Recently, some social media users have been in an uproar after Facebook admitted to carrying out a secret experiment in which the news feeds of more than 600,000 users were filtered to see if those individuals would have differing emotions based upon what they saw on the screen. For example, it was determined if a person was exposed to more positive news from friends, he or she would be less likely to post something negative as a status update. The opposite was also found to be true.

“Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion”

On a smaller scale, most of us are already familiar with this phenomenon. Spending time with a friend who is in an abundantly good mood probably makes you feel similar, even if you were previously feeling a little down in the dumps.

For the purposes of this study, the changes in a person’s emotions were collectively called “massive-scale emotional contagion.” Put simply, scientists determined it was not necessary for a person to interact on a face-to-face basis, and that an individual only needed to read about an emotion being expressed in order to be potentially influenced.

Fears About Future Data

As soon as the study made it into the public realm, it was met with a great deal of concern. As quoted in a piece from The Guardian, a spokeswoman for Facebook clarified how the study took place in order “to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible.”

However, some people around the world have protested in earnest, especially considering the experiment took place without a user’s knowledge. Selection for the experiment was randomized and based on a person’s user ID. Some people worried future manipulation of news feeds could potentially be very powerful, especially if it occurs in conjunction with political campaigns.

Attempts to Influence Emotions Are Not New

It’s important to remember that ever since advertising has existed, there have been efforts made to create emotional responses in people who see the campaigns. Usually, the most memorable advertisements are ones that resonate with you on a deep level.

Trying to tap into the emotions of a user base certainly doesn’t have to be connected with sinister goals. If you’re an athlete who’s thinking about using a therapy pool during a rehabilitation process, you’d probably really appreciate if the respective website had testimonials from fellow athletes who have depended on aquatic therapy to get back to top form.

Reading about the experiences of people who might have been in similar situations to the one you’re now facing would almost certainly incite a sense of hope, especially if you’re already wrestling with a lot of doubt and are wondering if you’ll ever be able to perform well again.

Carefully Read the Terms and Conditions

Facebook, like other social media websites, has terms and conditions that users must agree with before getting permission to use the site. If news of Facebook’s experiment makes you feel uneasy, maybe that’s a good reminder that it’s time to revisit the user agreements for all the sites you frequent, and make sure you’re still OK with what’s stated there.

There’s a saying that goes something like this: “Give me the baby. I don’t need the labor pains.”

This definitely applies to modern digital marketing and advertising. It’s actually contrary to certain trends. Faster internet connection, faster mobile devices, and a resurgence of multi-step digital processes point to the concept that perhaps we don’t need to be so focused on getting to the point, but the other factors point in the other direction. Most notable of these factors would be the fact that people have been forced to jump through hoops in the past and those who emulate this same process will not be rewarded.

One of the most obvious scenarios where this continues to happen today is in the automotive lead selling segment of the industry. Companies have been generating and selling leads to dealers, finance companies, OEMs, and other vendors for nearly two decades now (yes, it has been that long). There’s nothing wrong with them and they have their place in the world to jumpstart sales and increase opportunities, but the system has flaws that go contrary to the trends. First and foremost, people are filling out fewer forms, particularly on the third party sites that feed them the leads. They’ve already been burned in the past when they filled out a lead form and were contacted by several entities that the lead company sold their information to, something that people are more sensitive about today than ever before.

Even if you take away this as a negative and point to the idea that businesses need more leads for this very reason, there’s still the concept of “cutting out the middle man” that people appreciate. If they’re going to look at a car, they want to be able to contact the dealership that has that car directly. Third party sites are great as a gateway and there are reasons that people go to them, but they are also usually the step before the final step – finding live inventory on a dealership’s website itself.

This is one of the reasons that LotLinx intrigued us so much. The service is one of the very few that we actually partnered with in order to offer it directly to dealers. They cut out the middle man. They take the traffic from these third party sites and brings it directly to the vehicle details pages on the dealership’s website. Rather than dealers paying for leads that may or may not be exclusive to them, they pay for traffic to their website from the same sources in order to generate leads that they know are directed at them and them alone.

