MackCollier.com

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Sam Altman Fired as OpenAI CEO, Executives Worry About AI, Google Introduces Notes

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you had a restful weekend and are ready for a productive week! It’s Thanksgiving week here in the States, but it seems like we are still in store for a crazy news week, as you can see in our first story:

 

So on Friday, OpenAI’s Board of Directors unexpectedly fired CEO Sam Altman.  That set off a chain of events that is still playing out at this moment.  Where we are right now:

  • The BOD for OpenAI fired Sam Altman as CEO
  • OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman quit OpenAI in protest
  • The hot rumor at this point was that the BOD was going to cave and bring back Altman and Brockman.
  • Instead, they hired Mira Murati, the CTO, as interim CEO
  • Then, Emmett Shear was named interim CEO
  • Then, and this is the biggie….Microsoft hires Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to head up a new AI initiative at the company.  Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.
  • Then, 500 of OpenAI’s 770 employees write a letter to the BOD saying if the BOD doesn’t resign and reinstate Altman and Brockman to their previous positions, that all 500 employees will quit OpenAI and join Microsoft to work with Altman and Brockman

And that gets you up to date as of this moment.  By the time I finish this post there could be a breaking development, so I better write fast.

 

On the heels of that crazy first story, guess what area executives are worried about? Artificial intelligence, of course! AI contains the perfect mixture of potential and mystery to keep it top of mind for decision makers at every company.

 

Years ago, Seth Godin launched a product called Side Pages (I think) that was basically a browser extension that let you add notes to any page on the internet. So you could visit a page and see notes that other users had added about that page.  That project didn’t last long, but it sounds like Google is looking to incorporate a similar functionality into its search results with Notes. Notes is being tested with users of Google’s Search Labs, and would basically allow users to add notes and comments to entries in search results. I think it could be a useful feature, if implemented properly.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. This is Thanksgiving week in the states, so I hope those of you that are traveling will do so safely, and have a wonderful time with your friends and family. I’m honestly not sure if I will have any more posts up this week or not.  I hope you have a wonderful week!

 

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The One Thing I Hate About Content Creation

Content CreationThe one thing I hate about content creation is writing about the same topic over and over again.

I hate doing this. When I do, it always feels like I am being lazy or repeating myself. I mean, I covered this same topic back in 2011, why revisit it?

As it turns out, there’s actually several good reasons to create content around the same topic, more than once. So if you are like me, and it gives you the willies to create content about the same topic over and over again, strap in and let’s talk about why this is actually a good idea.

Why you should be creating content about the same topics over and over again

1 – Your audience changes. I’ve been blogging since 2005, across three different sites. The audience I wrote for at each site was vastly different. I’ve now been blogging here for over 12 years.  The people I am writing for today are vastly different than the readers I wrote for back in 2009. It makes complete sense to cover the same topics repeatedly because there are constantly new eyeballs on your content.

2 – Your expertise changes. I look back at a lot of the content I created back in 2005-2007 and realize now that I had no earthly idea what I was talking about. I certainly thought I did, but over the years I got to work with many companies and clients and put what was theory, into practice. My skills improved and grew, and as such the point of view I had for the work changed as well. I could go from presenting other people’s case studies to illustrate a point, to referencing the work I had personally done with clients. My knowledge and understanding of the topics greatly improved, and as a result it makes sense to revisit those topics to add what I have learned.

3 – You have better examples. Tying in with the previous point, as your expertise grows, your ability to illustrate concepts and ideas does as well. You become aware of better examples either through your own growing experience, or simply by being exposed to new case studies.

For instance, when I first started blogging, I often wrote about the value of using influencers on-site to drive interest in a conference or event. After a few years of experience working with companies such as Adobe as an influencer to promote their events, I could then point readers toward the results from that work. This resulted in my being able to create better content, and back up the concepts with real-world results.

