10 Reasons Why Public Relations is a ‘Must-do’ for SEO in 2013

Ken McGaffin, December 31, 20120 Comments

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Many people today recognize that search engine optimization (SEO) and public relations (PR) have much to offer each other.

The latest Google changes have put a real emphasis on high quality, unique content that is linked to by quality sites. And this is where real public relations – as opposed to crappy news release distribution – can play such a crucial role.

There are real opportunities for great business. What follows are 10 reasons why SEOs should really get to grips with PR in 2013, based on my conversations with the people who are making the two work together.

1. The PR Industry is Definitely ‘Getting it’

Most of us who have been in link building for a while have in the past experienced a certain degree of frostiness from the PR industry. But that is clearly changing and people are breaking out of silos.

Mike Cherenson is a former Chair and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and is EVP of Success Communications Group. He sees the importance of SEO and link building.

“Authentic and relevant link building, aimed at driving engagement, informing publics and building mutually beneficial relationships should be a part of every public relations and SEO effort," Cherenson said.

But not only should link building be a part of every public relations effort, public relations also has much to offer SEO.

“Public relations professionals are skilled storytellers and content generators and should be a part of every SEO effort," he said. "The future of SEO is not in the technology, it’s in the ability to tell stories that readers and Google will find interesting… and that’s public relations.”

And Cherenson understands the value of linking.

“Links need to provide value to the reader," he said. "Media will be more likely to link to content that is compelling and provides information that goes beyond the original reporting.”

Another PR professional is Ken Deutsch, EVP of JPA, a healthcare communications firm and a seasoned specialist in public affairs.

His company takes SEO and link building very seriously. But that’s still not the case throughout the industry.

“Many PR people stop at getting media coverage and think their job is done. They get a placement in the New York Times but they don’t follow up to make sure a link is put in. So they’re not taking advantage of the SEO side of the story.”

And while many media outlets provide links, there are some that don’t link out as a matter of policy.

That influences the targets he goes after, “because they don’t put links in, it’s not worth putting as much energy into getting placement there.”

2. There is a Tremendous Synergy Between SEO and PR

Putting it simply, SEO enhances a press release. Use popular keywords and the press release, never mind any stories it generates will continue to bring search engine traffic. And the editorial links the press release generates bring direct click-throughs and lead to higher rankings.

Public relations enhances SEO by focusing on what’s newsworthy, crafting a great story, finding editorial opportunities, getting coverage and building relationships with reporters and editors. And of course, they got the negotiation skills to ask for a link without really asking for a link.

“PR helps SEO directly by increasing branded traffic," said Lindsey Kirchoff, a Media and Speaker Relations specialist at HubSpot.com. "We always see a bump in branded traffic after a big campaign! Indirectly, PR helps SEO generate inbound links from quality sources that not only gets first-touch exposure to new audiences, but credibility in the eyes of search engines.

“SEO grounds PR with hard, measurable data. PR has always been notoriously difficult to pin down, but SEO adds hard numbers to the equation. I also think that SEO allows PR to be less isolated from the rest of the team – sometimes PR can feel like an island. SEO helps PR connect their work to the rest of the company's business goals.

“Finally, SEO establishes credibility for PR for keywords. You look much more credible to a news source if you come up high for the term they are reporting on!”

3. Editorial Links Bring a Big SEO Boost

Most PR links are extreme quality links, according to Jordan Brannon, the SEO guy at Coalition Technologies. Why? "Because getting them is not a free for all – you have to earn your media placements,” he said.

But the rewards are worth the effort.

“If you get 200 high quality editorial links, it’s worth more that 20,000 low quality links,” Brannon said.

However, most reporters work to a deadline and you have to be swift in your response to get in.

“Most editorial opportunities are time sensitive and you need to act quickly. That means you need to have the authority to reply on the client’s behalf," Brannon added. "And you have to have an email account on your client’s domain – it’s not good saying you’re a marketing agency.”

Will Marlow was formerly a Press Secretary for two congressmen before founding a company that specializes in search engine marketing. He knows that to get those all-important editorial links, sticking to deadlines is crucial.

“You need to understand that you’re dealing with someone who has a hard deadline. It’s like a train going by in the night and there’s one open boxcar that can take you wherever you want to go," Marlow said. "But jump too early and the reporter won’t write about you: jump too late and the reporter won’t write about you. You got to get it just right.”