As we continue to explore them and other services that “get to the point”, we’ll want to take into account what has happened in the recent past and where that points us in the future. That’s not to say that businesses and marketing companies should be guided strictly by trends. There are things that have worked in the past that will likely continue to work into the future. However, staying mindful of the way that people interact with businesses and the experience they want to receive will help businesses and marketers keep their advertising focused on the things that are important.

Have you ever wondered how a particular brand knows so much about you that they keep sending relevant discount offers, including at times when you need them the most? It is not magic, nor is it luck. These offers are a result of the brand being able to obtain some solid customer insights that have helped it create a timely marketing message that is extremely relevant to your needs.

While there are plenty of traditional data collection techniques, like web analytics and monitoring a particular customer’s purchase behavior, there is another wealth of consumer data that is just waiting to be tapped and this data is sitting on a consumer’s social profile across different networks, like Facebook and Twitter. The question is – how do you get access to this rich social data that is essentially the most credible first party data that you can get ahold of?

The answer lies in social login.

By integrating a social sign on, you get a ton of benefits, one of them being deep customer insights by capturing social data.

Social Login and Social Data

When you implement social login on your site, the overt benefit that you are offering your customers is seamless login with their preferred social media accounts. So, if a user wants to log in to your site with his Facebook account, he can. And when he does this, he bypasses the long, drawn-out new user registration process that leads to the creation of yet another user name and password that needs to be remembered.

Offering users a frictionless sign on process improves login conversions. But there is another benefit that a social login plugin brings to the table – the ability to capture data that is highly accurate. We’re not talking ‘sentiment’ data here but ‘real’ data. Marketers no longer have to draw inferences about customer characteristics based on their purchase and/or website behavior. This social data helps you get more clarity about the individual, his/her needs and requirements, preferences and dislikes.

Permission Based Access

What you – the marketer with social login – are getting is the permission to access profile information from a particular user’s social network (the one which they used to log in to your site). The way it works is like this – say a user chooses to login with their Facebook identity, a permission screen will greet them asking to share their profile data with the website. The identity provider chosen by the user determines the kind of data you can capture. In this case, it’s Facebook, so you can access birth date, relationship status, interests, etc. If the user had logged in with their LinkedIn identity, you could have access to their work history, skills, and so on.

Social login gives you access to this data; it also stores it in normalized format in your database. This allows you to pair this data with other third-party applications you might be using to draw a clearer picture of the customer.

A Social Data Strategy

A social login provider such as LoginRadius helps you capture more than 200+ data points from a user’s profile. As can be imagined, this is a lot of information and as a result, you have multiple options as to what to do with it. You could either enable as many permissions as possible or be selective about the data you capture. No prizes for guessing that the latter is a better choice. This is why you need to keep refining your social login strategy vis-à-vis access to permission based social data in order to leverage the maximum benefit from it. Rather than capturing an immense amount of data that you will need to sort through later, acquire only that information which is aligned with your marketing plan and you can put to good use.

The idea is to deliver value back to the customer with the data you’ve accessed through relevant content. So, make sure you are very clear about what you’ll do with the data you gather and how it is aligned with your larger content marketing strategy.

Customer Insights through Social Login

A user’s profile information on a social network is usually current and accurate, because most of it is visible to their friends and family. This means that this data is more accurate than what you can get through a normal registration process. Social data has more accuracy and dependability, enabling you to segment customers and make highly personalized offers. The customer insights drawn from this data can help you create a better user experience and engage with the customers at a far more personal level than otherwise possible.

This leads to your content being shared, re-shared and discussed, resulting in more social media referral traffic and ultimately higher sales.

To Conclude

Social login helps you socialize your web property and ensures that you do not have to look anywhere else other than easily accessible social networks to get rich customer insights. It acts as the bridge between your target market and your website. You don’t really have to try too hard to get critical customer insights if you’ve implemented social sign on correctly: A user logs in, you get his permission to access information he’s already entered, and you have access to some amazing numbers instantaneously.

What you do with this data is completely your call. But make sure you use it well. The difference between success and failure for a business today depends on how well it has understood its customer and how it has put this understanding to use. The first part is taken care of by social login; it is the second part you need to excel at.

There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.

