Evolution - CCarter Weekly #3

"Time and attention. Better than lamb's blood."

Websites are dead.

I know a portion of the audience is not going to like this, good. It's not for them. They'll be gone, with their market shares shrinking day by day, week by week - Year Over Year traffic and profits dwindling and then poof, nada. However the ones that get IT, at least you'll have a chance. We're not all going to make it.

Let's take a step back for a moment as marketers, think about your own internet usage on a daily basis. Most people consume the internet or media through their phones, over 50% of internet traffic is now mobile devices. Internet usage is going up and will continue to go up, but people aren't hanging around in the Safari web browser.

I asked a random friend to send me her App usage when she is her iPhone:

I can't wait for the battery comments...

In a week she has use Safari for 49 total minutes. The Web Browser is simply an App now, and the attentions of the audience are within other Apps. Don't take my word for it, and don't try to look at your own usage, simply ask random strangers, co-workers, spouses, or friends if they don't mind you peeking at their App usage times, try to find Safari, Top 5 - yeah right!

What's crazy is people refer to me as an SEO, but when I look at my own referring traffic, cause you know I love traffic leaking, I see the majority of my traffic coming from referring websites and not search engines. And I OWN an SEO software company!

This isn't about SEO, it's about what I've always thought of myself as, a marketer, that specializes in online marketing first, a programmer second. SEO is too restrictive since Google is simply one website on the web, a powerful one, but still only a single website that can drive traffic to my brands. However I can easily generate traffic from Quora, Reddit, or other sites and measure the conversion rate on who converts and see which traffic source is getting me the better customer.

SEO isn't dead, but it's not as easy as updating some meta tags and ranking and banking like it is 2007.

Brands As A Platform

From the marketing angle: marketing allows me to engage users beyond search engines, because realistically a search engine is simply a website that drives traffic, thousands of other websites can drive traffic too. Actually let's evolve that - a search engine is simply a platform that I can utilize to generate customers from. I can pay to play by buying advertisement on the platform or rank in the organic results with SEO.

The Death of TV

These platforms are siloed within the mobile ecosystem. You have to download their Apps to mostly use them, You can't even use Snapchat's website to login.

Old school TV - Media

Once you start seeing the landscape as platforms you start seeing the NEW "Internet". And to really put things into perspective of user's attention, the "Mobile" has now surpassed TV:

Mobile attention has surpassed TV

We all knew this day was coming, and for those that aren't evolving with the times, they'll become irrelevant, just put them in the back of the yellow pages, or throw them into the organic rankings of search, burying them on page 2, and call it a day.

So not only is the TV declining, the desktop has been surpassed by mobile...

New Media is here. You have to play within the platforms your consumers are at - either by buying advertisement or creating content that's better than your competitors or both.

And here is the thing, your brand is considered a platform, even if you are running an affiliate site, if you can create enough presence on other platforms that drives your potential audience to your brand.

Now here is your next problem: you have to have real estate on those platforms. With Google you've got your website. With Youtube you'll need a youtube channel, with Facebook you'll need a FB Page or FB group, Instagram you'll need a profile, even Amazon you'll need your own merchant presence there to get customers from that platform.

If SEOs don't evolve into online marketers we'll become dinosaurs - think of the people in 2000 that were talking about Yellow Pages. There are still business till this day that advertise within the yellow pages and simply aren't evolving with the times to even have a website to have a presence within the web browser App.

SEOs will become those Yellow Page marketers - the traffic will be there, but the percentage of that piece of the pie will continue to shrink.

Don't Blame The Audience

The audience hates websites, but who can really blame them? I know this will irk some website designers, but put your ego aside, no one really cares about that extra 3 hours you put in to perfect that pixel alignment, let's be serious.

When I visit a website to read a blog or some content within 2 seconds of landing on the site I get a pop-up asking for my email or giving me a discount code or some promotional nonsense, I literally just LANDED!

What's crazy is I'm using Disconnect and other AD blocking plug-ins, so good luck with a person that doesn't have any of that. I went to Express.co.uk and over 5999+ Advertisement connections have been made, and the page is technically "still loading" - WTF?

Is this really necessary - is this the experience we want for ourselves?

What's The Next Step?

Informative

There is always something changing within an industry, if you can become the "news outlet" for the latest of what's going on AND add your expert commentary on the situation your audience will start looking for your input on topics. You'll need to stay on top of the latest though.

Or you could be a source of content for the news. For example within the SEO industry Google Algorithms happen "occasionally" so at SERPWoo we created a free tool that monitors our crawled data and showcases the latest search engine results volatility (Located here: Latest SERP Volatility Stats). New sources, bloggers, and commentors now use our data as a source when talking about what's going on with the latest Google updates. There are number of other competitors that we get compared to, so users can see from multiple sources that there is indeed a Google update going on. Boom, now we are informing people and letting the audience spread the word of mouth about our brand.

