicks. DON’T just make this tag a list of keywords.

12- Allow Inclusion for Other Meta Tags (canonical, robots, etc.)

If you’re using any kind of tracking codes or other things on your site that create duplicate URLs, you’re going to want to be able to include a canonical tag on those pages. Also, depending on how your site is built you may need to include other meta tags like a robots tag and others. Make sure your site’s back end allows for this when necessary.

13- Incorporate Social Media Sharing Buttons

In case you missed it, social media is a pretty big thing right now. I’m not a big fan of the generic ShareThis button, but you need to have some kind of social media sharing buttons on your products and other important pages. Do some research to decide which social networks are best for your site and then stick with those.

More general information about social media:

• 4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media
• So Your Industry Is Boring – Don’t Let That Keep You Out of Social Media

14- Install Analytics Tracking

If you don’t have any kind of analytics tracking installed, you have no way to tell where you traffic is coming from, what’s working, and lots of other crucial information. Pick a solution and get it installed. Popular ones include:

• Google Analytics
• Omniture
• Mint
• StatCounter
• And a lot more…

Make sure that the software you go with will allow you to block your office IP address, track conversions, ecommerce revenues generated through different online sources, and anything else that will help you to understand what is actually affecting your bottom line.

15- Set up and Verify Webmaster Tools Account

Through Google Webmaster Tools you can find out a lot about how Google sees your site, and can give them indications on how to handle certain parameters, submit your XML sitemap, and be notified of problems they find with your site. Bing’s Webmaster Center is coming along, so it’s worth it to go ahead and verify that one as well.

16- Follow Web Standards for HTML, CSS, and Database Programming

The more you follow standards, the easier it will be for someone else to come along later and make changes or modify the site. It’s a real problem when a site’s backend code or database is so complex that it has to be rebuilt later in order for it to be changed.

17- Generate an XML Sitemap

It only takes a few minutes to do it, but once the site is live make sure you create and XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines through their webmaster tools accounts. It’s even better if you can set this up so that it automatically updates and pings the search engines whenever a change is made.

18- Create a Robots.txt File

When you create your robots.txt file make sure that you are disallowing any pages or directories that you don’t want the search engines crawling. Standard examples would be login pages, search results pages, and shopping cart pages. You should also include a link to your XML sitemap as well. Also, make sure you test this file in your Google Webmaster Tools account to make sure it is working correctly.

Here’s a great site that talks more in detail about how to create a robots.txt file: About /robots.txt

If you follow these 18 guidelines you’ll launch a site that is in great shape as far as SEO is concerned. If you’re an SEO, feel free to add anything else to this list in the comments.

Is social media stardom reserved only for the world’s most exciting things like, say, gilded yak shaving?

I think not. Just a few days ago, I watched the people in this office go nuts over a social media campaign about body wash. People around the world have been obsessed with campaigns about blenders, hamburgers, and beef jerky. There are not a lot of inherently exciting things about those products, but they were able to engage users like few things can. If they can do it, you can do it in your boring industry. Here are two things to remember:

1. It’s not about the product

Most consumer products and services are boring, which is why good social media marketing is about emotion and branding instead of the product. Your aim should be to make people laugh, shake their head in disbelief, do a double-take, etc. If you can’t do that with an explanation of your boring product, then it’s time to get creative.

Think about this – if everybody else in your industry is just sitting in front of a webcam, giving dry guarantees about how their product is the best and posting it on YouTube, then you are in a good position to stand out.

2. It’s about strengthening your brand

The goal of all things social is to get people to spend money at your store. When your brand speaks to people at an emotional level, it makes them actually want to spend money at your store. To that end, simply get social and tell people in a creative way why your brand is better than everyone else’s in your industry. At first, they might crack a smile and not think much of it. Gradually, they’ll warm up to the idea and begin to associate your brand with what they want. Now you’re building brand equity. If your industry is boring, then the bar is low and it shouldn’t be too hard to make your brand shine.

So if it’s not really about the boring product, but rather about getting your brand into people’s heads, then that explains why body wash can be so successful at social media. And if the personal hygiene products industry can do it, then the (insert boring industry here) industry can do it. Yes, you’ll need some creative people on your team to make it happen, but it has been done before and you can do it again.

Now get out there and make your boring product the next Internet sensation.

Here are a list of the things I’ve seen make a piece fall short, and my own personal recommendations to remedy them.