4 – It helps your SEO. Yes, writing for search engines still matters. Depending on your blog, anywhere from 30-80% of your traffic comes from search engines. Those are numbers that are simply too big to ignore. By consistently creating content around certain topics, you are telling those search engines what the focus of your blog is. That makes it more likely that the content you create for those topics will place higher in search results, leading to more traffic from search engines.

The plugin I use for my blog to help me rank higher in search results is Yoast SEO. I cannot recommend it enough.

5 – It helps readers understand what the focus of your content is. It’s important to write for search engines, but it’s even more important to write for your readers. Consistently writing about the same topics helps readers understand where your focus is. Once they know what topics you write about, they can help tell their friends and colleagues about you as well.

So it’s vital to think about, from a strategic standpoint, the key topics you want to focus on. This will be the 3-5 topics that you want to be known for. I call these Topic Buckets. I pick 3-5 Topic Buckets that will be the main focus of the content I create here. This helps me focus my content. Additionally, this makes it easier for others to understand what the main topics are that I cover here.

 

There’s five reasons why it pays to focus your content creation efforts on the same topics, over and over again. Pick 3-5 Topic Buckets, then consistently create content that fits into one of those Topic Buckets. This will not only help drive more search traffic to your blog, but it will drive more direct and referral traffic as your readers better understand the focus of your writing.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Podcasts Thrived in 2020, Year’s Top Search Terms, Fast Food in Pompeii??

Happy New Year, y’all! Welcome to 2021! Time to turn the page and start into a new year and I am ready for it! I bet you are as well! Before we get to today’s Marketing Minute, tomorrow night’s #ContentCircus will discuss how to do a content audit. It’s a process I’m going through now, and we will be discussing tomorrow night at 7pm Central on Twitter. Additionally, I will have a VERY robust post up here tomorrow on my process for auditing content. It will tie in nicely with tomorrow night’s #ContentCircus, so look for that as well. As they say in the circus, on with the show!

 

This surprises me a bit, but podcasts continued to have remarkable growth in 2020. Downloads surged by almost 50%, and spending on podcast ads hit a whopping $780 Million! There was some concerns that growth of podcasts might slow in 2020 as we spent more time at home, and less time driving to work. But the stellar growth of the format in 2020 proves that we love listening to our podcasts, and not just while driving to work.

 

It’s always interesting to look back at the top search terms for the year. As expected, most of the terms revolved around the pandemic and how it has impacted our lives and daily workflow. One of the big topics I’ve talked about here the last few months is how customer behavior will change as a result of spending more time working from home. I think the shift in search term usage reflects that.

 

Ok, it’s hard to restart from a nice Christmas break, even for the Marketing Minute! I thought this discovery of an ancient ‘fast food stand’ in Pompeii was absolutely fascinating! And look at the artwork on the site of the stand! It’s two thousand years old! I can just imagine this being in the corner of a bustling market, where patrons could go and get a hot meal while shopping.

 

That’s it for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! See you back here in a week, and be back tomorrow for my post on how I audit my content, then we will discuss at #ContentCircus tomorrow night at 7pm Central on Twitter!

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Google is Now Indexing Tweets in Search Results, What it Means For You

Google’s love affair with Twitter is back on.  Previously, Google had indexed tweets from Twitter in its search results, but that deal ended in 2011.  Here’s a post I wrote back in 2011 that examined how this process worked.  Earlier this month it was reported that Google would begin adding tweets back to search results sometime in the first half of 2015, but it looks like it’s already underway.

Here’s a screenshot from a google search I did for the name of my marketing podcast.  Note the 6th and 7th results on the first page are tweets I left:

FanDamnTweetsGoogleThis means that content you create on Twitter (tweets) is now being indexed into search results alongside posts that appear on your blog or white papers on your website.

It also means that you now have another channel to seed your content into Google search results.  One of the issues that many blogging businesses face is a difficulty in getting content to rank high in Google results.  It typically can take years to build a business blog to the point where content ranks well in search results.