Okay, so that’s not really original. Any opportunity to plug in a line from Gladiator, I’ll take it. Despite the overly serious tone of the quote, it plays well with the dream that was social media. The idea of having a set of free venues through which businesses could interact with consumers and the consumers could interact back presented itself as a grand concept to be desired and cherished. Unfortunately, the dream is dead. Success on modern social media requires one of two things: serious fame or cash invested.

Unless you’re Justin Bieber, your brand needs money in order to be relevant on sites like Facebook. There’s no other way to look at it. Even Twitter gets exponentially more useful when a little money is applied to it. LinkedIn, YouTube, and possibly Pinterest and Instagram are all heading down the road of pay-to-play if you really want to find success.

It’s not the evil plan of social media sites come through to their end game. In fact, most of the social sites outside of YouTube went in with the hopes of not having to apply advertising as a primary source of revenue, at least not in the formats they’re presenting themselves in today. “Advertising” was a dirty word in social media startup circles just four or five years ago. Today, they’ve accepted that their dreams of making money through networking and data are simply no long realistic. As their dreams died, so did ours.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the cost of playing the game right is, for now, extremely low when compared to the potential results. For a fraction of the cost of Google Adwords or display advertising, campaigns can be set up through social media that bring in similar results. In some cases, depending on the goals and campaigns, the results can actually be better despite the lower spend. Let’s take a look at the recent past, the way it works today, and the near future:

It All Blew Up

For better or for worse, the people muscled out the businesses. On Facebook, for example, the feedback from users was that they simply weren’t interested in seeing as many posts from pages as from profiles. They might like the show Game of Thrones and they might not mind occasionally seeing updates posted on their news feed, but for the most part they go to Facebook to see videos of little nephew Timmy sliding into 3rd base. Facebook obliged recently (and really, for a long time they’ve been creeping in this direction) and made it less likely that posts from pages were visible in news feeds.

There’s a silver lining to this, though. While users were not as accepting of posts in their news feeds from pages that showed up organically, they’ve demonstrated a tolerance for sponsored posts. In essence, they know instinctively that they have these services for free and that Facebook is a business. As long as they have some sense of control over what they’re presented, they don’t mind ads on Facebook any more than they mind television commercials. They tolerate them. At least on Facebook, they have the ability to let Facebook know which posts they don’t want to see on their news feeds.

Social media blew up. It got too big for brands, at least from an organic perspective. On Facebook and Twitter in particular, the feeds are too cluttered with personal posts to allow the business posts to come through naturally. That’s okay. We should be paying. If anything, this makes it to where the aggressive businesses can take advantage of the exceptionally low cost of entry without being muscled out by popular pages with their organic reach.

Today

Now that we know that organic reach is dead, we can move forward with the benefits of this. Facebook has done a terrible job at educating businesses about their advertising powers and Twitter has done even worse. Google+ – don’t get me started there. This is bad for them. It’s great for us. It’s great for companies that are starting to take advantage of it.

There are caveats, most notably that the ad types used to bring people to the table and try advertising are the worst ones. On Facebook, the “Boost” and “Promote Your Page” buttons are the easiest to get you started and the worst at achieving results.

Data. That’s the power of social media. Unfortunately, both of the basic types of advertising have trouble thinking about scratching the surface of the data components. This isn’t the place to go into details about how the data works, but suffice to say that it’s extremely powerful when used appropriately.

That’s today. Get involved and use the data that you have as well as the data that Facebook has. With that understood, what will the future look like?

Shifting Towards Mobile First

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

It cannot be overstated and it doesn’t matter where you put the emphasis. Mobile will eclipse desktop soon for nearly all forms of internet browsing. It already does with social media. This is why, no matter what you think about social media, you must make sure that your digital marketing strategy focuses on mobile first and allows the desktop experience to happen as a secondary course. That’s not to say that desktops are dying or that they don’t need to be considered. They simply need to reside in a mobile world as if they’re big mobile devices without the touchscreen. Heck, there are plenty of desktops and laptops that already do have touchscreens.

As social media continues to evolve and mobile grows in eyeball share, so too do the advertising strategies need to match appropriately.