And it’s not unusual to miss opportunities.

“If an SEO was learning from any PR guy, they would all have stories about how they missed opportunities because someone internally didn’t get back to them or didn’t give the reporter what they need," Marlow said. “If the reporter wants to talk to the CEO and the CEO is playing golf, then you’re not going to get the story. So you’ve got to collaborate with people within the company and make sure that the right people are available.”

4. There’s a Big Cascade Effect

Journalists will often quote, comment or enlarge upon other journalist’s work. Bloggers are also constantly citing other stories.

So if you get your story covered in one prominent media outlet, you’ll quickly see a cascade of similar stories and links spring up.

You’ll get links you never even asked for.

Miranda Miller wrote about How Google Rakes In Over $100 Million in Search Advertising Daily, based on research from Larry Kim of WordStream.

In writing that report, Kim was directly targeting the Wall Street Journal for a link – and succeeded. The story really benefited from the cascade effect and attracted coverage and links from literally hundreds of quality media outlets.

5. You Win Bragging Rights For Your Client

Clients just love to write “As featured in ..." on their website, whether its the Washington Post, Inc. Magazine, or whatever.

That builds consumer trust in their brand and makes it more likely they’ll buy.

And you also increase trust from other reporters. If you’ve already been quoted or covered by a respected publication, then other reporters will think you’re a safe bet to write about, too.

6. PR Skills Can be Learned – or at Least Understood – Easily

Kirchoff has this advice for SEOs who know little about PR:

“SEO experts should think of PR as a way to build strong referral links – something that should be on their radar already. If you have a PR expert in the office, start by taking them out to lunch and chatting. After all, PR is all about building relationships.”

But of course, learning about public relations will help you understand the process – but it might teach you that there’s a lot you don’t know. If that’s the case you might do better to partner with a PR resource.

7. It’s Easy to Partner With an Up and Coming PR Person

Mona Moore is an SEO who has teamed up with a small PR company, Hepner Communications, to pitch their services together.

“I think SEOs are always so focused on getting those links back to the client, we sometimes forget how important it is to nurture those long-term relationships necessary to continue working with specific media outlets,” Moore explained. “And PR reps are great at finding opportunities - but, they don't always take full advantage of those opportunities from an organic SEO standpoint. By working together, SEOs and PR people are able to maximize exposure to a higher level than either of those entities by itself.

Joel Gross, who works with Brannon at Coalition Technologies, describes himself as the SEO tech guy.

“I know how to build and code websites so that they are search engine friendly, and I understand that in order to achieve visibility and revenue for our clients we need to build high quality links and work in tandem with traditional and social media," Gross said. “I know what needs to be done, but Jordan is able to bring in the creative aspect and wow factor that is needed in order to gain the attention and keep it focused where it needs to be. He devises how we frame the content and package it for the consumer in the most digestible and memorable way.

“The best advice I’d give to an SEO would be to get to know your client’s people, their background and story, what’s unique about the company," Gross said. “And remember, this is news and human interest so your stories don’t always have to be selling product. You can have perfectly good story and link from a story on say, ‘work places that are pet friendly’!”

8. You’ll Build Media Contacts That You Can Use Time And Time Again

Contacts are essential both to PR people and to reporters.

“One mistake I made at the start was sending out too much poor stuff," Kim said. "Blasting out press releases is over-rated. What you need to do is get to know the reporters or bloggers you’re targeting.

“Read their articles every day, get a sense of what they’re interested in and only approach them with what you know they’ll be interested in,” Kim continued. “Start small and work your way up. Once you’ve built a relationship, they’ll start contacting you.”

He said he has found that PR is the fastest way to generate those backlinks on related industry websites, but you’ve got to go past distribution services and build your own contacts.

“We are diligent in keeping a database of related editors here," Kim said. "So we're sending press releases directly to the editors and not through a service. However, we also post the press releases to PRweb or PRnewswire to get the added Internet news site exposure (i.e., Yahoo News)."

Kim said those personal relationships increase the chances of coverage so much it’s "unreal."

"We now get lots of calls from editors who ask – is there an engineer over at such and such a company that we could talk to?" Kim said. “Now, when they see our press releases, they always read them. And they’re more likely to publish them because we’ve been helpful.

