Growing Your Audience with Random Affinities

Most of us don’t get to choose what we write about. Your new client makes pollen-resistant underwear? Congratulations. You’re now an author specializing in allergen-repelling undergarments.

This setup sounds pretty funny until you have to write 15 blog posts per month for PollenProof™’s new marketing campaign. The idea well runs dry pretty quick. How do you keep your interest peaked and idea generator fresh? Random affinities to the rescue!

Random affinities

This term is 100% made up by me with a lot of help from some colleagues. I’m not so worried about protecting it – just beware that if you decide to use it and get laughed out of the room, your only reference is a sweaty, pale marketing guy who spends his spare time training his cats to play fetch.

Two topics have ‘random affinity’ if they are connected only by a common audience. For example: the fact that I like cycling may mean I’m four times more likely to watch "Adventure Time." There’s no subject connection between cycling and "Adventure Time" - Jake and Finn never ride a bicycle. The only connection is the fact that an unusual number of people are interested in both.

A few other (potential) examples:

• Cyclists are more likely to own tablet computers. 
• Cyclists worry more about skin cancer and skin protection. 
• People who belong to a PTA or PTO are more likely to be aquarium or zoo members. 
• People who attend boat shows are more likely to watch extreme sports on TV. 

Don’t overthink it. Two ideas + no obvious connection except audience = random affinity.

So what?

This is the part where you say: So what, Ian? You writing a new book or something? Why are you wasting my time with all this fake academic marketing crapola?

The answer is this: random affinities are another way to attract and keep your long tail audience. I don’t buy a bicycle every month (not for lack of trying). I buy one every few years. You can try to catch my attention at just the right time for a bike purchase. But you’ve got a better chance of selling to me if you catch and hold my attention throughout my bicycle buying dry spell. You can do that by speaking to the random affinity topics I like. I’m over 30, plus I sunburn under full spectrum lighting, so skin protection is pretty important to me when I ride. I own a tablet computer, as well. And, if you occasionally talk about "Adventure Time," there’s no question that I will remember your company when I head for the local bike shop for my next toy.

Use ‘em right, and random affinities can increase your likelihood of:

• Building rapport with potential customers 
• Helping folks remember you 
• Giving you something to write about besides pollen-proof skivvies 

Company and sanity savers. They’re dang handy.

Finding random affinities

Way back before the Internet, when I lived in a rolled-up newspaper and got paid in fish heads, we found random affinities by a) guessing, or b) interviewing random people and hoping they weren’t screwing with us. Times were tough.

With the Internet, tools are abound. You can’t click a link without knocking one over. Here are a few of my favorites for finding random affinities:

First, use your brain. This is marketing. After conducting all the math and pretending we can computerize it all, it’s still about looking at the product, looking at the audience, and seeing the connections. Don’t treat these tools as automatic marketing machines. If you come crying to me because you got fired after you tried to sell granola bars with articles about camel spiders, I’ll just laugh. And probably write about you.

Facebook Ads are my #1 source. Sign into Facebook, then select Create An Ad. It doesn’t matter what your first ad is about; you’re just using it as a tester. Then, scroll down to ‘Precise Interests.’ Start typing, and pick the interest that makes the most sense. You’ll see a list of suggested likes and interests:

Explore to your heart’s content. Keep in mind that Facebook might not always help your exploration, so be sure to keep it creative. I once searched for "yurts" and found nothing. That’s OK, keep searching! Moving on to the next tool...

Amazon.com is a freaking gold mine. Go search for the top books on your topic. Then scroll down to "Customers who bought this item also bought." It saved me when I was yurt-hunting. Apparently a lot of yurt shoppers also care about composting, ergonomic furniture, getaways, and my favorite, alpacas:

There are some loose semantic connections here, but if you’re yurt-impaired like I was, these are great new topics. I’m not sure many people would make the connection between yurts and ergo furniture. And while I might picture alpacas frolicking about my yurt, I wouldn’t have considered them potential topics.

