To sell content strategy to your boss and organization, you’ll have to perfect the art of pitching projects with the intention of not only presenting your ideas and convincing your boss to sign off on them, but also to educate him or her on what content strategy is and its value to any organization.

If you can quantify how much of an impact content strategy will have on the bottom line, I guarantee your boss will listen.

Point Out The (Not So) Obvious

Take advantage of opportunities to inform your boss of where your organization could be losing revenue through a poor content experience. Take a look at your website and make a list of any potentially revenue-impacting issues such as:

• Pages with high bounce rates or form abandonment
• Incorrect prices, content or data
• Broken links or contact forms
• Trending keyword searches related to your organization that are not covered by your content
• Contact information for employees no longer with the organization
• Typos and grammar mistakes

To put this in business speak your boss will understand: These are your opportunities for conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Do The Math

Ahava Leibtag, author of The Digital Crown: Winning at Content on the Web, led a great workshop on the importance of defining workflows around content production and maintenance at this year’s Confab Intensive conference. Not the most exciting topic, but surprisingly influential on an organization’s bottom line.

To drive her point home, Ahava shared a personal story about receiving a hotel upgrade worth several hundred dollars because of an incorrect room description on the international hotel chain’s corporate website.

“Imagine how many people this must happen to,” she asked. “How much money is being unnecessarily lost because of a typo?”

I’d ask American Airlines, who in August 2015 accidentally listed round-trip flights from Sao Paulo, Brazil to Hong Kong, China for $350 USD instead of the normal fare of $3,350. That missing ‘3’ discounted flights a whopping 90%!

A solid content management and governance plan would have had reviews and controls in place (such as a triggered email alert for human review whenever a fare dipped below a certain price threshold) to safeguard against errors like the one American Airlines experienced.

Assuming they sold an entire flight (approximately 400 seats) at this discounted price, American would’ve recouped only $140,000 instead of a potential $1,340,000–a $1.2 million loss on a single flight!

Now ask yourself:

How much is each issue on your list costing your organization in lost revenue?

Your boss wants the answer to this question when you pitch your content strategy. If you can connect the dots between content strategy and your organization’s greater goals, you’ll go a long way towards convincing your boss that content strategy projects are worth the effort.

To put this in business speak: You want to increase revenue by raising the conversion rate. (Better data = higher conversion = more revenue).

Make An Offer They Can’t Refuse

Ever had your boss say to you, “I want you to bring me solutions, not problems”?

This is exactly the situation he or she was talking about. Once you’ve pointed out content problems and done the math on how much revenue each one could be losing, it’s time to close the deal by making it as easy as possible for your boss to say “yes” to your project.

Map out exactly what work needs to be done, who will do it and how long it will take. Come prepared with a roadmap of tasks, resources and timelines. Condense that plan down to a single sheet of paper and share it with your boss. The simpler you can make things sound, the more likely your boss is to listen, understand and approve.

Talk with your co-workers ahead of time, even if only informally. Present your ideas and let them kick the tires on your project before you go to your boss. Talk things through, discuss the feasibility of your ideas on the ground level and get the buy-in from key stakeholders that will sway your boss in favor of your project.

Before presenting your ideas to your boss, have ready answers to the following questions for each problem on your list. The more questions you can answer upfront, the better.

Solutions
How can content strategy solve this problem?
What is the scope of work that needs to be done?
What are the benefits of your approach?

Resources
What skills/roles are needed to fix the issue?
How many people will you need and for how many hours?
Can this be done in-house, outsourced or with a combination of both?

Timeline
How long will it take to complete the project?
When can you begin?
How soon will you see results?

To put this in business speak: You are laying out the return on investment (ROI) for completing your project. (Gains – Investment = Return).

More Than A Dog And Pony Show

This might seem like a lot of work just to fix some typos on a website–but it is so much more than that! Content strategy has real value on the bottom line; it’s just not always easy to make the connection between the two. Use your skills as a storyteller to connect the dots for your audience and get your content strategy projects approved.

The post How to Sell Content Strategy to Your Boss appeared first on Portent.

The central challenge of content marketing is getting people to engage with the content you publish or, to put it simply:

The secret to success in content marketing is to create content people care about.

But how does a marketer go about creating content people care about?

By taking the time to care about the people they are marketing to. By knowing who these “people” are, where they can be found, what they need, and when and why they need it. By surfacing the right message at the right time in the right place to the right person–a state I like to call Content Nirvana.

Finding Your Audience: Research

Creating content without knowing your audience is a surefire strategy for campaign failure. This is why audience research should always play a part in the process of developing new content and/or a content marketing strategy. It equips marketers, content creators and decision makers with hard data from real people so they can make informed decisions about what kind of content to produce and where to distribute it.

There are multiple ways to gather data on your audience and, ideally, you would pull data from multiple sources to create a detailed composite of your target group. Analytics, surveys and interviews are three of the most common ways to do audience research.