Social media is no longer organic, at least not for businesses. To move ahead, you have to either use social media from a defensive posture or go full force with the advertising component. The in-between strategies will do nothing more than waste time and energy.

Consider this: how exactly do you behave when you are at a baseball game compared to your presence at a luncheon with state heads (if ever you had such an opportunity)? In the former setting, you’d ideally be yourself. You’d cheer out loud, you’d even swear, wouldn’t you? However, you’d do no such thing at the aforesaid luncheon, board meetings, or the like.

That’s context and your behavior is a function of such context. We go through these motions every day of our lives.

So, why are we talking about context here? According to Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, the immediate environment you are in determines you behavior at that point. He has a string of related examples to pick your brain in this regard.

As marketers and business owners, we want to affect consumer behavior to pursue our goals. For us, customer context is everything.

Sarah Miller Caldicott wrote about The New Marketing 101 where she advocates the need for finding customer context and to get rid of market boundaries. She writes that asking new questions or activating new behavior patterns among customers is a few of those contextual examples that almost changed the way we use mobile devices.

We don’t have to reinvent the iPad for affecting conversions. We don’t even have to trigger deep, embedded emotions. For matters related to digital marketing – and especially for conversion rate optimization – all we need to do is to deploy tactics that trigger activation streams to affect visitor behavior on web properties.

Here’s how you can do it:

Create Feedback Loops

It’s all about customer experience today. If you aren’t getting that into your list of priorities, your marketing bucket is all set to leak for eternity. According to a study by Monetate, more than 79% of customers will buy again if their experience were satisfactory. However, a whopping 89% of customers will switch to your competition in milliseconds if their experience wasn’t satisfactory.

Peep Laja, a renowned conversion-marketing expert, wrote a comprehensive post on the importance of creating customer feedback loops. He defines feedback loops as a series of experiments and insights that you and use to improve customer experience on the whole. Peep advocates applying these loops to every customer touch point in your business including customers, non-customers, leads, etc.

As a part of your experiments to create effective feedback loops, you could do everything that makes sense. Invest in UX/UI, go after conversion best practices, go responsive with your design, and work on every transactional or regular email campaigns you send.

Build Social Proof

Even before you get knee-deep into conversion best practices, content, social media, or design elements that’ll affect your conversions, you have another task that precedes your work with conversions: it’s called social proof.

Social proof, by itself, is a context that’ll affect your conversions. If thousands of people think that your products are cool, others will want to try it out.

Building social proof, however, is tricky. Many businesses attempt ”buying” their way into building social proof (just like many companies during the industrial revolution thought that advertising domination could get them sustenance).

You just can’t buy love. Even if you did, it wouldn’t be worth it.

So, the only thing left for you to do (in order to build social proof) is to hustle. Maybe reach out to influencers or even tinker with marketing hacks. Do what you have to do get people to like and trust you even before you make a pitch. Peep Laja recently recollected how he grew his blog to 100,000 visitors in less than a year.

Similarly, Noah Kagan wasn’t kidding when we wrote this post to detail all the work he had to put in to double his social shares.

Bring Context to Life with Landing Pages

Scott Brinker has a post (on Search Engine Land) that takes you back in history through the generations of landing pages. Every landing page is an arena where intent meets content and then a conversion happens. With A/B testing in place, you’ll be able to work your way up to facilitate these conversions.

The images, the copy, the value proposition, and the call to action – they’re all there on those effective landing pages. Vigilink, for instance, has a landing page that meets user intent (earn money from links) quickly – there’s a short message and absolutely no beating around the bush. Right Signature has an effective landing page with a “Try it Now” box that stays on the side even if you scroll the rest of the page (which has simple images for social proof and features).

A landing page is where all your work on social media, content, digital marketing spend on paid ads, and everything else you do stops.

Once the workflow is in place and your content assets are in motion, it’s at the landing page where you’ll see finally see it happen.

It’s that moment you’ll profit from. It’s that moment of truth (in a digital form, of course).

Make It All Come Together

Some businesses sweat over responsive designs. Others swear by the efficacy of content marketing. The truth is all of this work goes into inbound marketing and ought to come together to facilitate business results such as to generate leads, widen the sales funnel, ramp up conversions, and get customers. None of the aspects of contemporary digital marketing can work in silos.

