Decoding The Content Outreach Mystery

As Google started diminishing the scope of link building via directories, articles & so many other avenues which were a big hit with digital marketing world, one of the avenues which became an overnight hero for link building was content outreach via guest posting. However most of the search marketer struggle with this aspect of link building because of the rejections or poor response they get from blog webmasters. 

Here are a few tried & tested strategies which can be implemented to ensure a quicker breakthrough -

 Size of the mail used for pitching up the content to the blogger

My thoughts here would be conflicting with a lot of bloggers. Everyone is of the opinion the larger the content used for pitching up the content, better is the conversion rate.

I would definitely differ here-

Always the first mail that you send for your content outreach across should be clear, short & crisp. Once I see that the blog webmaster is showing an interest, I slowly start giving him a brief overview of how he & I both can benefit from a long term relationship. I try to understand what kind of content he needs, the work that he does in online as well as offline world, whether he has access to other domains, if he knows other people who blog in a particular niche. This way I start building up on a simple mail & eventually end up making more than one content live using minimal efforts, time & energy.

Often there is confusion whether our real identity or a dummy account should be used for content outreach. I have tried both & both are equally effective as long as you can make a connect with the webmaster via your email.

Also it is my observation that more people are likely to respond if you were to state that you are from a digital marketing company. This might be a small aspect but definitely helps. Given below is the sample mail that I used for one of my campaigns. I have kept it short & simple yet I managed to get a quick response.

 Do your homework before you pitch the content

Every blogger no matter how big an authoritative domain he owns is always on the hunt for the content to serve his audience. There are always specific points in the content, subject title & images that he is looking out for. The best way to know the preference of the blogger is to actually go through the previous content pieces he has been posting. This is one of the easiest ways to know what kind of modifications needs to be done in the content before it is send across to the webmaster.

 Have your content generated as per the guidelines of the blog webmaster

This is the best antidote to your backlog in content outreach. Get in touch with the blog webmaster, get to know what he actually wants to put forward in front of his audience. Get a kick ass content written from your content writer as per the recommendations. This way you are eliminating all the possible chances of your content being rejected.


 Become a tracker for Blog Carnivals

You just can't afford to miss out on blog carnivals if you want your content to go live regularly. This is the best place to build long term alliance with blog webmasters of different niches. There are numerous sites which offer info on the details of these carnivals. One of them is http://blogcarnival.com/bc/.

These are just a few steps that one can follow. Obviously there are a lot more approaches that can be tried & followed for success in content outreach.

The above pointers might seem to be very simple to follow & they actually are. Follow these rules & you will be bang-on as far your content outreach plan is concerned.

Author Bio:

Aaditya Shah works as a Search Marketing professional at SMGConvonix. He loves every aspect of digital marketing especially content outreach & link building. Closely follows Google updates & algorithm changes & loves to continuously experiment with SEO to decode the mystery around web search. A complete foodie!! -his hobbies include playing Cricket & watching movies.

 

Check OUT my Check IN

Do you get irritated by ‘check-in ‘update notifications from various social networking services?  Every time your friend visit’s a place of interest like a tourist attraction, hotel, café, airport, some special venue and if not worse you may also get to see a check-in alert while he/she is in their office/college etc. Sometimes people overdo this stuff without realizing that it can get really annoying beyond a point.

If you thought Social Media and technology is to blame for this stuff, think again and go back to times when all this stuff did not exist to really understand why we feel the need to share our whereabouts, you would start acknowledging this behavior as just one part of the human psyche we live with anyways. 

Location based services are emerging as a potential driving force to support commercial prospects of social media tools, e-commerce and sales in general for a small businessman to large firms. People create a pattern of their consumption habits and interests while using such services making it easier for offering customized sales offers, deals and discounts which in turn benefits consumers actively using such services to an extent, however a lot of us view this kind of “Big Data” study by social networking firms as an invasion of our privacy and even as a consumer no one really likes to get tracked as a potential sales prospect on the move.