Analytics

By far the easiest and least expensive way to gain insights into your online audience and their behaviors is to review your site metrics. Even the most basic data logs can yield useful insights into your audience demographics and behavior by displaying clear trends in:

• Geographic location
• Preferred time(s) of day to interact with the site
• Referral channels (how they reached your site)
• Preferred content formats
• And so much more!

Sometimes the results can be a real surprise. For example, a client based out of Asia was working with the Portent team to optimize its online marketing efforts as it moved into new markets. The client was looking to expand into English-speaking countries, choosing to focus heavily on North America.

However, after conducting a review of user data in Google Analytics, it was revealed that a fair number of website visitors were coming from India. This insight enabled the client to not only develop targeted marketing messages for their Indian audience but also led them to reconsider whether they had their sales team located in the right places.

Surveys

While analytics provide a wealth of quantitative data, there is a limit to its insights. Surveys yield personal quantitative data and qualitative insights that often can’t be found through search engine or browser histories. Conducting a visitor survey via email, website or social media channels can be an effective way to define the basic demographics of your core audiences, including personal data points such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Race/ethnicity

Audience research surveys that use open-ended questions can also be particularly helpful in validating (or debunking) popular beliefs about why your customers choose to work with you. Ask your audience questions such as:

• How did you first hear about us?
• Why did you visit our website?
• How satisfied are you with our customer service?
• How easy was it for you to complete your purchase?

Behavioral questions like these allow marketers to put together a clearer picture of why and how customers interact with a particular product, service or business by exploring the personal stories behind the actions. I once worked with a client who had been in business for several decades, amassing a very loyal following in the process. This client was relatively new to digital marketing and asked that I evaluate their website.

The results of their audience survey showed that nearly a quarter of respondents had first gained brand awareness from hearing the client speak on his weekly radio show–that had ceased broadcasting in 1987! This came as a real shock to the client, who had canceled the broadcast due to dwindling ratings but, in light of these findings, was now reconsidering whether to start it up again by broadcast or podcast.

Only by looking beyond basic transactional data and delving deeper into each audience member’s personal history was I able to go back in time and identify this new place to distribute content. When there’s a match like this–between audience, place, and time–that’s content nirvana.

Interviews & Observation

One of the oldest methods of data collection–pure observation–can be an invaluable tool for determining how people interact with a product. Personal interviews, conducted either in person or over the phone, can supply the “why” behind consumer interactions. Combining in-depth interviews with observation, such as with a focus group or user testing session, can allow you to view human interactions with your product/service and speak directly with your audience members to determine the thoughts behind their actions.

Interviews are the place to solicit in-depth, truthful feedback. Seek clarity on the interviewee’s thoughts and feelings about your organization:

• What do you think of our product/service?
• How could we improve your online experience?
• What do you like/not like about our website?

Aim to interview a minimum of 5 people who are representative of your personas in age, race, gender and other demographics. Avoid the common pitfall of interviewing family and friends of your organization. These people are too close to your organization to provide unbiased opinions and are often less representative of your audience groups as a whole. An easy way to find interview subjects is to include a “request to contact” question in your audience survey to identify people willing to speak with you. Offering a small token of appreciation, such as a $5 gift card or company schwag, can be an effective motivator as well.

The goal of audience interviews is to get people to share their innermost thoughts, not tell you what you want to hear. Expect answers to be long and rambling–in fact, encourage this! It often produces the most original insights. Case in point, one client I worked with had a rather dated-looking website and wanted me to conduct interviews with users of their current site before developing a new design. When asked what she thought of the current website, one interviewee exclaimed:

“1997 called. They want their website back!”

This got a lot of laughs from everyone involved–including the client. It was also a useful way to describe in greater detail what people thought of the website beyond that it “looks ugly/old.” It even became the yardstick against which our creative team compared elements throughout the design process: “Does this look too 1997?” they would ask.

Putting It All Together: Audience Personas

So what do you do with all this audience information once it’s been collected? Start building personas! Audience personas act as representative archetypes of your core audience groups; a unified symbol of the diverse set of individuals who comprise your audience. Offering an easily digestible snapshot of audience demographics and behaviors, personas are a powerful tool used by editorial, marketing and design teams to quickly and efficiently convey key information to freelancers, vendors, executives, stakeholders and each other.

Start by looking for trends across the data and group audiences together by shared demographics, actions and/or motivations. This will lay the foundation for evidence-based audience personas. As you comb through the data, you should be answering questions like:

Is my audience clustered in specific regions of the country or globe?
Do older people prefer a different set of products than other age groups?
Are there demographic similarities between the people who come to my site from Facebook vs. search engines?

Building Your Personas

Think of each persona as a mini style guide that outlines questions to answer, key phrases to use and which channels are best for content distribution for that particular audience. A good audience persona should address the four elements needed for content nirvana: person, place, time and message.

Person
Simply giving the persona a first and last name immediately humanizes him or her and enables content creators to better visualize the person they are writing for. Give your persona a job, a family, a hometown. Provide a personal backstory that explains how specific life circumstances have led to your organization.

Place
Always try to include a discussion about which channels are best for reaching that particular audience. Depending on your specific organization and business goals, this could be as narrow as a few pages on a website or as broad as a comprehensive list of all online and offline media outlets.