You can’t possibly work on SEO while ignoring content. Doing content without SEO gets you nowhere. Get everything right but pay no attention to design, UX/UI and conversion elements and you are losing money by buckets.

Conversion is the end result. To make conversions happen, everything should come together: engaging social media presence, purposeful copy, and tight design.

Over to You

Convince and convert – that’s just three words but it’s exactly what sends thousands of businesses into a tizzy world of “I have no idea how to make that happen” syndrome.

Ask for the sale. But be patient if it doesn’t happen. Shopping cart abandonment rate is a given, but follow up with personalized emails. Roll your content marketing assets. Generate leads. Nurture those leads. Make your conversions happen.

How does conversion play for you? What difficulties do you face when it comes to conversion optimization? Do you invest more in getting traffic or conversions?

If you judge your business’ social media (SM) success solely on how many likes you can drum up, you’re only looking at a tiny piece of the puzzle. There’s a big disparity when it comes to optimizing your ROI with SM, with a number of marketers jumping full force onto the social media bandwagon, but falling short where it matters most: Actually looking at the data to seeing how successful they are.

Forbes reports that a 2012 industry report revealed that 86 percent of all marketers say SM is key for business, but are they making the most of it?

Putting the cart before the horse seems to be the norm with SM marketing, and 46 percent of businesses executives say they plan to make their SM budgets bigger in 2014. This will include buying Facebook ads or advertising on key blogs. However, Adobe says that just 12 percent or marketers say they feel “capable” when it comes to measuring SM ROI. Something is askew here and playing a guessing game with a company budget is a dangerous move. Whether your business is a thriving online clothing boutique or an international logistics company, you need to know how to measure results.

Start with the basics

Right now, marketers look at the overall customer journey to try and judge ROI. A typical journey might include a customer seeing an ad on Facebook, liking the product, going to the company website, making a purchase and becoming a loyal customer because the product and experience was positive. That’s a great story, but when it comes to SM analytics, just how accurate are the metrics available? A certain number of people checking out your Facebook page may hint at higher awareness, clicks say something about interest, and how many fans you have might indicate just how interested consumers are.

However, nothing compares to online purchases when it comes to the actual conversion factor. If you’re like most companies, you probably use a cocktail of metrics on a number of SM sites. Maybe you look closely at cost per lead, customer acquisitions, Brand Impressions Frequency or referral site traffic. This is all great data, but each one represents a sliver of the total SM activity. Trying to understand it all can be overwhelming and even misleading.

The slippery slope

If such metrics can take you down the wrong path, why are they in such high favor? Simply put, they’re easy to use, easy to access, and easy to understand because they mimic metrics which marketing pros already know. Plus, if you’re a marketer who needs to relate information to a CEO in 60 seconds, you go with what’s easiest to describe. Social media requires “flow media” because of its depth and what you really need to focus on instead of positional equity is relational equity.

Comments matter more than likes, how often your company replies matters even more, and is the social sentiment of the company brand doing well? Quantitative measures are easy (shares, fans, likes), but qualitative measures (thank you messages, good shares, etc.) are more challenging and more important. Some companies are doing this right by engaging customers, sticking with good value and offering exclusive discounts; these are the companies you should be looking to for inspiration.

Just about every company, from age-old corporations that got going before the lightbulb was common to brand new organizations that are online-only, want to use social media to get more visitors to their websites. How exactly can these companies accomplish this, though? It takes more than just opening up a Facebook page and waiting for friends. Some companies have done an incredible job leveraging the power of social media to improve their traffic and make the new word-of-mouth work for them. Let’s look at a few of the most successful cases from the recent past to see what makes for a great social media strategy.

Samsung and the Staged Selfie

Mobile technology giant Samsung has to count its social media followers in the millions — or in some cases tens of millions. It’s not just because there’s practically a 50 percent chance that a smartphone user is going to have a Samsung phone in their hands. The South Korean company has always had a penchant for creative, even guerilla-style, marketing. When it’s not muscling in on Apple’s billboard territory, Samsung is taking the global pulse on how people use smartphone technology.