Can you create a tool or something similar in your industry?

Can you create content that talks about the latest industry news, like Clint Butler does with his SEO This Week live video which helps his Digitaleer brand?

Inspirational

Inspiring people will have a positive impact on your brand more than anything else in my opinion. Inspiring people to do something or take action or pull the trigger on an idea, on bettering their life anything that leads to a net positive in their life they will attribute to YOU and YOUR BRAND as the source of inspiration. Now imagine selling a product or service to them after that initial impact of positive flow? Money in the bank!

Educational

To generate trust you need to show your company, your employees, and your brand has the knowledge to get the job done. That means educating your audience on about your industry, tactics, and things to look out for. Your audience can be broken up into 3 levels: Newbie, Intermediate, and Expert.

Newbie Level Audience Member:

A person within your industry that has absolutely no idea about what's going on - these guys are going to be your bread and butter since they tend to trust the first brand that gave them the "Ah ha" moment. It's why so many people within the SEO industry still tout Moz as being a good source. It's because they were the FIRST source that gave them detailed information. You have to create the content that's geared towards them, like a glossary of your industry jargon, and then detailed explanation of each industry jargon term and what it means, what to look out for, and more.

They'll consume this content left and right. Here is the thing, the content should not be in just text format, create a YouTube video of the same piece of content with example walk-thrus. There is a percentage of your audience that learns through video. Then also create the same content into podcast format, there are people that walk their dogs and listen to podcasts all day - I throw on a GaryVee podcast whenever I'm driving since I can't connect to video. Look at your own actions and family/friends' actions on how you all absorb content.

Example: You are a plumber, so you create a piece of content on how the audience can fix their own toilet with different store bought products and give them a long DIY (Do It Yourself) guide on how to fix common toilet problems. A portion of your audience will fix the toilet themselves, another portion will be like "screw this, this guy looks like he knows what he is doing lets just hire him". Another portion will remember you as the local plumber with video guides and they'll recommend you through word of mouth, and your business will grow as you create more content in multiple formats.

Giving out value first is key to winning on the internet. Simply throwing up an advertisement "Hey I'm a plumber, got a leaky sink call me!" Is boring, lazy, and isn't a long term strategy, there is no word of mouth behind it, there is no "added-value" behind it, there is nothing except "I want your money". We are evolving from the TV, Radio, print media era to a new era where the brands that add value to the ecosystem will have the staying power.

Intermediate Level Audience Member:

This is a person that knows the industry jargon and will be mostly looking to maximize current strategies and learn about new things going on. This is where content piece centered around new products and services within your industry is the key.

Example: Being a plumber, you can create content about a new drain snake, tool used to clean out pipes, that has entered the market and is absolutely great OR is absolutely horrible and to stay away. Creating videos of your attempt at using the newer products and reviewing them will show that you have a wide field of knowledge within your industry.

The results will be word of mouth, and recommendations from the intermediate audience member and your brand's expansion.

Expert Level Audience Member:

This is probably a competitor level audience member that's also in your industry. Create content that engages them and/or even provokes them can get them to spread your message for you to THEIR audience. When a competitor starts talking about you to their audience, their audience is now suddenly aware of a potential alternative. Their audience will start looking at your content and you can capture a good portion of them if your message is on point.

Create expert level content that talks about different problems within your industry or regulation that's coming that will impact everyone. You can interview other experts within your industry to help boost your own authority. This will help spread the word within your industry as an expert amongst the experts since you are on-top of the news. It's again why Moz is so annoyingly referred to even though they've been slipping for years. Being a part of the news circuit and writing informative comments when you read an article will help spread your brand within your industry faster - it's why CCarter is CCarter. The brand lives on after WickedFire's demise.

Example: You are a plumber and you read the comments of content from the newbies to expert levels of your audience. This allows you to gather new content ideas, but also comment back when there are errors or is confusion that you can solve - EVEN if it helps your competitors. That genuine help will not only be seen by the audience but if your competitors are smart enough they'll be alerted to it. Slowly a relationship can grow and you can partner up on future marketing initiatives to help both your brands cross-pollinate your audiences. Example you can invite them onto your podcast for a series that collaborates on problems in the industry and how they can be solved.

Entertaining

Every industry gets a little mundaned so a brand that can entertain while providing value is going to stand out. Think Eat24 (before GrubHub bought them). Eat24 was up to a lot (How to Advertise on A Porn Website - in fact that's how I found out about them and started ordering from them - WAIT! FROM THE ARTICLE they wrote about their marketing not that other way, yuck... yeah... that's it.) They also created a unique voice for their advertisement that stood out amongst the competition.