If you’re an SEO who new to PR, the best place to start is by reading the editorial guidelines of the publications you’re targeting, Kim advised. Then you know what they’re looking for and can pitch accordingly. Don’t pitch something they clearly don’t want.

And don’t forget editorial calendars – you can see months in advance what the publications are going to be covering.

9. It Strengthens and Extends Your Relationship With the Client

If you learn how to do proper public relations effectively or bring in a competent professional that you work well with, then you increase the respect your client has for your work. That can only strengthen your relationship and help ensure that they’ll stay with you.

10. It Opens up Additional Income Streams

It probably goes without saying that with the increasing interest in this area, it should offer some profitable and additional income streams to your agency.

There are tremendous publicity and quality links available through effective public relations. You’ll probably have failures to start with but if you keep at it, your skills will grow and you’ll get the benefits.

How do you cope with failures?

“I don’t believe in failures – it’s a matter of setting your expectations," Kim said. "You can’t start out and immediately get coverage on CNN. Far better to pick a local target and learn from it. Every time you do it, you have more experience. Say you approach 10 journalists and you get nothing but two reply and say I’m not interested because it’s not exactly what I do – you’ll get a better idea of what will work next time.”

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232614/10-Reasons-Why-Public-Relations-is-a-Must-do-for-SEO-in-2013?wt.mc_ev=click&WT.tsrc=Email&utm_term=&utm_content=10%20Reasons%20Why%20Public%20Relations%20is%20a%20%E2%80%98Must-do%E2%80%99%20for%20SEO%20in%202013&utm_campaign=12%2F31%2F12%20-%20SEW%20Daily&utm_source=Search%20Engine%20Watch%20Daily&utm_medium=Email

Marketing owns telephone lead qualification

Marketing and Sales have long been at odds over whether it’s better to generate a large volume of leads or if it’s better to generate fewer, higher quality leads. Anyone involved in Sales or Marketing today, however, knows that the volume game is over. But the question still lingers: How do you get Marketing to deliver the high quality leads that Sales wants and expects?

While there are several ways to improve the quality of Marketing leads, I think one of the best solutions is to have Marketing manage the telephone lead qualification process. Here’s why.

Marketing Doesn’t Have Near-Term Quotas to Close Deals

The reality of Sales departments is that salespeople live quarter to quarter, and they have to hit a quota each quarter in order to stay in the good graces of their department. While this is a great incentive for keeping your sales team motivated to bring in revenue, that same incentive be counterproductive in the lead qualification process.

If a salesperson is worrying about whether their going to hit their quota for the quota, most are going to go after the low-hanging fruit or the big deals because this is what will bring in near-term revenue. It’s part of the reason that, according to a SiriusDecisions report, sales only calls 20 percent of all leads sent by Marketing.

Unfortunately, not every lead is ready to buy–or even ready to speak with a salesperson. So that prospect needs to speak with someone that can move them along the qualification process and find out more about their needs. While many companies keep this function within their Sales department, I think that Marketing is better equipped to handle this process. I think this for two reasons.

Firstly, Marketing isn’t worried about hitting near-term closed deal quotas. This allows the marketer to engage a prospect in a more open and honest conversation about their needs, purchase timeframe, budget and other factors that comprise typical qualification criteria. Beyond that, Marketing departments need to become more responsible for the quality of leads that they send to Sales. By asking Marketing to manage the qualification process, they’re intimately tied to the quality of lead they’re asking Sales to close.

In order to make this work, however, Marketing departments need to be methodical about who they hire, how they compensate and how the lead qualification process is managed–and improved. Here are four tips for managing this process.

1. Hire at the Junior Level

In any role, hiring the right person is critical. For the role of lead qualifier, you want someone energetic, competitive and willing to a lot of spend time on the phone. And you want them to junior enough to grow into a different Sales or Marketing role. Beyond that, you want someone that can really drive a phone conversation and has the inquisitive nature to to dig beneath the surface to uncover information from the prospect.

2. Compensate with a Sales-like Pay Structure

The biggest driver in increasing the quality of Marketing leads is to tie compensation to the sale. The easiest way to do that is to start them off at a base salary and offer a commission based on the total revenue of closed deals. You can also add incentives for qualification accuracy such as an additional bonus for a great Sales-accepted lead metric.