Case in point, Samsung’s incredibly convincing but nonetheless staged “selfie” photographs. A number of high-profile, self-taken smartphone pics in the past year have actually been carefully orchestrated by Samsung as a quiet promotional effort. The company got Ellen DeGeneres to take a selfie with an impressive gaggle of Oscar-winning celebrities at the most recent Academy Awards, but even more stunning was the staged selfie Samsung snuck past the Secret Service. Baseball star David Ortiz took a selfie recently with none other than President Barack Obama at Samsung’s behest, giving the world something to share millions of times on multiple social media platforms and keeping Samsung in the spotlight.

It doesn’t take a mega-corporation or the leader of the free world to make this strategy work. Giving people something fun, highly visual, and a little weird to share is a great way to covertly promote a brand. All it takes is sneaking the brand into the photo and waiting for the hashtags to do the heavy lifting.

Starbucks Does Promotions Right

Seattle’s hometown coffee heroes know a thing or two about social media. No one does promotions better and the company does it by being conscious of how people interact with their product. First and foremost, Starbucks has a great and deceptively simple method for using Facebook to get people to their stores. Coffee is an everyday product, an essential for people at the start and middle of the workday, a staple on dates and at business meetings, and the second most important fuel on a road trip. That’s why Starbucks sends promotional offers to its Facebook friends and gives them access to the discounts by ‘Liking’ the message, ensuring that it goes out to everyone else on that user’s news feed.

Beyond online coupons, Starbucks also maintains partner pages for its other brands, like Tazo Tea, and even platforms for people to interact with Starbucks employees. In short, the company keeps a human face on their brand and always listens to its customers, giving them something valuable and always offering a good reason to stay connected. Even if you’re not slinging coffee, making your social media connections feel valued and even part of a special club is the latest, greatest way to ensure brand loyalty.

Video Variety with VICE

If you even dip a toe in news media today, you’ve probably noticed that VICE has expanded far beyond its roots as a magazine. These days, VICE has a highly trafficked website, an HBO documentary show, and a growing online empire that shows off the investigative reporting chops of CEO Shane Smith and his global staff of reporters. Smith and VICE have jumped into some of most hard-to-access places in the world, from notoriously closed-off North Korea to the radically shifting streets of contested territory in Ukraine. All the while, VICE is doing it with Web-ready video.

VICE has done a great job of mixing highly sharable short-form video content with more meaty, long-form videos. Both varieties are valuable to any organization that thrives on content, using the short-form videos to get people interested in today’s attention-deficient atmosphere and then giving them something to really sink their teeth into with the long-form videos.

Not everyone has to go to the other side of the world into the shadowy regimes to make this model work for their company. The key to making video that’ll drive site traffic is to aim for quality over quantity and use the short-and-long combination to grab viewers, keep them interested, and give them a reason to share your content with others.

Content Curation Care of HuffPo

How did one woman’s blog evolve into one of the biggest sources of news and opinion on the Internet? Selecting the right stories and making sure the headlines pop. The Huffington Post practically invented this particular game. The publication goes for a highly effective mix of great guest bloggers, conversation-starting topics, and provocative headlines to give social media users something they can’t help sharing. The right names combined with topics that get people riled up ensure that HuffPo stays popular in an age when more and more people are getting their news entirely online.

Even outside the news world, proper content curation drives traffic better than any ad can hope. By knowing what your audience finds interesting and giving them quick, concise content to learn from and share, you’ll bring something of value to the table and associate your organization’s brand with being in the know.

As every example above demonstrates, content continues to be king on the Internet. People use social media to connect with one another, but they also use it as a streamlined way to find interesting content without having to dig around too much on their own. Using a content-based strategy for social media engagement will bring users to your virtual doorstep and keep them coming back because they trust your organization to give them something worthwhile without necessarily asking anything in return.

Teddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.

At the beginning of 2014, Google’s Matt Cutts made headlines by stating that guest blogging was dead. This caused a lot of stir in the online community. People naturally got defensive and protested this as unfair. After all, hasn’t almost everyone used guest blogging to help with SEO at some point or another?

