Silly Marketers: SEO is for Kids
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Many marketers just don’t get it. Either they are plain ignorant, silly or worse. Usually I’m not bashing anybody.
Yet sometimes a post makes me think that we are still in 2003. As if social media were something completely new and nobody knew how to deal with them.
Viral content and link baits exist since 2004 and prevail or rather are already outdated in some cases for years.
Are you begging for traffic?
Many people by now sense the too obvious attempts to generate traffic by sheer force. Content asking to go viral too much is everywhere.
First off we know that traffic is not the only measurement to look at in SEO.
I’ve been popular on all kinds of social sites and know that the numbers are not everything. In some cases visitors just come over to witness how much of an idiot you are.
They arrive to bash you in comments. In other cases you get plenty of slightly interested “traffic” that moves on faster than you can look.
The main problem is not only the focus on the visitors but it’s SEO on social media itself.
In conventional SEO selfishness rules: it’s often Selfish Ego Onanism. Like saying “Hey, I got viral and 50.000 visitors in one day”. I’m guilty of that myself sometimes even as a SEO 2.0!
This is how we do now
What’s the difference between obsolete SEO and SEO of the 2nd generation though? It’s the mindset and thus the approach to the community.
In SEO you are plainly selfish, “you against the rest of the world”, in SEO 2.0 you are social, “you with others to reach common goals”.
A SEO of the 1.0 kind won’t contribute anything of value to a community. He will only reap fruits he hasn’t sown on social media.
Conventional SEO is still largely parasitical. Black hat SEOs are the locusts eating up everything and destroying the plantation.
White hat SEOs just take a small part of the crop, but they still come and take away something that’s not theirs.
In SEO 2.0 the mindset changed. We plant the seeds we harvest.
Many conventional SEOs practicing SMO will arrive as outsiders and not integrate well with a community.
The transition to SEO 2.0 is everywhere though. On the most basic level it’s providing value to the communities you participate in.
Don’t submit to social sites be social
Participation is the key term here. SEOs of the 2.0 kind do not only respect the communities and contribute, they build them up.
On some niche sites marketers themselves are either the majority or a big part of power users creating value and building the community from the start.
This is no wonder with a special interest news community like Inbound.org. Other more general oriented sites aimed at the main stream are not about marketing to their audiences.
Inbound.org is by far not the first community I build up with. I did it in Germany and globally before. I know how it works.
Once you’re an accepted power user you are part of the community and you’re immune against the self promotion and “SEO is spam” mentality.
I know that many of the SEO people reading this will think something like “so much work for nothing” and “I don’t buy this SEO 2.0 crap” but you feel it already that you’re wrong. Why?
You can’t either piss in the pool or use up all of the water to irrigate your lawn. You need to keep up the community itself.
When the community thrives you do as well. That’s in a nutshell the way of SEO 2.0! When you contribute in a meaningful way you become a niche authority people trust.
How trust is built over time
People on social media will also trust my judgement on SEO. I will be the SEO guy who was there from almost day one.
People remember who is a fundamental part of the community, while you will just an outsider trying “to leverage traffic”.
On a side note: I enjoy new social sites like Ello very much, it’s probably the best community until know I participated in. Thus it’s not work at all. I joined early on when everybody was ridiculing them.
With the wrong mindset you won’t understand how a community works. You need to be part of the community to get organic traffic.
Don’t try to exploit it. Then your traffic will be more than just traffic and meaningless numbers. Real people who respect you will be the actual visitors.
You need to grow up and do not act like a kid who only takes but never contributes. Egoism is childish.
Marketers are often just big kids who won’t assume responsibility. It doesn’t work on social media because it consists of other adults.
Last updated: April 18th, 2018: added image alternative text and a meta description.
* (CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by Chase Elliott Clark
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I think abandoning mixx now could be short sighted as you pointed out in the post. Since you are building relationships and authority, it would put you on good grounds when mixx attracts more people.
People like to follow the herd, and as mixx grows, others would like to follow with ever increasing momentum. The smart people are those who get in early rather than just follow.