Time
Knowing what stage of the sales funnel your audience is at when viewing your content is critical to producing the right message. Include a list of interactions this person could have with your organization and a short description of how and why they do so.

Message
Be sure to include key messaging, phrases to use and avoid, and potential calls to action in your personas. This will help align content with marketing goals and strategies by providing a standardized terminology and clear value proposition, as well as cut down on the back and forth of the editing process. Developing editorial guidelines are very helpful for content creators, especially if the language has been previously vetted by stakeholders.

Aim to create 3 – 5 one-page personas to represent your core audiences, with the one that represents the largest group of people designated as a “primary” persona. Having fewer than 3 personas risks discounting secondary and tertiary groups who, when combined, may account for a significant portion of your total audience. Having too many personas risks diluting your message.

Example Persona

Here is an example of an audience persona for a technology company that licenses its customer relations management (CRM) software.

Note how everything fits neatly onto a single page; this is intentional. The goal is to produce a document that people will actually use. I’ve had content creators tell me they’ve printed out their personas and posted them next to their workspace for easy reference while they’re developing content.

Download a copy of this audience persona template.

Find Your Content Nirvana

Many successes in history can be attributed to the simple coincidence of being in the right place at the right time. But times, they are a changing, and as Secrets of the Millionaire Mind author, T. Harv Eker, puts it, “It’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You have to be the right person in the right place at the right time.” Or, in the case of content, you have to send the right message to the right person in the right place at the right time. When all of these elements (place, person, time, message) align, you will have achieved a state of content nirvana.

Remember the secrets I shared with you at the beginning of this post:

The secret to success in content marketing is to create content people care about… And the way to create content people care about is to care about the people who are viewing it.

Or, as marketing guru Lewis Howes succinctly states:

“Know your audience.”

The post How to Achieve Content Nirvana appeared first on Portent.

First and foremost, Facebook Business Manager became a really good friend of mine these past three months. I learned more about Facebook after coming to Portent than I ever knew before. The biggest take away I can give to any business is to get on Facebook. Social has become such a huge part of today’s marketing world and Facebook is a major component of this. No matter what size or who your target audiences are, you need Facebook. Then you can decide for yourself (or maybe get a professional opinion) what other channels are best for you. But, why is this so important? Facebook allows you to run ad campaigns and boost your posts towards a targeted group of people so that you have the best opportunity to sell your product to the people who would most likely want to buy it. The whole idea behind social media is that it gives you the ability to promote yourself to an audience and gain a following of people who like your brand. If your followers like you, they will share your name with others, so on and so forth. Social media allows you to connect and build relationships with the people buying your product in real time, a concept that didn’t really exist before.  Furthermore, Facebook Business Manager gives you access to the numbers behind everything you are doing so that you can analyze your business strategy and if need to, change it. These metrics are also offered on Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, and more. The better you promote yourself, the better your business will perform, and that is what social is all about.

Another thing I found very helpful (although maybe not the most fun) was devoting a couple hours a week to staying up to date on recent events in the digital marketing world. Sites like Mashable or Social Media Today, and even just searching within Google news are places I would do this. One thing I have learned at Portent is that there is always something new to learn, and you should WANT to learn it, especially when it concerns something that is relevant to your career. If you are really passionate about what you are doing, you will take the time to learn more about it. If you aren’t, you should probably switch careers.  Seriously, some of the smartest people I have ever met are located in this office. Yes, they have many more years of experience under their belts than I do, but they wouldn’t have gotten to where they are now if they refused to keep learning. Our CEO, Ian, constantly remind us to learn the $#!+ out of everything, and that is something I will take with me the rest of my career, whether I am performing on stage or sitting at a desk.

The digital marketing industry is rapidly growing. I think that there are still many people who aren’t aware of just how much it can positively impact a business. Social media and other forms of online paid advertising have really sparked my interest and is something I would like pursue for the next few years. What is also great about it is that the knowledge I have learned from this industry can be applied to other fields as well. These include things like PR, Marketing, Advertising, and more. Although each field has its own specialties, they are also very similar. Through social media advertising I have learned the process that goes into promoting a business or product. I have learned how to market a product to a specific group of people and the details and costs that go into advertising it. There are three types of media: paid, earned, and owned. Social media and PR work with these to grow your business and its reputation overtime. The online marketing world is so prevalent in today’s society and being able to be versatile in your work can be very beneficial for you. Digital advertising helped me get my foot in the door, and from here there are a number of directions I can go.

So, there you have it. Three beautiful months boiled down in three small paragraphs. For anyone interested in a social media career, I can tell you its loads of hard work and fun. The social world is constantly changing and updating itself, which is the reason it remains so interesting. Social is one of the many new forms of marketing, and if you want your business to succeed in this day and age, you have got to get your business online, simple as that. To end, I’d like to give a shout out to everyone at Portent who made my time here so awesome, especially everyone in the cool kids’ corner (you know who you are). Peace out for now, and remember, “It’s not goodbye, it’s see ya later.”

