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9 Reasons Why Posterous is a Great Tool

24 February 2010 in Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

I’ve been into Posterous lately, for more reason than one.

Posterous is, in their words, the “dead simple place to post everything.  just email us.”

Why do I like it?  A few reasons, roughly in order of how important I view each characteristic:

  1. It encourages a more robust content strategy: This is the main reason I like Posterous.  It’s all about content, which you know we like.  Here you’ve added one more outpost to the mix, and it’s primarily used to house this content, have people find it, expose people to your brand, bring them back to your brand if you want them to and so on.  The focus is on your valuable material, getting it out there and providing one more place for people to discover it.
  2. Serious SEO juice: I don’t know if you’ve noticed this lately, but I’ve been seeing posterous.com posts pop up pretty high in search rankings.  The site has high authority, perhaps higher than your own website, which increases the chances that someone could find your material – and hence, your brand – while searching for something in particular.
  3. Inbound linking opportunities: Because of the added outpost and SEO opportunities, Posterous gives you continuous strong inbound linking opportunities – more direct routes for people to get to your website.  If you’re not sure of the power of inbound linking, check out the HubSpot blog.
  4. It’s not all about your material: Posterous not only offers another outpost for your own content, but you’re able to supplement it with outside resources in a way that’s more robust than tools like Twitter or Facebook.  While the brevity of Twitter can be useful, the depth of having full articles, or more deeply analyzed thoughts from outside parties also has it’s place.  Remember that sharing valuable information from any source with your audience adds to your own credibility as an expert.
  5. Easy to use: You can post from email, your browser, your phone, the Posterous website – you can really post from (physically) anywhere or from almost every device. You can have multiple pages from the same account.  Etc, etc.  It’s pretty fool proof.
  6. Measurement and analytics: Yes, you can measure “stuff” on a lot of sites.  But Posterous allows you to use Google Analytics and Feedburner as measurement tools, which  you’re likely using on both your website and your blog.  Sure, this may not be entirely unique, but it means you can draw pretty direct relationships between each web presence, and understand how each affects the other…..all in the same language.  That’s important and useful, at least to me.
  7. You don’t necessarily need engagement: Posterous isn’t necessarily about building a community that will continually engage with your brand.  While those are all benefits built in to it, and of course it’s an added benefit, the focus is really on content sharing.
  8. You can involve people in the process: Each page can have multiple contributors that only need to email content to get a post up.  Enough said.
  9. Syndication options:  This should be pretty standard nowadays, but Posterous offers integration with Facebook accounts, Twitter profiles, etc.

How have you found Posterous helpful?

You can connect to Kate and to the Other Side Group on Posterous.

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SEO Strategy: Short-term feeding vs long-term foundation-building

9 December 2009 in Business to Business, Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

I’m working with a company in the B2B space that has an interesting but very common website case:

  • They have an old, basic and static site
  • It has very weak SEO
  • They’re paying significant amounts of money for Google Adwords each month to get them page ranked
  • They’re not tracking anything

Luckily, they want this to change.  In conjunction with a website design overhaul, we’re going to completely up-end this model and flip it on it’s head (or side, or whatever).

One of the main topics of conversation has been the issue of Google Adwords – do we use them or not.  My answer is no, not right now.  A few further thoughts to that end [Disclaimer - I had a quick call with the team at HubSpot, as I would like to use their product in this process, and some of these thoughts stem from a conversation I had with Vas]:

  • Firstly, there is nothing in place right now to determine the effects of their Adwords: they don’t know who’s clicking, what they’re clicking on, if they’re qualified leads, etc.  All they know is that they’re the first (sponsored) link that shows up on Google for one of the keywords.
  • There was little research done to choose those keywords, and it was based loosely on product lines.  The list also hasn’t been updated in many years.
  • They have little to no effective SEO built into their site, which hasn’t been changed in over five years.

Essentially, they’ve put Adwords in place and let it run.

They’re simply paying the meter to reserve a parking spot, and hope they don’t have a cop come around and write them a ticket or tow the car away. Because that’s what would happen the minute they stopped paying the meter if they’d relied on their existing website.  The Adwords are only giving them short-term benefits while they’re still paying.

What we’re working towards is building their own parking lot where they won’t have to worry about paying the meter: An architecturally strong website, with sophisticated SEO, continually updated content, metrics in place to determine how people are accessing and using the site, and developing more paths for people to get there.

Does that mean we nix Google Adwords?  For now, yes. There doesn’t seem to be much point in using them if they don’t know what they’re bringing to the table. It’s sort of like parking in the first available spot before you know if it’s close to your lunch meeting near City Hall (”It’s around here somewhere,” he said.).  There might be spots closer.  Heck, City Hall could have it’s own free parking lot.

But only for now. Once we’ve gone through the process of developing a much stronger foundation – our website, and once we understand the best keywords to use (though, ideally, we’ve keyword-maximized the site so well that it can stand alone)….once we’ve really built something with a long-term future…..only then should Adwords be used to supplement these efforts. We’re building their own parking lot that they can park in on most days, and telling them where the best spot to pay for is next time they have lunch near City Hall….

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SEO in Layman’s terms

4 September 2008 in Explanation by Kate | View Comments

My dad asked me the other day what SEO was (and to be clear, he didn’t use the term “SEO,” it was more of a “What do you mean I should get my company page ranking up?  What the heck does that mean??).  I then proceeded to (try to) explain the basic concept of SEO to him.

I thought the dumbed down version of it might be helpful.  It’s on the shorter side, because my dad’s needs for his company website don’t extend much further than that.  I would love for people to add their own versions or additions to other aspects of SEO if they want to.

So here it is:

“Dad.  Let’s say someone searches for your company online.  You’ll pop up (hopefully!) on the first entry.  Great, but how many people do you think are going to find you using your company name?  Those people will probably already know you and what you do.  But what if someone was looking for a product that you produce, let’s say tracer wire.  They’re going to type in “tracer wire.”  So what search engine optimization does is it makes it so your company ideally pops up on the first page, if not one of the first few entries. Most people don’t look past the first page of what a search engine gets for you, so you need to be right there, and in their face.”

“How do you do that Katie [he calls me Katie]?”

“Well, an example of what you could do is to “tag” your website, which means you associate it with key words that you think likely customers might search for.  For instance, you tag your company with “copper wire” and there’s at least a potential that you’ll pop up at the beginning of their search.

“The idea is to make your tags a good mix between both broad and narrow terms so that you remain competitive.  There are a lot of firms that might be in the “copper wire” industry, and you may get lost somewhere in the mix of so many firms.  But there are fewer firms in the cooper wire industry that make “tracer wire”.

“Another way you can give your website some juice is by linking out, or putting links on your sites to other sites.  The search engines are like little worms with many heads, and the more pathways you offer them to your site, the easier and more often they can get to you. ***[Sidenote: this worm analogy could be gross, I'll have to come up with something better for future explanations, but, oddly, it's what popped into my head at the time.... please offer your suggestions below for other analogies]*** And the more times they get to you, the closer to the top of search results you will be.

“For the same reason, it also helps to have other websites that contain links to your website.  Good opportunties might be if you work with partners that could put a link to you on their sites, or if you’re a member of an association that features member sites.  Things like that.” ***[Sidenote: as you may have gathered, my dad is not in an industry where blogging/commenting/social media is used at present, and also note, he doesn’t know how to use a computer, so there’s no chance that he will be leaving comments and his website information on any blogs, but this is another way to go about this).


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