Same thing with Wendys' Twitter account - they were straight up roasting people left and right on twitter and that gained notoriety.

But it doesn't end there, entertaining your audience shows you've got more going on than just "Buy My Product", it shows you're creative and color outside the box. I plaster gifs all over my content, I've got a unique way of telling a story about marketing that my audience loves. It permeants throughout all social channels and marketing copy I do. It also aggravates a good chunk of people, Good - they help spread my personal brand further, I need you to hate.

Entertaining while educating, informing, or inspiring allows you to impact your audience twice as hard cause they are actually enjoying reading each word and the underlying story behind it.

Your Evolution Domination Game Plan

Something to consider: Branding content is completely different than Sales oriented content.

Branding content is used to grow your brand presence, it's used to showcase you are a player in the industry. Sales content is used to persuade or educate your audience on your product.

For example this particular article/blog post is a branding content piece. I rarely will mention SERPWoo and there is really no upsell. It's an informative and educational and hopefully entertaining piece of content with actionable items that will grow the SERPWoo brand in the minds of our audience, you.

If this were a sales piece of content, we'd be mostly talking about a particular problem that the audience has and that SERPWoo solves better than the competition, like our ability for Online Reputation Managers to tag negative URLs for advanced reporting to their clients. 😉

8th Step, Go all in on GaryVee, follow him on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Linkedin (Yes Linkedin, if you got business customers it's time to click that 'forgot password' link and get back in the game cause it's on!). Look at how he creates content and understand WHY he creates so much content.

The problem is a lot of brands hold back cause they think they'll flood their users with too much content, HOW? They are already drinking from a firehose when they turn on the internet. Your organic reach within Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms are at best 5-15%, so even if you repost a piece of content, you can never hit 100% of your potential audience within that platform. it's impossible to hit terminal velocity and overwhelm your audience.

What GaryVee does is take a single content piece, splices it up into Micro-content pieces, and then shares that piece on so many platforms, that his penetration makes it almost impossible for you to not see it. Actually just take a look at his blueprint, he literally wrote it all out on how he does it:

The GaryVee Content Model

Don't like GaryVee, I give zero fucks, he's winning at audience penetration. Your brand needs to up it's game, even if you can do 10% of what he's able to accomplish you'll be leaps ahead of your competitors who only post a new blog post once a week, and maybe a tweet along with it.

The internet is an ocean of information that gets reflooded daily, how can your one single piece of content survive more than a couple of minutes? It's like a drop of water into the ocean, you have to keep dropping content piece after content piece to win. It's why the micro-content strategy works, it helps penetrate different parts of your organic reach and you can test which content pieces got the most attention and then buy ADs against that creative and money in the bank.

Take Away

1. Fucking evolve. I first watch my competition and people playing the game on platform better than me and absorb. Currently GaryVee is out-doing everyone in terms of execution. so I studied him and I realize I was watching most of his content within other platforms. He's presence is like he is running for president of the internet. I've been absorbing his content for 3 weeks before I realized he has a website! WTF. It never occurred to me to even check.

   That revelation opened my mind to how brands are missing the boat if they simply concentrate on their "website" as the vehicle to grow their brand.

   
   Evolve with the internet

2. Go Hard. Envision your brands as running a political campaign for president of your industry. You've seen these political Ads, they are everywhere at all times. That's the level of fever you should hit within your industry:

   • When your audience turns to YouTube you are in their pre-rolls ADs, you are in their suggested videos.

   • When your audience turns to Instagram you are in their IG stories, you are in their feed. Your audience turns to Facebook you are in their scrolling feed and in their sidebar.

   • When your audience turns to Twitter you are being retweeted and in their feed, you are being promoted to them with different content pieces from your micro-content strategy.

   • When your audience tries to update their Linkedin Profile, you are being recommended to follow them, your content is being shared with them by their colleagues.

   • When your audience opens their email, your newsletter is sitting in their inbox old school style.

   • When your audience turns to reading blogs, you've retargeted them and your brand is showing up in Adsense ADs on the blogs they are reading.

   
   Go Harder Than Every Before

3. Your Brand Is Everything. Platforms can come and go, even if no one visits your website your brand can still exist within the realm, you have to evolve your way of thinking about how to "Internet". As the internet continues to evolve, you have to continue to evolve with it, your marketing, your messaging all have to adapt to the platforms they reside on. Follow your audience and stay in front of them because if you don't you better believe your competitors, old and NEW are going to be in front of them, and you'll become irrelevant and forgotten.

   

Time to get to work.

- CCarter (http://www.twitter.com/MakoCCarter)

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