Content is the king?

For quite a time, we have been buzzing Content is the king! Content is the king! While this is not incorrect, it has been undercut by Matt McGee's awesomely fabulous chart, SEO Success Pyramid.

From this chart we can see the content is positioned by Matt in the very heart of his pyramid. It is still very important, staying at tier three and in the middle. However, there are another three elements that overpower it: Social/Local Findability, Reputation Management and Trust. Here's Matt's explanations:

Social/Local Findability is to engage with your customers on local and social sites.
Reputation Management, what others say about you matters. A lot.
Trust, from users and search engines is imperative for long term success.

Shocked? Do you agree?

I myself find Matt's theory very enlightening and useful, either for SEOers or SEMers. He call his theory SEO Success but I do believe that it is much more than SEO.

Enjoy.

How to hunt down a new marketing idea

When you walk in the streets, looking around all kinds of ads, does not this question pop up: How talented must those marketers be to create such funny and brainstorming advertisements and marketing ideas?

Do they just knock up or just pick up the ideas? Where are they derived from?

For quite a time, I have been pondering this. And I think that a creative marketing institution must be established to produce those mental goods.

As an individual marketer, one good idea is easy to fabricate and commercialize. Yet it may easily drop off your head. Or it may change from time to time. Or it may not be consistent with previous marketing ideas. It’s unstable.

So the question is really How to hunt down a new marketing idea, constantly and consistently.

Here are my thoughts. Tell me if you agree.

1. Marketing is a team work, it needs a leader and its members.
2. While roles of the team players must be defined, impulse may be given to encourage free idea. Every one must be free to make a suggestion and be awarded if necessary.
3. A marketing proposing system should be built to ensure ideas spring from time to time and constantly.
4. Evaluate each proposals and put them into open discussion.
5. The team leader must encourage and supervise any free proposals.
6. Team leader does not necessarily have to create ideas by him/her self.
7. When an proposal proves to be quality and effective, review and study why it becomes a success.
8. For the unsuccessful proposals, make records for future reference.
9. Treat every member and every proposal seriously and right.
10. Guide and lead any good idea to be a formal and reasonable proposal.

The list can go on and on. And the key word is team work and free thought. Encourage, enable and enforce team work and free thoughts and a systematic marketing institution may be built.

Using Google Trends

Google Trends is a very useful tool. Since this search engine take up 70% of the search market, it should absolutely be our number one choice of keyword study.

Here the link, in case anyone may possibly be unaware of it, http://www.google.com/trends

The question now is not, whether Trends is useful, but really how to use it.

So, how to begin?

If you already have the keywords, type them in the trends search box and hit enter. You will see the page below.

The chart on the left shows the search volume history for the keyword you just entered (here I entered “keyword”). You may well understand from this the change through time of the search volume.

A list to the right of the chart shows the news result for your keyword so that you may obtain a preliminary knowledge of what may appear in the search results.

Right at the bottom, Trends list out the hotness in Regions, Cities and Languages. In my example, people from India appear to search the keyword the most. And the city of Bangalore ranks No.1 in Cities. Strangely, in Language, Indonesian ranks over English. My guess would be that Indonesian was used in more than one country.

You may refine the result by applying filters on the top right. Google provides two filters, Regions and Years. If I want to see how the keyword was searched in Australia and in the year of 2007, I may just apply those two filters. It is very easy. Sub-regions are also provided to further filter the results. You may come across the result that Google says “not enough search volume” if you filter the result too much.

If you do not have specific keyword to market or promote for your site, Trends may also help.

At the Trends home page, Today’s Hot Trends are listed below the search box. The list is top 10 and you may click More Hot Trends to view the top 100. The results come from the US but are representative enough.

If you want to view history results, the top left link “change date” may be useful.

Looking at the list you may be well confused, for there are a lot of keywords that are meaningless, such as fml, fmlife, etc. Discard them. But pay attention to the ones that may be typos which happen a lot. I may guess that fmlife maybe f my life. And I try search this with Google, the number one result tells me it is actually fmylife, which is the name of a very hot site. Tip is, search the keyword yourself and see the result to understand its meaning.

Now choose the keywords that may interest you and market them!

Divine Bridge Vil.

Divine Bridge
This is Divine Bridge, located in Xinhuang, in the middle of China. The scenery is raw and almost untouched by modern civilization.
http://www.associatedcontent.comslideshow/12262/divine_bridge.html

Discount coupons, treat or trick?

Check out my recently published content on AC:

Discount Coupons, Treat or Trick?