The post Three Months at Portent: My Life as an Intern appeared first on Portent.

I get the feeling that my friends still think I spend my entire day surfing Facebook and Twitter… and to be fair, I do spend a good chunk of my time each day on different social channels. And, okay, sometimes I find myself mindlessly scrolling Twitter feeds to waste time (shh don’t tell my boss). But, really, the thing I’ve realized most about this job is that there are tools I need to have each day in order to do my job well.

Social media tools, which I use for a variety of reasons, help me perform tasks like scheduling posts ahead of time, and digging into the analytics of a page to check on its performance. I have to say, the amount of time I save using these tools really makes me feel like a social media ninja.

Below I have listed five social tools that I use daily as a social media intern (and that hopefully prove to my friends that my job is more serious than the title may let on).

1. Facebook Insights:

The Facebook “Insights” tab is located in Business Manager on Facebook, or within the “Insights” tab of a regular Facebook page. It lets me look at things like page likes and visits, post reach, total engagement, and fans. I can look at the overall performance of a page or how each post does individually. There are even easy to read graphs for all you visual learners out there.

I spend most of my time looking at the “Posts” tab. Most helpful for me is the first graph that you see above, which lets me know the days and times that most of my fans are online. This can help me determine when I should be posting and at what times these posts are performing best.  I can then dive further into insights to suss out why I think a particular post did better than another, or what difference a paid promotion made for a certain post. If you really want to overwhelm your mind you can download page and post excel performance sheets that give you every tiny detail of everything and anything you could every need to know about a post. Go ahead, if you’ve never downloaded it before just do it for fun. I dare you.

2. Twitter Analytics:

Twitter analytics is, for the most part, very similar to Facebook insights. The major different is that the tool doesn’t give as detailed an analysis as what Facebook provides. The home page gives a month by month overview of your page’s performance on Twitter, and includes metrics like top tweet, top mention, top follower, profile visits, new followers, how many impressions your page had.

The “Tweets” tab lets you look at how many impressions (number of people who saw a tweet) each tweet made and how many engagements (favorite, retweet, replies, or clicks) each tweet received. The “Followers” tab is next, and is pretty neat in that it lets someone look at what types of topics their followers are interested in, as well as their location and gender. This is all valuable information for ad targeting purposes. For example, Portent’s followers’ top interests include marketing, SEO, and technology (big surprise there, right?). But this is important to have so that we can make sure the content we’re publishing resonates well with our followers.

3. Sprout Social:

Sprout Social is a a little different than the first two tools I took a look at, in that it’s not baked into any social media platform.  Among its many implementations, Sprout Social lets you schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. It also offers proprietary analytic measurement and reporting on audience demographics, engagement, impressions, and more. These can all be further broken down into more specific numbers, but for the purpose of this blog I won’t get into the heavy details.

The publishing tool is most helpful for me as it allows you to schedule posts ahead of time that can go out on one or multiple social platforms. Images can be added to any post you want and a preview of the post appears before it is sent. There is also a built in bit.ly function that lets you shorten any long links. Let me tell you, this tool is a life saver if you’re trying to schedule a weeks worth of posts at a time! I can manage the process in less than an hour, and I never have to stress about the possibility of forgetting to post something important.

4. Buffer:

Buffer is a tool for social scheduling that’s significantly simpler than Sprout Social. Like Sprout Social, you can program posting days and times (and even set the time zone) for multiple platforms at a time. There are also analytics available that show how each post is doing, but it is more specifically related to what Buffer sees you post, rather than the results you’re seeing on your social pages themselves. Link shortening features bit.ly and buff.ly are included, and Buffer allows you to upload pictures from your computer to use in whatever posts you want. An awesome feature on Buffer is its extension/app that lets you push any article you like on Google search, Facebook, or any other page to your own personal Buffer account to share on your social channels. I don’t use this tool nearly as often as I use Sprout Social, but it’s definitely one that I couldn’t do without.

5. Hootsuite:

Hootsuite is another social media scheduling tool, but for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, WordPress, Tumblr, YouTube and many (many) more. Hootsuite is arguably more advanced than Buffer, but can also appear more intimidating as a result. Hootsuite lets you organize by “streams” which is basically just another term for a social channel. Streams are incredibly customizable – you can monitor your Facebook page wall it one, while keeping a constant stream of posts from selected Twitter followers in another. Hootsuite really makes it easy to monitor your social networks all in one place, probbly better than any other tool I use.

Hootsuite will auto schedule your post for optimal impact or you can manually schedule your posts. As with Sprout Social and Buffer, Hootsuite can also attach an image and post to multiple platforms, but I think it does it more elegantly than those other two tools. The Publisher tab organizes all your scheduled post in an easy to follow format, with notes, direct messages, and social feeds all integrated into the dashboard.

Phew! That was a lot, but seriously I couldn’t do my job here at Portent without these essential tools. I am constantly referring back to these sites to figure out what I can do to better promote any of our social networking channels. Each offer unique insights into the magical world of digital marketing, something I continue to learn more about every day (cue Tinkerbell fairy dust).

