WordPress; Curiosity; Google, Kansas
A week of interesting news, life, and creation. Wordpress went real-time. Scott Adams wrote of Curiosity. The moon has water. A town is being renamed Google. What a wonderful world!
Data as Sound: NYTimes Sonification of Winter Olympics Results from information aesthetics
Topeka, Kansas Is Now Google, Kansas from Google Blogoscoped by Roger Browne
WordPress Goes Real-Time With PubSubHubbub from Mashable! by Amy-Mae Elliott
Curiosity from Dilbert.com Blog
Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too from National Geographic News
How the earthquake in Chile could change Earth’s axis from Scientific American
Sniper Assassin 2 – Games Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Adding a game to your site might improve your bounce rate. Plus they’re a lot of fun to play. Check this bad boy out: Sniper Assassin 2. Play a game. Think you can beat my high score?
How To Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself
Tim Ferriss, author of The 4 Hour Workweek gave this presentation at WordCamp recently. His title: How to Build a High Traffic Blog without Killing Yourself.
[From ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse]
Becoming a Thought Leader by Creating Controversy with Quality
Becoming a Thought Leader Means Sharing Controversial, Quality Insights.
Thought Leadership is a relatively new term in marketing speak, but deeply relates to established techniques of branding and viral media.
First, the definition:
A thought leader describes a futurist who is recognized for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets). [my own, refined from source]
So how do you stick out from the crowd? Being a thought leader requires having an impact on the thinking some set of the general population, after all, doesn’t it? How can you increase your impact and reach in the marketing of thought leadership?
Not so surprisingly, the same methods are used to increase the impact and reach of thought leaders as the methods used to increase the impact and reach of marketing professionals everywhere. Quality and Controversy.
Quality
By “quality”, I mean you have to state what you want to communicate so your reader understands the message. Substance over style. Just because you relay a message doesn’t mean your reader will understand what you’re trying to communicate. For instance, if you’re trying to encourage a group to plant trees on weekends, saying “plant trees on weekends” will probably be understood easier than “come out and join us every Saturday and Sunday for environmentalism at its best!” The latter loses the message of tree planting altogether, whereas the first directly and understandably communicates the message. Quality.
Controversy:
By “controversy” I mean that whatever it is you’re saying it has to be worth talking about. Or in the case of thought leadership, worth thinking about. What you say has to be a contribution to the field you’re discussing. Simply summarizing or rephrasing what your peers are discussing is not leadership at all. Further, controversy will get people talking about the topic you bring up. If the site where you’re publishing your thoughts is optimized, you’ll see an increase in traffic from the repurcussions of convtroversial topics. A percentage of your readers will discuss your controversial topic with others, and a percentage of those folks will Google the topic and a percentage of them will click through to your content. Controversy.
A few good examples of quality and controversy in thought leadership: Science Babble by Scott Adams and Hand Shaking is So Medieval. Let’s End It by Michael Arrington. My attempt at thought leadership with Quality and Controversy: Blog Your Company’s Strategies, Tactics, and Tasks. Remember, you don’t necessarily have to practice the controversial topics you’re encouraging as a thought leader, though I recommend practicing them. Get the wheels turning and eventually, maybe everyone will practice them. Be the catalyst.
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Subfolder or Subdomain for your Corporate Blog?
If you’re in the lucky enough position to initiate, design, and|or develop your company’s blog, you’ll eventually be faced with a pressing question:
Should your corporate blog be set up under a subfolder or subdomain?
We at Qmania we were faced with the decision to establish the subdomain blog.qmania.com or create the subfolder qmania.com/blog. We chose to go with blog.qmania.com. Many of our peers and our web 2.0 leaders made the same decision: blog.boorah.com, blog.kelseygroup.com, http://blog.pandora.com, blog.plaxo.com. Yelp even created separate subdomains for their community blogs and their internal blogs: communityblog.yelp.com and officialblog.yelp.com.
So why all the separation? Can’t we all just get along under one domain?
The reason for the subdomains? Well, I’m not entirely sure about the reasoning at Boorah, Kelsey Group, Pandora, Plaxo, and Yelp though I’m sure their decision making process went along the same lines as ours. At Qmania, we recognized the opportunity to create something more measurable with the subdomain. Since the services we provide at Qmania are fundamentally different than the topics we’d cover on the blog; and since the architecture of the blog is fundamentally different than the architecture of our primary service; the only way to properly test and measure SEO performance of either entity was to separate them at birth. Independent results in SEO performance arise with the separation of content across multiple subdomains, although aesthetically the look and feel remains the same between the entities.
Smart readers will ask whether or not the same effect would happen with a perfectly siloed subfolder. Wouldn’t content under the subfolder /blog pump and concentrate SEO juice like the subdomain? I’m here to tell you the answer is yes… and no. Yes, a subfolder can optimize content to the same level of performance as a subdomain (with perfect siloing). No, the subfolder would not pump SEO juice like the subdomain because the subfolder’s performance in driving organic traffic is dependent upon the domain’s performance in driving organic traffic. And since sometimes there are other pertinent reasons for not optimizing an entire domain, it’s a bad idea to make the performance of something meant to be optimized dependent on something which may or may not be.
The benefit of choosing a subdomain over a subfolder is independent, measurable performance. The benefit of choosing a subfolder over a subdomain is improving the overall authority of the domain. Choose a subdomain first. Get it fully optimized. Then decide over moving to a subfolder or keeping your subdomain on the grind.
The benefit of setting up a subdomain is independent, measurable optimization of both the content on that subdomain and the content on the domain itself, since the content that would be siloed in the subfolder would effect the optimization of the content outside the folder. If its a must to move to a subfolder from a subdomain (for branding purposes, or redefinition of your domain [to avoid a slap]), you can always 301 redirect all the pages on your subdomain blog to fresh pages on your subfolder blog. I’d recommend doing this only after you’re sure your domain is fully optimized, your blog architecture is fully optimized, and you understand how to silo subfolders to retain SEO juice. A 301 redirect will cause a short dip in organic traffic for a few weeks, but afterward all your rankings built from your subdomain will point to your subfolder — which ultimately improves the authority of your whole domain.
In other words, always start with a subdomain for loosely related content (like a corporate blog). Allow it to rank organically. After its optimized and brings in tons of traffic, you can either change it to a subfolder (if certain requirements are met) or keep it growing on a subdomain. As an important note, compete displays all traffic to domains and subdomains as an aggregate, so to the outside world, you’ll see no loss in traffic to your domain if setting up a subdomain for your corporate blog.
Webmasters of the world, what do you think? Have you ever had to decide between a subfolder and subdomain? How did you choose?
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