3. Decide How to Route Leads

The natural lead category breakdown is to create three buckets of leads: qualified leads, disqualified leads and leads that need to be nurtured. All of these are fairly self-explanatory but the last one is worth elaborating on. The real opportunity for shifting this role to Marketing is that you can dedicate someone to nurturing leads with a human touch. As such, there should be an intense focus on the nurturing aspect of lead qualification.

4. Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment

While this is a long-standing issue in companies across the globe, it’s a necessary area of focus for making this model work. You need Sales and Marketing to have regular meetings about lead qualification criteria to have Sales understand why Marketing is disqualifying certain leads (and to double-check that they’re not disqualifying a few hidden gems). The best way to manage this process is to have Marketing and Sales meet frequently. Start off having weekly meetings, then move to once a month afterwards.

While this is not an exhaustive list of what needs to happen, I think these are the key areas of focus. If you follow these steps, you can create a Marketing team that both drives more sales and is more accountable and better able to see its contribution to revenue.

What do you think about this approach? If you have some thoughts, I’d love for you to contact me at Software Adviceon my blog at: Marketing Should Own Lead QUalification or to simply email me directly atderek@softwareadvice.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

http://successfulworkplace.com/2012/10/19/marketing-owns-telephone-lead-qualification/

Six Crucial Steps of a Successful Lead Nurturing Campaign

Six Crucial Steps of a Successful Lead Nurturing Campaign

Posted on November 21, 2012 in Industrial Marketing and Sales, Marketing, General

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Industrial marketers know that not every engagement opportunity they uncover will result in a hot prospect ready to buy. In fact, studies show that 70 percent of new business can come from long term leads, those prospects that are in the early stages of their buy cycles when they first engage with your company, but will be ready to make a purchase decision at some time in the future.

Your challenge is to keep these prospects in the fold and your company at the top of their minds so that they turn to you first when they are ready to buy. The way to do this is through lead nurturing campaigns.

If your company uses any kind of marketing automation program, you’re probably already familiar with setting up, executing, and tracking lead nurturing (or drip-marketing) campaigns. If not, you can still build and deploy an effective campaign by following these six steps.

1. Define your audience segment. The first step is to define the audience that will be included in your lead nurturing campaign. If all of your company’s prospects are alike, then all new leads might be put into a general lead nurturing campaign. But if you have specific types of customers — as most industrial suppliers do — you’ll want to define a segment or multiple segments for lead nurturing, either by current stage in the buy cycle, area of interest, market sector, product type, geography, or some other relevant criteria.

2. Offer value, not sales pitches. The reason you execute lead nurturing campaigns is because your prospects are not yet ready to buy, but might be in the future. Therefore, offers of product demos, pricing quotes, and special discounts are not only wasted at this point, they are likely a turnoff for your prospects. Instead, offer content that helps educate prospects on ways to solve the problems they are facing and that demonstrates the value your company can provide. Use educational content such as white papers, Webinars, articles, and videos as offers. You probably already have a lot of this content. If not, you may need to create new content to support your campaign.

3. Create a call-to-action and define objectives. For every e-mail, direct mail piece, or phone call that is part of the campaign, create a call to action and objective: download a white paper, register for a Webinar, read an article, view the video, subscribe to the e-newsletter or blog, follow you on Twitter, and so on. Then track your performance against those objectives to see what content and offers work best with your audience.

4. Build a schedule. Lead nurturing campaigns consist of multiple touches spread out over time. You will need to develop a timeline for when and how often you touch your prospects. It could be once a week for six weeks, or once a month for six months, or some interval in between. The important point is to define the entire campaign, so you will know how to phase your content and messaging, and to stick with it over the duration.

5. Develop response rules. Naturally you want to keep track of how your audience responds to the elements of your campaign. What your audience does determines what you do next. A prospect that clicks on every offer might be a prospect that gets a call from a sales rep. Or prospects that attend a specific Webinar might be candidates for a certain white paper. Plan ahead of time and apply logic, rules, and perhaps even branching (if they do this, then that, otherwise something else) in order to optimize your campaign’s flow and effectiveness — and to get high-potential leads into the hands of sales reps at the right time.