Google suggest can sometimes help you connect unexpected subjects that are linked by audience questions. I could write a lot of articles about this one:

Though I have to admit, the question alone pushes yurts down on the list of Future Places Ian Might Live. **Shudder.**

Reddit is fantastic. Take a look at the subreddits for any topic:

I never would’ve thought of Burning Man. Or Occupy Wall Street, for that matter. These aren’t really random affinities, but the search sure helped me come up with more material. And, I can now search Burning Man random affinities to find even more to write about. Evaporative air conditioners, anyone?

If your site, or any other relevant site, or any of the sites dealing with any of the random affinities you found get a decent amount of traffic, the DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you find even more. I searched the Burning Man web site in the Ad Planner and found some pretty useful stuff. First, and article or three about photo sharing and photography might be worth testing:

It’s possible yurt fans look for concerts more than the average person, too:

I’ll see what I can dig up about musical interests for my audience and test a few articles about best soundtracks for life in a yurt.

If you’re not saying what the hell, you’re not doing it right

Alpacas? Concerts? Desert events where visitors sunburn their unmentionables? It all seems… random. Right? Exactly. Truth is that the yurts example is a little bit on the fringes of the mainstream consumer audience. Try bigger B2B and B2C topics and you’ll get even better, harder-to-find random affinities.

Is it working? Getting buy-in from the boss

Your boss doesn’t care about your creative genius. She’ll just want to see the money. Or the stuff that’ll turn into money. So make sure you look at the data. I wrote a piece about Dungeons and Dragons and marketing, way back when. Affinities don’t get much more random. When it comes to short-term traffic, it sure worked:

My success metric is sustained growth, though. Zooming out a bit more, it looks like I got a nice surge that lasted for at least a few weeks:

Visitors even stuck around to read the whole thing:

If I were padding anything except my ego, I’d look at sales and other conversions, too.

Of course, before you can even write, you’ve got to convince your boss this is a good idea. Be super-clear. Show her the audience overlap. I’ve found CMOs and similar to be really receptive to random affinity marketing because it fits with traditional best-practices so well. One suggestion before you begin: start with milder stuff. Don’t sell yurts with Burning Man photos if you can do ergonomic furniture. Move on to the photos after you’ve proven the concept.

No autopilot

Again, this strategy can be messy. It’s not perfect. But random affinities will give you a whole different way to access your audience and keep your content fresh. There are three keys takeaways to making random affinities work:

1. Don’t make this your whole strategy. At most, random affinities can drive 20% of your editorial calendar. You need a few directly-related topics, too.
2. Set expectations. It’s a lot easier to sustain your effort if no one expects a miracle. Make sure everyone knows this isn’t a miracle marketing solution (like those exist). But also make sure they know that, in the budget spectrum, this stuff’s low-cost and low-risk. Worst case scenario is that no one reads it.
3. Above all: If you’re still using scripts to spam links on 10,000 blogs or ensuring that your keyword is 3.5% of every page on your site, random affinities are not for you. This is the stuff that blurs the lines between seo and marketing. Which is why I like it so much. And why it works so damned well.

wrttnwrd

Source:  http://www.seomoz.org 

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Getting Site Architecture Right

There are many ways to organize pages on a site. Unfortunately, some common techniques of organizing information can also harm your SEO strategy.

Sites organized by a hierarchy determined without reference to SEO might not be ideal because the site architecture is unlikely to emphasize links to information a searcher finds most relevant. An example would be burying high-value keyword pages deep within a sites structure, as opposed to hear the top, simply because those pages don't fit easily within a "home", "about us", contact" hierarchy.

In this article, we’ll look at ways to align your site architecture with search visitor demand.

Start By Building A Lexicon

Optimal site architecture for SEO is architecture based around language visitors use. Begin with keyword research.

Before running a keyword mining tool, make a list of the top ten competitor sites that are currently ranking well in your niche and evaluate them in terms of language. What phrases are common? What questions are posed? What answers are given, and how are the answers phrased? What phrases/topics are given the most weighting? What phrases/topics are given the least weighting?

You’ll start to notice patterns, but for more detailed analysis, dump the phrases and concepts into a spreadsheet, which will help you determine frequency.

Once you’ve discovered key concepts, phrases and themes, run them through a keyword research tool to find synonyms and the related concepts your competitors may have missed.