The post Five Killer Tools for the Social Media Intern appeared first on Portent.

What I have come to learn over my first month working at Portent is that I was completely wrong.  There is so much more to it than that. The digital marketing world is huge, ever-changing, ever-updating, and therefore always has something new to be learned.  I am fortunate enough to learn not just about social media but PPC, SEO, content strategizing, and more. (I also had absolutely no idea what those terms meant about 3 months ago).

Every morning when I come into work the first thing I do is check Portent’s social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.  For those of you who have never managed a business page on Facebook before, let me tell you, there is a whole other Facebook world out there that exists beyond your knowing.  If I come out of this remembering one thing, it’s that our computers know EVERYTHING about us. No joke, it’s almost creepy.  I can create posts and advertisements that are directed to exactly the type of person I want it going out to.  Facebook also has an algorithm that causes a business’s ad to be restricted from even your followers’ newsfeeds so that any one person doesn’t get too many ads popping up throughout a day.  To overcome this, Facebook makes you pay for your ad to be seen by more people.  I can choose the type of person I want to see my ad and tailor it to exactly the way I think those people will want to see it.  The end goal is different for each business.  Some want sales, others want website clicks or page likes.  It all depends on the type of product a company offers.  There are even websites that allow you to create your posts for the week and will automatically send them out when you set it to do so.  That way, you don’t have to technically post every single day, multiple times a day. Mind = blown.  Now for those of you who aren’t new to the digital marketing world I understand I probably sound a little too excited for my own good, but for those of us out there who didn’t know these type of things existed, it’s pretty cool.

Now, how do I use my knowledge base to figure this all out? I spend a chunk of my day looking at the analytics behind each post.  This includes things like page and post likes, impression rate, engagement rate (likes, shares, comments), the type of image used, what type of people were targeted, the time the post went out, and so on.  I have to pull all of this information together and see what makes a post succeed or fail and why.  I compare these stats by week, month, and year and decide whether or not the company is benefiting from its time and money spent on social media.  If they are not, it then becomes a question of what can we do to make this more successful?

So see, there is a lot more to it than you thought, right? Every day I am learning more and more about the ins and outs of paid online advertising.  So for those of you who ever questioned the legitimacy of a social media job, just know it’s not as #basic as one may think.

The post A Day in the Life of a Social Media Intern appeared first on Portent.

Back in September, Starbucks rolled out its first global brand campaign via YouTube called “Meet Me at Starbucks”. An ongoing brand narrative stitching together real life stories of people meeting together at Starbucks in 28 countries shot in just 24 hours. It created a powerful story of convergence where shared commonality, memories, new ideas, business meetings, and romantic moments are interwoven to tell the human story within one common meeting place. They aligned this with their campaign slogan, “Inspiring and nurturing the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” This isn’t the first campaign of its kind for Starbucks, but it is the first time they have done it to this scale.

One of the toughest things for companies to learn with regards to delivering digital narrative is that when you first launch it, it is simply the beginning of the journey. As with driving SEO, a consistent stream of relevant and engaging  content is essential towards building credibility with your audience. One of the great hallmarks of Starbucks success is in how they build their brand around both themselves and their audience’s stories. Taking cues from their success, here are 3 elements to an online presence that incorporates storytelling:

1. Tell true stories

Try telling your brand story through your audience’s real life conversations. Whether it’s featuring video testimonials on your site or blogging about an event you hosted for loyal clients, your audience will find empathy and trust in the faces of your customers. Retelling these narratives can provide a human element that engages your online audiences.

2. Your brand is only as strong as the stories people tell about you

Two common responses you’ll hear about online retailer experiences are, “I bought it online” and “I bought it on Amazon”. To use the company name as opposed to the vehicle of purchase implies a good example of brand loyalty. One of your goals should be providing an online experience that is both effective and memorable.

3. Every storyteller has a brand and every brand has a story

A storyteller can’t be separated from her story. If you Google yourself, you’ll see that you already have a virtual branded identity, whether or not you created it consciously. Companies need to ask if there’s anything memorable about the stories people are telling about them. People remember stories more than they remember names. Take a careful look at the stories being told about you online. Do they reflect the story you wanted or expected?

In order to help propel the brand story you envision, here are 3 questions that can help you focus your brand narrative:

Am I Relevant?

Do you have a target audience in mind? As in the Starbucks brand campaigns, are you making your audience the hero of the story? How are you serving, supporting, and empowering your audience to overcome their obstacles?

It’s important to shape your audience’s holistic user experience in a way that effectively connects their personal needs to the value of your brand and services.

What is my Origin?

Every memorable brand has a great origin story. The quality of that narrative can be established in any number of creative ways. The unique basis of your manufacturing process. How and why you got your company name. Where and why you use the ingredients that you do. One of the best ways to legitimize your brand is by anchoring it in the past.

One step would be to have a robust, creative, or innovative “about us” section, for example a car part distribution owner blogging about their first exotic vehicle purchase coupled by a single point of measurable engagement that links the origin to their audience such as, “When I was kid, my dream vehicle was…?”