6. Measure and improve. Because you have created offers, established goals, and defined campaign rules, you can track what works and what doesn’t in your lead nurturing campaign. Get rid of offers that don’t perform well, while building on content that is popular with other similar offers. Continually refine your campaign and you should see improved results.

Have you set up lead nurturing campaigns? What were your steps to success? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

http://marketingmaven.globalspec.com/?p=1534&id=0&email=gregory%2Enanette%40gmail%2Ecom&md=121129&mh=11acf9&Vol=Vol8Issue11&Pub=7&LinkId=1187561&keyword=link_1187561&frmtrk=newsletter

It Doesn't Matter What You Call Your Online Strategy!

Kevin Gibbons, November 9, 20128 Comments

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One thing I've always found surprising is the amount of strong opinions we seem to have around the nomenclature of SEO/SEM/content marketing, etc within the industry.

I ran a poll a while back asking what the best term to use was - content marketing or inbound marketing. This generated lots of responses and opinions:

It's always interesting to see the results, but when you think about it - does it actually matter?

Is looking at each individual channel really the best way to go?

1. SEO: If all you do is optimize a website for search engines, you'll probably have the most finely-tuned website with no links and no rankings on the internet. Congratulations! However, the SEO role obviously involves a lot more than just optimization, link reputation clearly plays a large role in 2012, which is very difficult to do without content/social/PR.
2. Search Marketing: Yes, you're marketing yourself to generate more search traffic online - but surely there's more to it than that that adds to the mix? For example, converting that traffic into customers, or engaging via social channels maybe?
3. Link Building: You're building links - what about the quality/relevancy of these links? And how does that affect your overall search strategy? On its own it doesn’t mean anything of value.
4. PPC: Do you optimize your paid search campaigns to pay for each click? Of course not – you want to maximize the revenue from your campaign. That requires content, call-to-action, email marketing campaigns, conversion rate optimization etc.
5. Content Marketing: I'm clearly more of a fan of this term than others, but if all you just focus on marketing great content - without any SEO knowledge or social media expertise, you're definitely missing the bigger picture.
6. Inbound Marketing: Likewise, there's much more to the content you create than the links that it produces. And this mixes in with your social and search strategies of course.
7. Social Media: Marketing yourself on social media without great content to share is far more likely to just be shouting, not that anyone will listen.
8. Conversion Rate Optimization: Again you could have the most finally-tuned website for generating sales, but no traffic!

I could go on, but you get the point!

And like anything, you can't just trust a single metric on its own - it doesn't matter what it is. If it's business, you can't judge performance by looking at revenue without considering profit. In sport, you can't just look at games won, without games lost etc…

Sticking it All Together = Marketing Gold!

Wouldn't it make more sense to integrate all of this together? That way you'll have an optimized website, a strong/natural link profile, it generates targeted traffic from keywords (both organically and paid), it's highly-converting and attracts new visits via social content, whilst engaging with customers. That sounds much more effective surely?!

I recently wrote about the need to ditch the silos when building a team.

For the best strategies you need to get everyone all involved from day one and get them working together - then they can all help each other out. I really like an analogy from Greg Boser, who said that it's like a Chinese food court - you just ending taking bits of each without worrying where they come from, and it probably doesn't work very well together!

So What Should we Call it?

Some people dislike the term "content marketing", even more seem to dislike "inbound marketing" - largely because they're both new and maybe considered buzzwords. Yet others are saying "SEO" isn't the most accurate name to use anymore either (which feels a bit like we're going round in circles, SEO was once a buzzword too!).

I think there's a strong argument that SEO has grown up a lot recently and that you no longer need to just specialize in search to succeed in Google. That doesn't mean SEOs can't adapt and involve social/content into their strategies though.

Likewise, for the reasons above - there are also arguments that any of the other suggested replacements are flawed too. There are just too many factors to consider in a modern online strategy. Perhaps we should just use an old term instead? Marketing seems to have worked pretty well for a while now!

But let's be honest - who really cares?

Do Your Clients Care What it's Called? No, You Take a Budget and Spend it Where it Works Best!

And that's the way it should be - CMOs are judged on generating revenue from their marketing budgets. What it's called when they report this is irrelevant. And if you look at the reasons above, it's clear that if you have an integrated search strategy - the whole is going to be much greater than the sum of all parts.