In late March, Cutts followed through on his statement and shut down a popular guest blogging website called MyBlogGuest. This proved he was serious about his campaign against guest blogging for SEO. At the same time, though, it’s worth noting that many businesses have continued to guest blog and have benefitted from it.

Many report that their guest blogging yields more traffic and higher page rankings. This is because they write high quality, informative posts that are of interest to readers. These posts enhance the reader experience, so they’re in line with Google’s goal of making the internet better for the end user.

Know the Difference Between Good and Bad Guest Posts

Maybe the statement “guest blogging is dead” was a little too harsh. Cutts could just have easily said “spam blogging is dead,” but that may not have gotten everyone’s attention quite so well. What Google is really undercutting is the use of generic, shoddy blog posts with no value to readers that only exist to provide back links. These kinds of posts have become more and more popular in recent years, so much so that Google now considers them a black hat SEO practice.

It is perfectly acceptable to guest blog if your posts provide real value to readers. That is, they don’t just provide spam links disguised with poorly written copy. Any links you include should be organic and not seem like overt marketing ploys.

An endorsement is fine, as long as it makes sense given your post. If you regularly guest blog on topics you’re knowledgeable about, you could gain exposure and build your brand. Just keep in mind that you should only work with legitimate blogs and bloggers, ones that aren’t just in the business for back links. You don’t want to be penalized for any questionable practices, even if it’s inadvertent.

Find the Right Places to Blog

As mentioned above, you don’t want to be associated with any spammers. That means if you want to guest blog, you need to find legitimate places to publish your posts, and this involves a little research on your part. Sites like MyBlogGuest used to allow you to search for sites accepting blog posts, but given Google’s crackdown on spam blogs, you now have to dig a little deeper for opportunities.

It’s a good idea to start by identifying important blogs in your industry. This will make it more likely that they’ll accept your content. For example, if you’re interested in environmental issues, you might consider writing for a blog covering oil scams. Next, find out which blogs accept guest posts, and reach out to the blog owner when you’re ready to pitch the story. You can also follow some important guest bloggers in your industry and find out where they’re publishing their posts.

Pitching your idea first is better than writing an entire post and then hoping someone will accept it; this way you won’t waste your time if they’re not interested. Also, certain blogs may have specific length and other requirements. You can write the post with these requirements in mind if you get in touch with the blog owner first. Although it may seem like common sense, be sure you’re as professional as possible in your initial contact.

Use the blog owner’s real name — it’s usually listed in the contact section. “Sir or madam” can sound distant and makes it look you were too lazy to find out the owner’s name. When writing, let the blog owner know who you are and explain why you’re qualified to write the post. Also, make sure your message is grammatically sound and makes sense. Finish with an e-mail signature including your contact information and position title (if appropriate).

If You’re the Blog Owner

Blog owners have to be just as careful about guest blogging as writers do. After flagging MyBlogGuest, Matt Cutts revealed he would also be coming after the publishers of spam guest blogs. That means you’re responsible and will take the hit if someone posts sub-par content on your blog.

Fortunately, you can take steps to prevent penalties by reviewing guest posts before they’re published. You may also want to turn potential bloggers down if anything about them raises a red flag. For example, it’s not a good sign if there are numerous grammar or sentence structure errors in the initial contact message they send.

With Google’s latest restrictions, guest blogging is more regulated than ever before. However, you can use guest blogging to your advantage if your content is high-quality, interesting and doesn’t use spam links.

There was a time when teen smoking was the ultimate for any bad boy (or girl), which of course led to a lifetime of addiction. The good news is that the teen smoking rates, and adult rates, have been dwindling in recent years. This is in part due to the influx and popularity of e-cigarettes which have been touted as a great tool to wean smokers off of their addiction. It’s safer with less nicotine, zero smoke and tar, and smokers don’t get the death stare from passerby who want no part of that second-hand nonsense. However, leave it to teenagers to come up with a brand new “trend” that’s worrying parents across the nation.

It’s rumored that teens have taken to smoking coffee beans, nicknamed caffeine sticks, but is this actually true? Some critics think it’s a made up urban legend considering the rumors started suddenly. However, what’s most telling according to many doubters is that there’s no social media presence about this trend, and that’s a dead giveaway since SM platforms are a teens’ bread and butter. There are no Facebook pages for it, no Tweets, and basically nobody but worried adults are talking about it.