But if you have a large following on Twitter, that could mean that your tweets rank higher in search results than blog posts you write on the same topics.  You can leverage your following on Twitter to help build your audience for your blog.

Another way to use Twitter to help your blog (and this has nothing to do with Google indexing tweets) is to leverage your business discussions on Twitter as potential topics for your business blog.  I am constantly doing this, I will use Twitter as sort of a ‘sounding board’ to see which topics are important and interesting to others.  Participating and even lurking in Twitter chats is a great way to do this.  By following a Twitter chat that’s focused on topics that are relevant to your blog, you can get a better sense for which topics interest potential readers of your blog.  Which can lead to more content ideas for your blog, which will make it easier to hit your content creation goals.

Have you noticed that tweets are showing up in Google results?  Has it impacted any search terms your blog has ranked for in the past?

 

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The Simple Change Facebook Made That’s Screwing Up Brand Pages Everywhere

RedBullFB

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook altered the algorithm that determines what content you see in your News Feed (and no, you’re not seeing everything from your friends or the pages you Like).  Previously, content from friends/Pages that you had Liked or interacted with previously were more likely to show up in your News Feed in the future.

But earlier this month, Facebook again tweaked what content is shown in your News Feed.  When it did, the company said that ‘high quality articles’ would be given credence moving forward, and ‘the latest meme’ would get buried.

Instead, it appears that content from many company Brand Pages took a big hit.  Ignite Social Media, a social media marketing agency, analyzed almost 700 posts on 21 brand pages and had some pretty interesting/disturbing findings.  The biggest takeaway was that both organic reach and organic reach percentage fell by an average of 44% since the first week in December.  Five of the brands studied saw a decrease of over 60% and only one brand page in the study actually increased reach and reach percentage.  Since these results were revealed last week brand page managers everywhere have been lamenting similar findings on the pages they manage.

So what should your brand do now?

There are two things that I have consistently advised brands to do when it comes to social media:

1 – Plant seeds in the garden you own

2 – Focus on the people using the tools, not the tools themselves

Plant Seeds in the Garden You Own

The allure of Facebook for brands is obvious, there’s over a billion reasons why brands want to set up shop on Facebook.  Set up a brand page and suddenly you’ve got a free advertising tool on the biggest social networking site on the planet!  Why would anyone NOT want to do this?

Facebook knows that too.  Facebook is also now a publicly-traded company, and as such, revenue streams are of primary importance.  Which means if you want to keep having access to those users, increasingly Facebook will make it so you have to pay for that access.  Google does the same thing with its search engine, yes it says it is constantly tweaking its search ranking algorithm to give you better and more relevant results, but part of that is because Google wants you to pay for exposure.  It wants you to buy ads versus organically having your content rank highly.

Setting up shop on sites like Facebook and Twitter comes at a price for brands.  Yes, you have potential access to millions of potential customers, but ultimately, the sites control how and even if you get that access.  Facebook in particular is constantly changing the rules for how brands can use the site and distribute content.  Now that Twitter is  publicly-traded company, don’t be surprised if they don’t look for similar ways to monetize the efforts of brands.

This is why its better to put your eggs in baskets that you own.  Whereas you are at the whims of Facebook and Twitter when it comes to your content and engagement strategies, you have far more control over channels you own, such as your website, blog or email list.  Channels that your brand does not own can be used to compliment your social media efforts, but it should never be at the heart of what you do.  You want the heart of your social media strategy to be centered on channels you own, not ones that Mark Zuckerberg does.

Tools

Forget the Tools, Focus on the People

Who moved my ROI?  As Business Insider noted, this change could have a devastating impact for ‘social media marketers’ that are focused on helping brands get exposure for their content on Facebook.  Which is exactly the problem.  Too many brands and the agencies that service them are focused on gaming the system/tool versus trying to actually understand their customers.