So you can focus on getting great results - and leave your competitors to argue semantics.

Do You Think it Makes a Difference?

I don't want to turn this post into a debate on what it's called - that's not what it's about. But do you think the name of your marketing activity makes a difference? And does that affect your day-to-day strategy?

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2223233/It-Doesnt-Matter-What-You-Call-Your-Online-Strategy?wt.mc_ev=click&WT.tsrc=Email&utm_term=&utm_content=It%20Doesn%27t%20Matter%20What%20You%20Call%20Your%20Online%20Strategy%21&utm_campaign=11%2F09%2F12%20-%20SEW%20Daily&utm_source=Search%20Engine%20Watch%20Daily&utm_medium=Email

The Hope of a Link: Mashable Content Analysis

October 29th, 2012 - Posted by Kate Morris to Content & Blogging

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The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The holy grail: A link from Mashable. 

Don't kid yourself. We all want one. They are a content powerhouse with a mind-blowing community. Moz has that type of community, but Mashable touches on everything from kittens to major trends in the economy and technology. If it's interesting to the Internet community, they'll publish a about it. Their domain authority and homepage authority is a whopping 96. Of course we all want a link. 

The first thing any reputable SEO would tell you is that you need two things before you can even begin hoping for a link from Mashable:

1. Great content - it has to be beyond good by this point, it must be great
2. A relationship with Mashable

I'm not going to claim that those two things are absolutely necessary, but I would agrue that you need to know more about Mashable before you go pitching your content to them. Well, I've done some of that for you, and today I'll teach you how to do it for other sites as well. This is Advanced Content Analysis ... starting ... now.

The Brain Child

The idea to do Advanced Content Analysis on Mashable came from a conversation Carson Ward and I had one day about getting a link from them. He made the quip that all you really need to do is write a post along the lines of "7 Ways to Do X." I laughed because it's sort of true (list posts do well), but then asked myself:

"How many of Mashable's posts are lists?"

Once I dug into how to get the titles of as many posts as possible, I realized just how much more data was available and how much deeper the analysis could really go. 

Data Process

I thought I'd pull six months of Mashable posts; that is, until I started pulling the data and realized they put out almost two thousand posts a month. TWO THOUSAND. Holy content, Batman. Two thousand posts and one month was plenty for my analysis. If anyone wants to do more, I'd love to hear about six months of data.

I used three tools to pull the data necessary for analysis: ImportXML for Google Docs, SEOTools for Excel, and Microsoft Excel.

ImportXML

To gather the post titles, I used ImportXML for Google Docs. The linked guide will tell you more than I ever could about how to scrape content from a site using ImportXML. For those that are curious, I've included the formulas I used for Mashable. If you just want to see the forumlas in action, here is a document that is read-only for you to investigate. 

The first important part is the page to scrape. You want to get to the blog/site's archive pages. For Mashable, you can access them by hitting "next" on their homepage. This gives us the page to scrape. A1 below is where you input the page number you want to scrape. This forumla is cell A2 for me -- you'll need to know that in a minute.

=CONCATENATE("http://mashable.com/page/",A1,"/") 

Below that, you can complete the import. These three take up A3, B3, and C3. As previously mentioned, once I pulled the titles, I figured I'd just keep going. The URL is important for the things you can pull using SEOTools, so be sure to add that one. The date and comment number was important for in-depth analysis. The number of comments along with social metrics are the only real "success" metrics you can pull externally. I mean, unless Mashable wants to share the traffic numbers with me for each of the posts ... no? Dang. 

Titles: =importxml(A2,"//a[@class='headline']")
Post URL: =importxml(A2,"//a[@class='headline']/@href") (muy importante) 
Date, Author, Comment Count: =importxml(A2,"//p[@class='byline clearfix reviewer vcard meta']")

Side Note: Dear tech guys and gals at Mashable, sorry, I crawled tons, and others might, too. Though that is probably like .001% of your server traffic. :)

From here, you simply copy and paste into an Excel sheet, and keep going (change the page number in A1) until you get the number of posts you want. 

SEOTools

This is my new favorite tools for a number of reasons, not least of which is the ability to use Regex in Excel. Are you excited, too? Well, it can also return social metrics using a URL, return the canonical URL, and so much more. If you haven't downloaded it, please do. And donate. This thing is worth it. 