Top 10′s are SO 2008

Don’t get me wrong here, Top X type lists are great; they do well on social news sites and they are easy to digest for your readers.  However, some blogs out there overuse it. If you find that lists are your primary form of content, you may want to consider a bit of variety.

One site that pulls this off well is Cracked.com. Practically all of their most popular posts are in the form of a list. Cracked.com has taken the list-type articles and evolved them. Rather than a post about “10 Reasons Why Unicorns are Awesome” (which is a post I’m still looking for), they produce unique, well-researched ideas and top it off with stellar content.

Another new favorite site of mine that does well is ThisorThat.com. They’ve built their content focus only on comparisons. What better way to build activity on your site than to make a little controversy and pit Coke vs. Pepsi, or Madonna vs. Lady Gaga? Get your visitors to promote your site for you with a little competition.

Solution: Vary your content. Instead of lists, think of how you could produce that content into a how-to post, or a comparison-type post that puts it against a similar competitor. Some of my best pieces have been comparison posts, and, even better, ones that create a little controversy.

You rely too much on your images/video

I love pictures, especially in the blogs I read (picture books are my personal preference). I’m a huge fan and proponent of infographics as well! They’re trendy, eye-candy that just do well in the social sphere. One downside to an infographic, though, is the lack of content that could be indexed by the search engines. Sure, the added content may or may not affect whether your story hits the front page of Digg, but it does lose in the grand scheme of things (isn’t that why infographics are produced and promoted, so they can gain attention and links for better rankings?)

Solution: Add a summary to your infographics. Provide a general outline of what you are getting at with your piece. A couple of places that do this (and do well on social sites) are DegreeSearch.org & ChaCha.com. These give you all of the benefits that viral content can provide along with SEO factors that will help with better indexing from the engines.

You rely too much on your content

Building off of the previous segment, great content should be incorporated with great images to help the reader visualize your point. Images can be a great addition to any piece, and an absolute MUST if you will be putting it in list form.

Solution: There’s no need to beat a dead horse with this point, but if you’re investing a good deal of time and/or money into your content, be sure to add pretty pictures to illustrate your point.

There’s no fire under my feet!

People always say this, and maybe I’ve just come to realize it, but people can tell whether or not you believe in what you’re writing about. Now, I know some of you are asking, “Hey, Vince, I’m doing an article on people with STDs, does that mean I should get passionate about THOSE?”  Absolutely (but not in the gross way)! The love for what you write doesn’t have to be in the subject itself, but the DATA behind it.

I personally am extremely happy with the results of my last physical, however, articles like STDs Across America are somehow fascinating to me. Not so much that I now know where I won’t be taking any of my future vacations, but to see the statistics and demographics of the info.

Solution: Take a boring scenario or subject and find a way to twist it and make it viral. The Oatmeal does this every time he makes a comic.  Sure, your stuff doesn’t have to be so crazy or in-your-face as his, but you can create great ideas off of just about anything.

All problems, no solutions

I’m not the biggest fan of the “Why this place sucks” type of posts (personally). Some people like them, but it does nothing to add any value to my day and my time I spent reading your post seems to have been more of a waste than anything else. To be honest, when I initially started brainstorming and writing this post, it was going to be just a “Your content sucks” kind of a post. I then realized that I provided no real value to anyone reading this (all 4 of you).

Solution: How-to’s are one of the great ways to trump this. Providing a wrong and right way to do things will ring well with your readers and give them actionable items to take away after reading your post. Give them the good and the bad and help them to understand the distinction (I hope that’s something I’ve been able to do, even a little, here).

Not enough supporting data

What are they trying to say here?

Above all, this has got to be the one that irks me the most, especially when it comes to infographics! I don’t know why, maybe it’s the fact that it’s one of those pieces that “could’ve been” or was “almost there,” but didn’t have enough data to get me pass it on.

A map of the U.S. that shows the amount of foreclosures in each state isn’t THAT great of a piece. However, add another section below the map and include more information about the percentage of foreclosures compared to the previous decade, the number of abandoned homes and maybe some additional data about the amount of foreclosed homes that have sold over the past few years.

Solution: Give your readers something to digest! A simple graph that explains the fat content of a Big Mac is not going to cut it. Delve a bit further in your research and provide data that puts meaning into your piece. Adding more data, such as how a Big Mac a day would affect my body, weight and overall health would be much more appealing to read and share with those in my network. Get. Great. Data.

When creating viral content, it’s important to go the extra mile with your research and your writing. That’s what makes the difference between an article and a viral article. Let me know in the comments if you have any other pet peeve’s or recommendations about what you can do to better your work.