Is it Authentic?

There is an age old marketing adage that “content is king” but that is only part of the truth. If content is King than trust is the empress. If you can’t answer the question why your audience should trust you, than you should reconsider your approach. How are you making yourself real, accessible, approachable, and so on?

Remember this…

A memorable story helps you get beyond the numbers to breathe life and meaning into the value of your audience. To do that, you need to create an effective online experience that incorporates elements of humanity and empathy. Now is the time to get personal! People forget facts, but they never forget a great story.

The post Starbucks stirs the heart: Strength in the Brand Story appeared first on Portent.

Saying NO:

For a Libra, saying no is not easy. I like to have balance and harmony, make people happy. So saying no is often an exercise of will power for me, but it’s essential for keeping sanity. It’s taken me many years, but saying no for the right reasons has helped to protect myself, Portent, my internal teams and clients. Sometimes it’s saying, “No, we can’t do that” but I always try to say “We can’t complete that by the time your are asking for, but we can by x date”.

When clients ask for things that don’t make sense in marketing or within their strategy, I work with the team to come up with an alternative solution to present to the client. Saying “While we can’t do the specific thing you asked, we can do this other option that is well-aligned with your strategy and should work well”.

Being Nosy:

Around the office I’ve been labeled as “Portent Dictionary” or “All-Knowing Portent Goddess”. How did I get those titles? Because I like to know as much as possible about what’s going on. I have been through MANY different types of projects in my 10+ years here and I like to know the process, the steps required, and I ask a lot of questions. I like to get my hands dirty in projects and do things like add in content, or know how to update pages so I can train clients. This means I’ve learned about the different CMS systems we’ve used, the email newsletter programs clients use and I know just enough HTML to be dangerous (often asking my Front End Developers for help when I muck something up).

Talking on the Telephone:

What? What is that? I know, in this very digital era, sometimes it is hard to pick up the phone and call someone. Not only do people rely on email and texting, but its amazing how many people shy away from the phone when it rings, as if someone is going to come through the phone and grab them. But I find it really helps clear the air and is usually an easy way to get clarity on big questions.

If a client goes silent for a few days, we exchange emails a few times around one question, I have multiple team members in various locations, or its been a few weeks since talking to a client, sometimes just the tone of their voice can clear things up if there is tension. We are so inundated with email, texts, digital noise that a phone call can be comforting.

Being a Tattletale:

No one likes a tattletale, but sometimes its essential to clear the air, get things done and find solutions. I’m not saying I sit there in meetings and then go to people’s bosses and say “So and so isn’t doing something”. I’m talking about when you have issues on a project, you then address them with those people and their boss or another member of the team and we brainstorm on the issue, work on a solution and come away a more cohesive team.

These are just a few examples of behaviors usually thought of to be bad, that are useful tools when working with projects, teams and clients. Do you have any that you’d like to share?

The post Bad Behaviors That Make Me a Better Project Manager appeared first on Portent.

Fast forward to this last July when I joined forces with Portent to head up the Creative Services group. I’d heard of the Agile approach to projects along with other approaches like Waterfall, but never tried them.

Agile at Portent

Recently Portent had the opportunity to partner with a client to design and develop a website to support a new brand. Of course, the project had to be completed in a very short amount of time, in complete secrecy, oh… and and it had to come out of the gate looking like a brand that had been around for a while; one with street cred.

It was our internal team for this project (in this case, one designer and one developer) who introduced me to the power of Agile development.  Because of our crazy fast timeline, we realized we needed a method that proved to work quickly, blur the lines for organized phases, and encouraged incremental and iterative approaches.

Okay, so what is Agile?

Agile is a pretty new player to the production game, but it has made substantial gains in use and popularity within the last couple of years. With the Agile method, there is not necessarily a pre-determined course of action or plan. Rather, designers and developers are free to respond to changes in requirements as they arise and make changes as the project progresses.

Purely linear project management doesn’t account for different perspectives working on the same outcome. Things change as the project cycles through different teams, and Agile accounts for those changes as they happen. That way, everyone is on the same page and can agree that the finished project is the best version possible from all angles.

Agile requires two things: That each team member has access to each other at all times (best case scenario being that everyone is in a room, working together), and that the team is able to work together well. If your team is not cohesive, Agile won’t work.

Method to the Madness

For the Portent project, my designer and developer worked together in a small private office, day after day, late into many nights. Great design was concepted, development was able to contribute and weigh in, the two would volley innovative and cutting edge development practices and how that could compliment great design. It was this rapid back and forth from both experts that resulted in an amazing website and experience.

So really, when it comes to choosing a method or approach, there is not a right or wrong choice. You just need to understand which method is better suited to your project and your needs.  Clearly for this opportunity, the Agile method was the right choice.

So what resulted from the project? It’s almost public.  Please check back Nov 20^th to see for yourself.

The post The Agile Approach to design and development. It really works! appeared first on Portent.