Alright, so I promise not to bore you, but I used SEOtools to do a few things:

1. Download the Facebook shares (Twitter wasn't being nice when I tried, but it's possible)
2. Return True/False if the post title included markers like Infographic or Video. Mashable is nice and gives us a marker in the title if the post is about something big like that. 
3. Return True/False if the post title included a number. More on this later. 

Microsoft Excel

This section is all in Excel. I did one more thing and checked to see what day of the week the post was made live. That's made simple with a formula like this: 

=TEXT(WEEKDAY([@Date]), "ddd")

The [@Date] references the cell in the table with the date. 

Content Analysis

Now I have the data, it's time to learn some stuff about Mashable and their content. After de-duplication (they post weekly recaps of videos, etc.), I analyzed 1,159 posts. Below is a look at the content types from what I could tell. Other includes smaller types like Audio and just plain text posts. 

It looks like in the last month Mashable has preferred videos over infographics, which is something to keep in mind when deciding what content to develop and pitch. But this is just in terms of the number of posts. We have answered our original first question: how many of Mashable's posts are lists? 13% in the last month (in the chart above I am referring to "# Posts"). Nothing to cough at, but not as many as Carson and I figured. But what about performance of these posts? What days are they posted? And for that matter what about video and infographic posts? On to dataland we go.

Note: the "other" category includes all other posts that are not lists, or are something different as noted in the title of the post. Mashable has a habit of marking posts with [MODIFIER] which I used to break these categories down. All other are smaller tags and any other "regular" posts. 

Lists, Infographics, and Video Posts -- Oh My!

How well do they perform? I'm picking on these because they are the content types that we all harp on so much. The results for comments on the post types and Facebook metrics. The most suprising find here is that while video posts have more shares and comments, there is a higher number of list posts. I think this has more to do with traffic and brand building than actual engagement. I theorize that if we could see average unique visitors to these posts, that lists would have a much higher view rate. Reason: people are lazy and just want to skim for data. Lists work well because they are easy to skim and give people information in just a few seconds. One day I'd love to see a study in which Mashable looked at the new visitors from a list post and watched how often they came back to Mashable, and compare that to other post types. THAT would be fascinating. 

Now to the more fun stuff - days of the week. This has little consequence in my book, but it's fun to look at. 

Above is the average for the site overall in the last 30 days. Fun factoids: 

• Mashable posts less on the weekends, but the audience is more active in comments and sharing. Weekend numbers are similar to Tuesdays. Tuesday is apparently the day that Mashable audience members are bored at work. But more likely, there are just fewer posts those days. Averages run higher when you have a smaller base. 
• Monday is the big post day. No surprise to me there. 
• Wednesday and Thursday are when intereaction drops off. 

What about by post type? How many are posted on each day? It turns out that the videos and lists are posted more on Mondays, and infographics on Wednesdays. Why do you think this happens? I have my theory, but I'd love to hear yours on this one. 

How did these content types perform per day? Let's just look at the "lists" category for this part as we are getting pretty deep, and this post was originally about lists. 

Remember my theory on boredom on Tuesdays? *points like Vanna White at the chart above* See?!?!?!? The count of total shares and comments back my theory up. Even though there are fewer posts on Tuesdays, they got more interactions on average. Huh. Maybe this is why we post on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Distilled. Will and Duncan are smart cookies. (No, really, I doubt that had a ton to do with it, but Will or Duncan can correct me later.)

Final Thoughts

• Content Analysis is much easier with tools like ImportXML and SEOTools for Excel.
• You should consider doing this with the content on your blog or a competitor. What's really working for them? Back up your analysis with hard core numbers of interaction with the audience, not just what you see them doing. Don't get inspiration (see I didn't say copying?) from something that isn't working. 
• Post awesome stuff on Tuesday.
• Develop great videos for Mashable, as infographics are on the way out. 
• List posts get attention, but not as much interaction. 

What else did I miss? This isn't fully scientific, but it is fun and gives us much more data to help make decisions than we might have had before. Take everything above with a grain of salt, pull your own numbers, and see for yourself. 

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-hope-of-a-link-mashable-content-analysis