Search Marketing Sage

It’s been about a year and a half now since Google+ got started. Today, I’m attending the panel Getting ahead with Google+ to learn about search and brand implications, as well as the sense of community that Google can develop.

Adam Audette, President of RKG, kicked off this session with a story about a magical world called Google Land. Google Land was a happy land of wonder. Google focused on search and they were good at search. Then, along came an evil wizard called Mark. This dark sorcerer came to Google Land to steal the dragon’s fire. Mark was from Facebook. Do you follow?

It’s time for Blow Me Away Blogging! I’m listening to arguments for blogging, so I guess it’s fitting that I am blogging this session. I’ll jump right in:

Jennifer Evans Cario

Jennifer Evans Cario says that we may be tempted with Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and leave our blog behind. But we have one brand and many homes – don’t just focus on one. For instance, if we spend all our time on Twitter and it dies tomorrow, we have nothing. We need channels to support our website and our blog marketing channels. Social media is a channel, not a destination. Use social to entice them and then get them to subscribe to your newsletter.

Why did we get started with social media in the first place? Social media delivers traffic and links. This is the connection and tie for SEO and social, so you can’t ignore this. From that, social media delivers conversions, registrations, leads, whatever your desired action is. Social media can deliver credibility.

I’m in Vegas! So far I haven’t had any Hangover, the movie experiences, but there is still time…. Just kidding! I’m attending Search Marketing Expo: Social Media Marketing. I just checked in, got some coffee, and now am ready to get started.

This session is called “Decoding Facebook Ads: Strategies & Tactics for the New Ad Environment” and I thought this was a perfect follow up to Michelle’s Facebook advertising blog post from last week. Greg Finn is moderating this session with 5 (!!) speakers. I have a feeling each presentation is going to be jam packed with information because they have less time to speak. The speakers are Addie Conner - SocialCode, Zvika Goldstein - Kenshoo, Nate Luman – Zappos, Merry Morud – aimClear, and Christina Park – TriggIt.

Following my session today on retargeting was Chris Goward featuring the top ten conversion optimization mistakes. This is fresh stuff from Chris — he added many new points just last night!

Chris started with a sample from BabyAge.com. The goal was to lift ecommerce sales with their product page template. The test involved simply swapping the right and left columns, with image on left v. right. Variation B won with a 22.8% sales lift — which was surprising to the room because the image was on the left.

Now, the top ten mistakes!

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of moderating a session featuring Loren Baker (VP of Business Development at BlueGlass and founder of Search Engine Journal), Jennifer Slegg (President of JenSense) and Melissa Fach (Founder of SEOAware and Managing Editor at Search Engine Journal) where the three spoke about planning and executing your blog. Great panel!

Jennifer Slegg

Jennifer started out the panel an initially focused on planning out your blog posts. She emphasized the need for an editorial calendar and recommended the WordPress editorial calendar plugin, which looks very handy. She also emphasized the need for editorial guidelines.

After you have the basics established, where can you find writers for your blog? She recommended a host of options, but most interesting to me was that she recommended using students for blogging. Above all, she warned to avoid writers for article sites and to only accept original content. There’s also a WordPress plugin for assigning writers called “Post To-Do Lists“.

Jennifer also recommended to repurpose content in different mediums and to identify popular or trending topics to write about using Google Trends.