In the beginning, there was text

Up until the early 1990s, the web was largely text based. There was little text formatting, no images, and no structure beyond what you could achieve in a plain text document. Then in the ’90s, HTML was adopted as a way to visually format and structure text within the web browser, which lead us into the era of table-based layouts.

For those of you who never had the fortune of building websites in the ’90s, table-based layouts were the equivalent of creating an entire website using an Excel spreadsheet. Tables were never meant for anything beyond displaying tabular data, but at the time they were the only HTML element that allowed us to create horizontal layouts. For example, sidebars and multi-column layouts were made possible thanks to HTML tables. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when CSS was adopted, that we were able to move away from hacky, table-based layouts, and take on a more semantic approach to development.

The idea behind CSS (cascading style sheets) is that the structure of a web page and its design should be kept separate. This allows us to reuse more code, making our websites faster, and also swap out styles and designs quickly and efficiently. CSS also offered us more control over visual layout and formatting. Thanks to CSS we could create the multi-column layouts (and much, much more) we are used to today, and do it in a semantic way, meaning every HTML element had a role and it should only be used for that role (i.e. tables should be used for tabular data).

This shift to semantic web development allowed us to start defining what our webpages mean through proper use of HTML, which in turn allowed computers to make more sense of our content. This was only the beginning, however, and leads us directly to HTML5.

What is HTML5?

I get asked this question a lot, and it’s a hard question to answer. Technically HTML5 is a new language specification for HTML, but many other new technologies have been thrown under the HTML5 umbrella, which has turned HTML5 into a nebulous collection of technologies rather than any one thing in particular. For those of you who remember the Web 2.0 craze, HTML5 could be considered Web 3.0.

Some of the flashier technologies included under the HTML5 umbrella allow us to do things like manipulate the user’s webcam, render creepy 3D eyeballs, and create dynamic, 3D user interfaces. While these are all amazing and groundbreaking for the web, none of them are purely “HTML5”. They are HTML5 used in conjunction with other new technologies.

So what is HTML5 then? The major contribution of HTML5, on its own, is that it allows us to further define the meaning of our content. In fact, HTML5 goes beyond meaning and allows us to define the intent of our content. Let me repeat that again, because this is the true importance of HTML5.

HTML5 allows us to define the INTENT of our content.

Not only can we define what an element on a page means (ie. this piece of content is a paragraph, or a heading, or a link to an external resource), but it allows us to define the purpose of our content. Computers don’t inherently know the difference between an “About Us” page and a blog post, or a blog post and a list of content related to said blog post. But, with HTML5, we can give computers hints. For example:

• The `<article>` element is used to specify content that is independent of the content around it, and is meant to be distributed by itself (think article or blog post).
• The `<aside>` element is used to specify content that is tangentially related to the main content (think recent or related blog posts).
• The `<nav>` element is used to specify a group of links that are used to navigate a site, as opposed to linking to resources that support the content.

If you’re still not convinced of HTML5’s importance, think of it this way: by defining what our content is, and what purpose it has, we allow search engines and possibly other, future technologies to make more sense of our content, which in turn improves content sharing, curation, and discovery in a huge, yet to be defined way. When combined with its umbrella technologies, HTML5 is the next leap in the evolution of the web and will fundamentally change how we communicate and interact with each other and our content.

Caveats

While all of this (hopefully) sounds great, not all is sunshine and rainbows when it comes to HTML5. In particular, there are two major issues that I see. The first is that the specification itself is still a work in progress. While most features have been solidified by now, some parts of the language have changed from the first drafts of the specification, or been removed entirely. The second is browser support. All modern browsers support most of the HTML5 standard, as well as a good portion of the technologies under the HTML5 umbrella. The problem, though, is 10% of the population still uses Internet Explorer 8 or 9, and we’re stuck with one foot in the past until both of these are obsolete.

Conclusion

So what’s the takeaway from all of this? The technologies associated with HTML5 are making the our content more dynamic and interactive, and are essentially improving the user experience of the web. The new HTML specification, on the other hand, is the scaffold. It provides more robust structure and organization. It is the means by which we classify the flora and the fauna of the web. New HTML elements may seem trivial, but the ability to better define our thoughts, content, and architecture improves our ability to connect and share content.

The post Why HTML5 is, like, REALLY IMPORTANT appeared first on Portent.

Rooting out the bad links can be exhausting, but it’s part of the job. It has to get done so we can do awesome stuff with the good link building without hindrance. Using heuristics for qualitative and metrics from quantitative, I know, on average, whether a link is worth keeping in less than ten seconds; if I have to look at the code, it takes a little longer. There are going to be loads of almosts, mights, and should’a would’a could’a because every site has a different link profile. There are so many “depends” that go into it that it is crucial to take your own site’s history into mind. That being said, these methods should work for finding the domains causing your link-related woes.