If you would have happened to visit popular tourist places across any part in India, you may find carvings of people’s names on structures, walls, any other object at tourist attraction premises, memories of smitten lovers that may not interest you but all they can do is spoil the beauty of the overall place. 

if you go back further in time during ancient period when human civilization was busy drawing animal figures in caves, inscription found on clay tablets,  painting stories on pyramid walls in Egypt and many other monuments in the past which symbolize presence of a ruler, civilization and their influence during that period, People had places named after them and so on, however I can assure you that the significance of me checking in a washroom of a 5 star hotel would just vanish in a fart, no one’s going to narrate my poop chronicle any time in the future.

Everyone on planet earth with a population of more than seven billion is busy trying to leave a mark of their footsteps to places they have visited, and social medial platforms are a medium of creating that digital footprint for the world to see, so there’s a set of people who use location based check in services for any damn reason, believe me I had a colleague in office who used his Smartphone to check in at home and office everyday  to track how much time he was spending at both places, I was actually baffled with his logic to do such weird stuff but then these kind of people feel the need to get their presence validated by their friends, family etc as social media has definitely groomed the celebrity complex in all of us, still no one is going to give us a chance to feature our hand or foot print at Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame.

Airport and Railway terminal check-ins are also very popular, which also go into the footfall analysis passed on to companies and advertisers, Los Angeles airport was crowned most popular airport in terms of check-ins in 2011. If you happen to land at a airport in some foreign country and try looking for a popular joint at the airport to have food, these location based services come to your rescue by showing you most popular joints at the venue where you can head to directly rather than roaming all across or asking random people, airport staff etc for suggestion. 

There is surely going to be a connection in customer footfall/sales at cafés and the countless coffee mug shots uploaded on image sharing service like Instagram or location based service like Foursquare etc. Word of mouth promotion and herd mentality related to this visual overload of bragging work actively in such scenarios to promote business. If you check in at work daily as an automated update gets posted on either Facebook or Twitter, some of your friends may even like your status but you may get a comment one fine day when you are out of office asking if you are on a holiday. So even if your presence at some place is not getting validated, it is surely getting noticed.

If you go by numbers, having 100 friends on your list even if 10 people check-in to a place, this check-in is viewed by 1000 people, so you can imagine the kind of cascading effect location based services play in building indirect branding for a local business, if check in services were just going to be a fad why do you think services like TripAdvisor, Zomato, FoodPanda etc. continue mushrooming and sometimes we discover less known joints with quality food and leisure outlets due to member recommendation on such applications, reading through blog reviews and more. 

I personally feel this type of services can be used in balanced way, according to one’s preference for privacy which varies for all of us. Be alert of pre-defined settings on your gadgets which probably could be revealing a lot more about you and your habits from what you actually want to reveal and when you sign up on many sites these days which have Facebook or Twitter sign in enables make sure to keep a watch if they are posting on your behalf to your wall, you can edit posting preferences to be visible only to you or your friends if you do not want to make it public, You recommendation is not just a blip on the map today, there’s more to it and next time you think what’s the need for this whole check in game, remember the historical image of Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon from Apollo mission and you may understand.

Clinics opening up to treat Social Media Addiction

Social Media addiction related cases keep springing up in the news, now many clinics have being coming up in UK to treat this behaviour, symptoms which we do not even think could place us in an addict category. What may thought was a passing phase in the world of technology has found a deep place in our day to day life to an extent even changing the way we grieve 

Read about a self confessed smartphone addict: Martha Roberts

In my observation Twitter has being a platform where some users keep tweeting every 10/15 mins, about every damn thing they are doing today. It gives them a high and they feel like celebs when followers re-tweet or comment on their tweets. Few days back Salman Khan's single word tweet "Hi" gathered so many retweets in few minutes goes to show what level of time are we wasting on stuff that does not require attention.

Leave your comments if you agree that excessive tweeting, Facebook status check and posting is going to cost us dear and probably change the way we interact with people around us socially while we are out.