One useful, free tool that can group keyword concepts is the Google Adwords Editor. User the grouper function - described here in "How To Organize Keywords" to "generate common terms" option to automatically create keyword groupings.

Another is the Google Contextual Targeting Tool.

Look at your own site logs for past search activity. Trawl through related news sites, Facebook groups, industry publications and forums. Build up a lexicon of phrases that your target visitors use.

Then use visitor language as the basis of your site hierarchy.

Site Structure Based On Visitor Language

Group the main concepts and keywords into thematic units.

For example, a site about fruit might be broken down into key thematic units such as “apple”, “pear”, “orange”, “banana” and so on.

Link each thematic unit down to sub themes i.e. for “oranges”, the next theme could include links to pages such as “health benefits of oranges”, “recipes using oranges”, etc, depending on the specific terms you’re targeting. In this way, you integrate keyword terms with your site architecture.

Here’s an example in the wild:

The product listing by category navigation down the left-hand side is likely based on keywords. If we click on, say, the “Medical Liability Insurance” link, we see a group of keyword-loaded navigation links that relate specifically to that category.

Evidence Based Navigation

A site might be about “cape cod real estate”. If I run this term through a keyword research tool, in this case Google Keywords, a few conceptual patterns present themselves i.e people search mainly by either geographic location i.e. Edgartown, Provincetown, Chatham, etc or accommodation type i.e. rentals, commercial, waterfront, etc.

Makes sense, of course.

But notice what isn’t there?

For one thing, real estate searches by price. Yet, some real estate sites give away valuable navigation linkage to a price-based navigation hierarchy.

This is not to say a search function ordered by house value isn’t important, but ordering site information by house value isn’t necessarily a good basis for seo-friendly site architecture. This functionality could be integrated into a search tool, instead.

A good idea, in terms of aligning site architecture with SEO imperatives, would be to organise such a site by geographic location and/or accommodation type as this matches the interests of search visitors. The site is made more relevant to search visitors than would otherwise be the case

Integrate Site Navigation Everywhere

Site navigation typically involves concepts such as “home”, “about”, “contact”, “products” i.e. a few high-level tabs or buttons that separate information by function.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but the navigation concept for SEO purposes can be significantly widened by playing to the webs core strengths. Tim Berners Lee placed links at the heart of the web as links were the means to navigate from one related document to another. Links are still the webs most common navigational tool.

“Navigational” links should appear throughout your copy. If people are reading your copy, and the topic is not quite what they want, they will either click back, or - if you’ve been paying close attention to previous visitor behaviour - will click on a link within your copy to another area of your site.

The body text on every page on your site is an opportunity to integrate specific, keyword-loaded navigation. As a bonus, this may encourage higher levels of click-thru, as opposed to click-back, pass link juice to sub-pages and ensure no page on your site is orphaned.

Using Site Architecture To Defeat Panda & Penguin

These two animals have a world of connotations, many of them unpleasant.

Update Panda was an update partly focused on user-experience. Google is likely using interaction metrics, and if Google isn’t seeing what they deem to be positive visitor interaction, then your pages, or site, will likely take a hit.

What metrics are Google likely to be looking at? Bounce backs, for one. This is why relevance is critical. The more you know about your customers, and the more relevant link options you can give them toclick deeper into your site, rather than click-back to the search results, the more likely you are to avoid being Panda-ized.

If you’ve got pages in your hierarchy that users don’t consider to be particularly relevant, either beef them up or remove them.

Update Penguin was largely driven by anchor text. If you use similar anchor text keywords pointing to one page, Penquin is likely to cause you grief. This can even happen if you’re mixing up keywords i.e. “cape cod houses”, “cape cod real estate”, “cape cod accommodation”. That level of keyword diversity may have been acceptable in the past, but it’s not now.

Make links specific, and link it to specific, unique pages. Get rid of duplicate, or near duplicate pages. Each page should be unique, not just in terms of keywords used, but in terms of concept.

In a post-Panda/Penquin world, webmasters must have razor-sharp focus on what information searchers find most relevant. Being close, but not quite what the visitor wanted, is an invitation for Google to sink you.

Build relevance into your information architecture.

PETERD

Source: http://www.seobook.com

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