Porn, When Your Links Are Showing Too Much

If your site isn’t in the porn industry, you probably don’t want porn links. I have yet to see a case where it made sense. Whenever you have porn links, use your imagination on words to search for in your link data. A good starting point is looking for “xx” or “xxx.” These are used frequently in domain names, titles, and URLs. Other terms are related to body parts and genres of adult entertainment. The hardest part, well, if you’re at work, is spot checking these links. Considering these types of sites aren’t safe for the majority of work environments, I recommend making the window as small as possible so that you can review it. If you’re on a Windows machine, I use the mouse over preview. You’ll be able to comprehend a site’s content real fast based on even a thumbnail-sized image. Sometimes, you will be surprised that a site isn’t pornographic, so the occasional spot check is still suggested when uncertain.

Pills, Not What the Link Doctor Ordered

“Viagra,” “Cialis,” and any other medicine you might take for extremely personal reasons are the normal suspects. The pill names, other than the big brands, are long words and medical sounding. Review the anchor text, URLs, domains, and anywhere you can apply filters to look for the bad words. You want these links gone, and I have not seen a situation where you’d want pill links yet. Maybe, they’ll be okay if you have pharma clients.

Gambling, the House Always Wins

Gambling can be a fun activity, but I really don’t think gambling with your link profile with these types of links is worth it. Common trigger words to look for are “poker,” “casino,” and “gambl.” Gambling links normally show up as a sidebar sitewide link or as an advertisement. In general, they don’t represent as large of a problem as porn and pills, and only pop up from time to time. That being said, gambling links still produce problems in search results and should be deleted.

ccTLDs, the Bottom Level of Linking Domains

The TLD is an easy method of picking out poor links. My favorites are .pl, .ru, and .br. They have been the worst offenders in the past. If you see a pattern of a specific TLD pointing bad links to your site, check them out. Unless your business is international and frequently deals in those other languages, the linking sites might be up to no good in your neighborhood.

Hidden Links

Have you selected all on a webpage recently? People are STILL trying to hide links with white text. Unbelievable! These have to go, and selecting everything on the page is a simple way to find the “white-out” links.

What about when the link is there but you can’t see it? Off to the code with you! Press F12 or CTRL+U to start searching for the link. Once you find the ahref, inspect the element on the page to identify where the bugger is hidden. There shouldn’t be too many of these, but when they exist, they are vile because they are time consuming to find. The positive side of this is that most of the “hidden in the code like a ninja” links are sitewide, so you get to bust a whole bunch at once.

The Blank Slate Blog

There are several telltale signs of a blank slate blog: generic, starter WordPress theme (often, still on a WordPress subdomain), no blog comments, spun content (does not make sense when read), no internal links, bulk content uploads on the same day, exact-match domains (EMDs), excessive advertising, and no social profile links. It takes a only ten or so seconds to complete a quick scan on the content to look for these clues. When boxes aren’t checked, the game is afoot; the blog is not being updated, stinks, or is part of a network – all good reasons to remove and disavow those links.

Farming, Not Grassfed, Natural, Organic Links

The number of external links on a page can be an indicator of whether the page is good or not. We’ve seen classic examples of link farms. It’s hard to put a number on “how many is too many” because the site might have poor optimization and their navigation is full of junk. Tell you what though, 1,000 is excessive. If there are more links than text words on the page, something is going on that requires a closer look.

Quantitatively Speaking

Quantitative is much simpler. Utilizing link data from whatever tool you’re using (note: use as many of them as possible and always include Google Webmaster Tools data), apply rules and automatically weed out links that shouldn’t make the cut. Because each site has a different profile, it is better to work on the rule of averages for the links you have. For example, if your average domain authority is 52, start cutting sites below 15 rather than 30. Here are my metric preferences to use:

• * Domain Authority (Open Site Explorer): a link-based score on the predicted strength of a website in the search results.
  * Number of Linking Root Domains (ahrefs, Majestic, Open Site Explorer)
  * Trust Flow (Majestic): a link-based score on the predicted strength of a website’s trustworthiness in the search results.
  * Citation Flow (Majestic): a link-based score on the predicted strength of a website in the search results.
  * Domain Count (Excel): the count of external links coming from a domain.
  * Anchor Text Count (Excel): the count of specific linking keywords.

Other Time Saving Tips

Think at a Domain Level

Typically, if a link on a page stinks, the rest of the domain stinks, and there are hardly any reasons to look at any other pages linking to your site. You should be disavowing at a domain level for almost all of the problem links, so this can save a considerable amount of time.

Remove the Limb to Save the Body

If your website is under a Google link-related penalty, you need to prepare for the worst. Depending on your history, you might have to get rid of nearly every link to prove your worthiness to the powers that be.

Always Be Learnin’

Once you’ve wrapped up discovering as many bad links as you can find, it is time to work on link removal and the disavow file. Link removal is absolutely necessary, if you are working under a Google penalty, so that you can show your work when requesting a review. If your link profile review work is preventive, you can skip to the disavow file and upload proactively. Remember, work as much as you can at the domain level; this is especially true in the disavow file.

These are my go-to favorites when vetting links for their removal and ultimate demise. Have any of your own that you’d like to contribute? I’d love to hear about how you find the bad ilk.

The post How I Know Which of Your Links Are Bad – Link Profile Review Tips appeared first on Portent.