Where's Social Media Heading in India: Facts and Figures

Explosive adoption of Social, Mobile and Digital continues to swell in India which presents some astonishing facts in numbers which show a huge potential for continuous growth.

Some stats to start of with from this article featured on wearesocial.net

• India has 137 million internet users – more people than the total population of Japan.
• More than 60 million people in India use social networks – equivalent to the total population of Italy
• India is home to a staggering 934 million mobile subscriptions – equivalent to more than 13% of the world’s entire population

Twitter and LinkedIn are also popular amongst Indian netizens, with each claiming more than 15 million users.

YouTube has particular appeal for Indian audiences too, with 20 visitors every single second. Each month, almost 56 million visitors from India consume more than 4 billion videos – 25% of them via mobile devices.

Of all these statistics, what remains to be seen how companies can use this growth to their advantage in order to facilitate the e-commerce transition to compliment their brick and mortar retail business model, given that the urban/rural digital divide still exists in India on a large scale.

Facebook data leak and a Durga pooja pandal

If social media gives you a privacy scare every now and then, here's another news that has surfaced about a Bulgarian blogger who purchased a data leak of 1.1 million facebook users for just $5, which consists of facebook user profile URL, their complete names and facebook emails.

On the surface it does not look like much of a sensitive data leak, however the price at which has got sold is what should be the worrying factor, possible impact of such data being leaked is listed below:

• Send more convincing phishing emails, using the Facebook user’s profile URL, first and last name, and login email, to obtain more information.
• Use a password cracker to discover the user’s Facebook password to accompany the login email, allowing them to hack the account and discover more information.
• Use the name and login email together to reconstruct the user’s actual identity.

The person who sold all the information was reportedly collecting information via Facebook and Twitter apps from the past 6 months, comprised of details of users from US, UK, Canada and Europe. Facebook has already begun investigating this incident and has mentioned that it stands committed in its efforts to safeguard user data and would continue to investigate this individual who tried scraping user data.

Read more about this here

Back home in India, during this years Durga pooja in a town of Suri from West Bengal a facebook user spotted a pandal made with a Facebook page design, if you take a close look at the image it looks to be a very detailed and creative representation (Original article source and image credit: http://lighthouseinsights.in)

Want a Social Jhappi? try Facebook Hug Jacket

I had read about some device which got showcased at Tokyo Game Show about brain kiss, as if human race is facing shortage real kisses now comes a Like-A-Hug, a wearable social media jacket. Every time someone likes your Facebook post, photo, video or status this vest inflates like a life jacket.

Companies into marketing are actively toying the idea of interactive/digital clothing and this could be just the right start in this direction, Imagine you returning home wearing this jacket with a big grin on your face thinking, "Oh man I was SO swelling with Joy the entire day!" 

A social media PR agent reporting how many time's he/she counted jacket inflating throughout the day for a Facebook company/product page, and well it does not just stop here it also has gesture response to being de friended, poked or followed. read more about this here

Rise of Social Bots

Skynet was the earliest concept on self aware machines imagined via Terminator movie series, The web has being carrying years of online data which is enough to feed a virtual AI system with this collection of our online experience that would mirror the behavior of our society as a whole in a parallel bot univerese if brought to life.

Our social networks also are profiling user activity to create a complex adaptive system for bots to learn from this social chatter we have built, which may allow them to gain identity, make friends and develop relationships.

Pepsi is also experimenting with a "Social Vending Machine" that would allow you to gift a drink to a friend and this machine would also give free drinks to strangers as a random act of freshness, read more about this here.

On a similar note VMware is also working on the SocialCast enterprise social network which would facilitate adoption of social media technology to corporate data environment, read more about this i detail from an article on TechCrunch. Do you think Social Network's could prove to be the missing human link towards enriching an AI system that would one day power the dream of robotics and future as we have seen in movies?