The other day I went to a Japanese restaurant with my wife to have some sushi and sashimi and mustard. People here in Guangzhou love Japanese food a lot – quite a lot, I’d say. The first restaurant that serves sushi and sashimi were fully booked and we had to go on find another one.

There are many Japanese restaurants in Guangzhou, majority of which are chain stores that belong to a handful of corporations. And we finally got ourselves two seats in another store that belongs to the same corporation as the one that had turned us away with its weapon of massive diners.

The dining was not bad. We were hungry enough to wolf down dishes of sushi and a whole kilo of salmon sashimi. The only thing that I was not totally happy with was that the salmon was not as fresh as all previous eating there – I have been to that restaurant many times.

Pay time came to declare the end of our banquet.

“Waiter, check please!” The waiter I was calling was too busy to hear. And a waitress came with indifferent expression on her face and took the order away. Several minutes later she returned to my table and advised me how much I should pay. I gave her the money and she went away again. Another several minutes later the waitress cam with the change and a piece of printed paper with which I was not unfamiliar with at all – a coupon.

Ohm, a coupon! Again!

I have in my not-so-long life seen many such things, at the first glance of which one may easily be cheated. They often have very enticing calls to shopping/dining. “Cash coupon worth 20!”; “Discount coupon of 5%!”, if you ever believed in those, you would have probably found your wallet was emptier than it should have been and you would have spent more.

Those coupons always have many prerequisites such as:

You must have bought 100 (or other thresholds that they may lay upon the coupons) worth of goods/foods in the store/restaurant;
You cannot use the coupon(s) on the same day of your consumption;
You cannot use all the coupons at a time;
You cannot use coupons on goods/foods that are already discounted;
If the goods/foods worth lower than the value of the coupon, no refund will be offered;
You must use the coupons before a deadline comes;
…

Read those carefully and give a second thought. And you will finally find out that you are not the one who is winning but they are!

Not all the coupons have all the above requirements. But it makes no differences: you will spend more and you will spend faster.

Why? How is that true? You may ask. Simply speaking, people are always wanting more and things that are seemingly free.

So these are the tricks that business persons are playing on us – poor and dumb goats who thought we are taking advantages. But caution! Business is cruel. And those marketing people are no foolish! They give you one dollar free and steal two or more away from you. Never ever think of yourself as wise when you took the coupons and use them. The marketers are wiser than you.
So, discount coupons, or cash coupons, is a treat for you or a trick? You will see.

World Nude Day

Check out my recently published content on AC:

How I See the World Nude Day


I’ve never know there is a World Nude Day (WND) before. What does this stand for? Are we not looking ourselves nude each day? Is that not enough? Why should we need such a day?

And when I typed world nude day into the search box of Google, there came over 18m results! And I found more days such as World Nude Gardening Day, World Naked Bike Riding.

What a world! I think to myself.

I’ve never heard of this before, not to mention celebrating the day. The world is strange and there are a lot of weird things to which even my craziest fancy will surrender.

I saw on the internet tiger man, girls eating shit, son killing mother, father raping daughter. What can be more insane?

However, I do not plan to start with all those things – and I do not have that much time and energy. I shall just take them as they are. And they cannot harm me.

And as regards the WND, it does no harm to others (I mean beholders) or me, despite its weirdness. And then I think to myself, this might be a good way of expressing or releasing oneself. So what’s the bad?

I do not like my body. It’s thin, not hot. But I do not think I will fear body exposure. It’s just body and everybody has it.

And then I ask myself why should human be clad. For keeping off the coldness? For moral consideration? It’s a long story and no one can draw the full picture.

So, if people have the need to expose themselves, it’s reasonable yet understandable. Remember thousands of years ago our ancestors were wearing nothing but leaves. And even before that their ancestors had nothing to wear at all!

I tell myself, this is a very strange thing to have a world nude day. I would never think of it. However, when someone creates it, you’ve got to be taking it.

I’m not unprincipled per se. This is an attitude. When something happens not to your likings or previous principles, if you are not able to tell if it is good or bad, just take it. You do not have to follow suit. Just think of this: uhm, there is such a thing in the world.

Top Ten Bushisms

(10) "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." —LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

(9) "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." —Greater Nashua, N.H., Jan. 27, 2000

(8) "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." —second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004

(7) "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." —Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000

(6) "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." —to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

(5) "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." —Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

(4) "They misunderestimated me." —Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

(3) "Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?" —Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

(2) "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

(1) "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002