“I sumbmit someone elses post to Mixx, then s/he will post my stuff on Sphinn and thus I get stumbled, but that’s advanced SEO 2.0”
I was just thinking about posting on this so-to-say “indirect” value of SMM – you beat me on that :) Nicely put, thank you for the great post as always!
You’re assuming Mixx will grow. How is it any bigger/better than the other communities? Demographics? Topics? How it’s used? Features? Looks like a me2 offering, imho.
Exactly david.
Smarty: I would love to read it at your blog in your words. I often have the impression that you can express what I think better than me. Is this love? Probably only SEO 2.0? :-)
Gab, I forgot to link this here, which probably is the best answer:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/12-reasons-to-join-mixx-and-abandon-digg
Would like to make two points.
1. As i clearly indicated in the post, traffic is never really a metric for calculating success or ROI from a social media campaign. It doesn’t stick and it normally doesn’t convert. However, it is one of the only metrics you can actually measure. You may not be able to measure if all your links come from a social campaign or if all your conversions and RSS subs come from the campaign you launched, but you can tell by referral who came from what site.
I see the value of social media in getting visibility to content and gaining links first, and then branding, traffic, and conversion as a nice bonus if it comes.
But if the best you can hope for is about 100 visits at max, then it is hardly an avenue to spend time and energy on.
2. Sphinn and Mixx are entirely different sites and communities. One is niche and one is not. As a marketer you should always target niche communities that relate to your content or product even if it only brings a small amount of traffic since it converts so much better.
Mixx is an open ended news site that anyone can submit anything to. Sphinn is a niche community about Search Marketing. So if someone wanted to do a linkbait on Cars and Insurance I would probably send them away from a site like Sphinn.
Nice rant none the less.
Cheers
Also can you please let me know where you saw the Silly Marketers post at.
Sphinn or Mixx?
@Tad: Thanks for the compliments! I like reading your blog as you make alot of sense. I have contemplating in writing a SEO/online marketing blog myself,and I am still contemplating :-)
@Gab: The only guarantee we have in life is paying tax and death I am feeling really smart and wise right now!.
Brent, thank you for rephrasing the main points of your article. Still, you complain about a freshly sown plantation that you can’t reap it yet. It’s like complaining that SEO for Mahalo does not make sense due to not enough traffic or do make the point clearer, complaining in 2004 that writing for Wikipedia does not make sense.
Also you seem to be an SEM expert not an SEO or social media specialist. Thinking in short term campaigns might suit the avergae PPC client, but SEO 2.0 and indeed SEO and SMO already is not only long term, you got live it. You can’t start SEO in a a campaign and then expect results. Also companies approaching social media in short term campaigns will fail. Social media is about strategy. It’s about being there, being part of it and taking part in a not for marketing sense.
Sphinn and Mixx are very similar. Not only you will meet the same people here and there, Mixx is also a niche community by now. It’s not a topical niche, it’s a demographic niche. Every marketer lerans this as a basic during his education that the most important demographic group is the early adopter. Now here at Mixx you get 80% early adopters. I hope I do not have to explain to you why it is important to reach early adopters.
I found your article probably at Sphinn first as I start my day with Sphinn, while I read Mixx inbetween when my head is too dizzy to work and I need a break, but basically I found it on both on the same day. If it would make some sense I would have stumbled it, but it doesn’t. It’s the boring selfish marketing nagging “they cheated me, I didn’t get enough traffic” I read at least a dozen times.
You got to sow to reap.
david: Although you can express what I need a post for in one or two sentences, please stick to what you do. Seduction is a topic most people struggle with in these both rigid and oversexualized times. The alienation of the sexes is horrendous. I know people, even perfectly “normal” women, who stay single until their thirties without ever having a real partner. People must be taught how to deal with each other. This is truly important. On the other hand you got way too many SEO blogs nobody reads besides the SEOs themselves.
[…] marketer presence and behavior on social media sites continued with a couple of interesting posts. Tad of SEO2.0 had a direct response, and a post from Matt Bailey at Sitelogic spoke to the tendency of marketers to get a little too […]
Hi Tad,
I believe so. There are tons of SEO blogs out there. I don’t have a blog at the moment but I have an idea of the kind of blog(s) I will be launching