Discover what lies at the heart of Social Media

Check out a collection of interesting slides in a video that reveals the true soul and essence of Social Media as it is evolving today

Epilogger:Meeting point for your events

Few years back your collection of best moments would have being limited to a huge album of photographs, we thought arrival of social media tools made our lives easier by giving us platforms to share these events from our life, however these tools pose a problem of fragmentation which results out of multiple services we use to share across social platforms for which A Toronto based start-up Epilogger is offering an online archiving service that aims to collate photos, blog posts, tweets, maps, check-ins from your event tying it together.

This service is aimed at ad agencies, event planners even regular users can utilize this service to bring together post event collection which could be tedious to go through if you are a social butterfly, why not savor the nectar of your sweet memories in one place.

Visit Epilogger site for more details.

The Girl Epidemic - Soul Stirring Ad Campaign

Satyamev Jayate began on a high note exposing the known but dark truth of our country, Female Foeticide, beyond the killing of female fetus, at every stage of her life a girl child is subjected to hardships, discrimination and second grade treatment from society across all masses and classes, religion and castes, in order to deal with this situation we have a lot of NGO's and Private companies joining hands together and fighting for the cause of women.

One such name emerges in the form of The Girl Epidemic Campaign which is being supported by the NGO Nanhi Kali, dedicated to the cause of education for underprivileged girl child in India and by Mahindra Foundation. This public service ad campaign was shot by Ad Agency Strawberry Frog along with photographer Indrani from Aerofilm who have projected the atrocities committed against girls as an epidemic in a shaky footage style direction that works well with the theme, all they wanted to do is to help raising money to educate young girls by using creativity and innovation.


The Girl Epidemic Site allows you to donate as minimum of a Pencil set for $3 up to a complete package of school requirements for $97, kindly help spreading the word about this site and provide whatever support you can lend towards this cause. Watch the campaign video below

Want to get serious with your workouts?

If your fitness plans keep flying out of the window, and the couch potato feeling takes over all your motivation to stick to workout plans which looked promising while joining the nearest gym, you surely would be eager to try something which would get you back on that treadmill and get sweating.

A lot of us using smartphones now have a plethora of options in health and fitness based apps that are loaded with features which track your physical activity, allow sharing of achievements with friends on social networks, reward you with virtual badges on accomplishing your fitness goals, sometimes even this is not enough to get people exercising for their own benefit.

You now have that last chance of making good use of your gym membership. GymPact is a service that utilizes the gamification approach with real money that would get any fitness atheist on his feet working out to save his money. GymPact aims to incentivize your exercise commitments by engaging users to dedicate a minimum 30 minute workout per week and be ready to shell out $5 through your credit card in case you fail to meet this target, so where does the money from defaulters go? it pays up the one's who fulfill their exercise schedule. This service was launched by Harvard students Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer, they have got a good response to this service garnering 20,000 users within 2 weeks of launch. They were expecting a slightly longer break even period of around 6 months, which was achieved in just 1 month of launch.

You can sign up to this service online or download the iPhone app, GymPact is aiming to increase reach of this service by tying up with corporate partners, I feel this is really an innovative service of getting people on the right track with their fitness, on the lighter side of this service I think it's true that guys get jitters with the word "Commitment", however an equal fear of losing money on their credit cards would linger on their minds similar to the situation when they go out shopping with their girlfriends or spouse which is enough to get them serious with their fitness, ladies are you listening to this!

Visit GymPact for more information

Social Media for Tiger Conservation

I read an article from New York post that described this initiative of Tiger Conservation that has come out with an innovative method of spreading awareness via Social Media. I have pledged my support to this cause which is being branded as people powered conservation.

You can join for free and gain access by donation to the section on the portal that shares the happenings in the lives of India Tigers, helping keep a close watch on their movements. I am sure we could tolerate this thrill of jungle drama better than the television soaps.

Check out the message video below and please share this with as many friends you can. Let's do our little bit to preserve the future of this species.

Visit Tiger Nation website for more info