April fools?

The rumors started circling on March 31, 2014 just one day before the biggest prank day of the year with parents gossiping about “bean heads.” While the talks began online in parenting forums, there remains not a peep from beloved social media sites such as Instagram (in other words, there are no selfies of teens lighting up their coffee stick). Coffee smoking talks began on the radio, and since then numerous websites have engaged in this telephone game with absolutely no concrete evidence. Have teens finally figured out they shouldn’t share the dangerous and stupid things they’re doing on social media?

That’s highly unlikely, and the more plausible case is that one isolated incident, most likely in Las Vegas according to the primary source, has spread across the country. The Las Vegas incident was reported locally, and it’s common for local affiliates to report on just about anything that happens since they’re thirsty for stories. There have been a few jokes on Reddit and mentions on Facebook flippantly, but no serious posts about bean smoking being an actual “thing.”

Beware the bean heads

If you’re to believe any of these supposed “reports,” the teen users are gobbling these sticks up like candy. Some news stations have reported that you might experience hallucinations if you try it, although there’s no telling where that warning came from. You may or may not get a caffeine high, and don’t count on the alluring aroma of roasted coffee beans to translate well into smoke form. Basically, you’d be better off trying an e-cigarette if you’re of legal age or, better yet, simply brewing a cup of coffee or munching on coffee beans.

A few more people may try this trend if jokes begin to spread, but just like any other vice, people (even teens) know how they like their coffee. For the most part, it’s in a cup or covered in chocolate and not wrapped in rolling paper.

If there is anything that can be said about nostalgia, it’s that its power is unlike anything else. It’s easy for anyone over a certain age to feel it, whether it’s due to hearing a song from his or her childhood mixed tape or recalling a familiar name from the Brat Pack. Whatever the case may be, it seems like nostalgia is among the many aspects associated with Project: MEGAFOOT, one of the latest Indiegogo products that is in the funding process.

For those who do not know, “Megafoot” is an independent horror movie that has been seen as a throwback to movies of old within the horror genre. The star of the movie is a robotic beast of sorts known as Megafoot. While under the surveillance of a group of scientists, something goes terribly wrong. After that, Megafoot becomes, to put it simply, violent. Can the scientists put an end to this project turned awry or will it be the experiment that spells the end for the experimenters?

By this summary, it’d be easy to assume that this film is nothing short of a portal to violence but the fact that there is a clear 80’s influence is hard to deny. By simply watching the trailer, it’s easy to see that while a sense of dread is present in the films, it’s not one that can be connected to horror movies in the mainstream today like “Oculus.” More often than not, even as someone who grew up during the 90’s, I felt like reaching for my Nintendo Entertainment System from the 80’s while watching said trailer.

Speaking of which, did you know that the NES is linked to one of the perks of the project?

Like many Indiegogo endeavors, the offered rewards for Project: MEGAFOOT are broken up into tiers. For example, anyone who pledges $25 to the project would be eligible for, amongst other things, a download for the Production Storyboards for the opening scene of “Megafoot.”  However, for those who pride themselves on being spendthrifts, pledging $150 would not only net a backer the rewards from the lower tiers but a limited-edition “Megafoot” video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System as well. To say that this would be a reason to dust off the NES would be an understatement.

This is an impressive perk on so many levels. It’s clear that those who pride themselves on being NES enthusiasts would like to get their hands on this game, to further complete their NES game collections if for no other reason. It also shows that Project: MEGAFOOT is heavily influenced by the 80’s, not only in regards to horror movies but other types of media, too. Once again, it’s a matter of nostalgia and any online marketing firm can attest to the idea that this project has it in quantities that perhaps even the monster called Megafoot would be envious of.

As of this writing, the Indiegogo for Project: MEGAFOOT has raised around $17,300 out of the goal of $35,000. With only four days left for funding, one has to wonder if the project will reach its goal. If it is able to make up the difference before the goal in question is reached, I would have reason to believe that “Megafoot” could become the latest crowdsourcing craze.