What’s more important:

1 – Understanding how EdgeRank works to show your brand’s content higher in the News Feed of people that Liked your page

2 – Understanding why your audience is on Facebook

Understanding the people will always trump understanding the tools.  Your goal isn’t to understand how to game EdgeRank so that the picture you just posted will show up high on Sarah’s News Feed, your goal is to understand why Sarah is on Facebook.  What activities is she engaging in, and why?  What experience does she expect on Facebook, and why does she spend 3 hours a day on Facebook and has spent a grand total of 3 hours on Twitter this year?

Facebook is going to keep changing the rules.  You can either keep chasing the changes and wondering why you’re not seeing the social media riches your agency promised you, or you can stop chasing unicorns peeing rainbows and get to work creating something of value for your customers.

You cannot create that value for your customers until you understand them.  If you understand your customers and create value for them, then you win.  And nothing Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest does will change that.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Blogging SEO

UPDATE: Here’s tonight’s #Blogchat transcript! (Click ‘Transcript’ on the left to view).

Well this is a topic I can definitely blog about, since I am no SEO expert!  We will also be discussing this topic tonight (Sunday, July 21st 2013) at #Blogchat on Twitter.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  Effectively, what you are doing is ‘helping’ search engines understand what topics you are writing about.

A great way to do this is to use keywords and phrases that tie back to your topic, in your blog post itself.  For example, notice that the phrase ‘Blogging SEO’ appears in this post’s title, as well as throughout the post itself.  By placing this phrase in the title and in the post itself, I am helping Google and other search engines to recognize what this post is about.

So when someone searches for a term related to blogging SEO, or blogs and SEO, this post will likely do better in search results as a result of me using those specific words.  This is why you’ll see bloggers often write their blog post titles in the form of a question.  Such as ‘So what’s the best way to use Twitter?’  Because if someone does a Google search for the term ‘What’s the best way to use Twitter?’ that post will rank higher in search results for that exact term!

So if you are just getting started trying to optimize your blog posts for search, think about which keywords you are using with every post.  And then focus on using those keywords in three locations:

1 – The post title.  Notice that for this post ‘Blogging SEO’ is in the title.  So if someone searches for ‘Blogging SEO’, that will help this post rank higher in the results.

2 – The post itself.  I have repeated the term ‘Blogging SEO’ several times in this post.  That further helps to impress on Google and other search engines that this post is about blogging SEO, and should be higher in the search results.

3 – The post’s URL.  This is a tip that a lot of blogger’s miss.  Notice that the URL for this post is https://mackcollier.com/blogging-seo  The keywords ‘blogging SEO’ are literally part of the post’s URL!  That also helps Google identify that this post is about Blogging SEO.

 

So those are some beginner tips for optimizing your blog content for search, and you’ll get a ton more tips tonight during #Blogchat, starting at 8pm Central time.

Finally, I know that #Blogchat has been hammered by a few spammers lately, so I have embedded the tweets here, and most of the spam tweets should be deleted from here.  So if you want please follow along with #Blogchat here!

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@LeeOdden co-hosts #Blogchat Sunday talking Optimizing content for Search and Social!

Tonight (Sunday) I am thrilled to welcome back as co-host of #Blogchat the one and only Lee Odden!   This will be Lee’s second time co-hosting #Blogchat and he’ll be teaching us how to Optimize our blog content for both search engines PLUS social media!  The best of both worlds!

The format for tonight’s #Blogchat will be this:

1 – From 8:00-8:30 pm Central, Lee will walk us through how to optimize your blog posts for search engines.

2 – From 8:30-9:00pm Central, Lee will walk us through how to optimize your blog posts for social media!

 

Now there’s a couple of twists to this week’s #Blogchat.  First, Lee has been in Belgium for the past few days speaking at an event, and it will actually be 3am there when #Blogchat starts!  So big thanks to Lee for agreeing to join us so late/early!

Second, you’ve probably heard that Lee has a new book out called Optimize, which shows you how to integrate and optimize your content for search, social, and your content marketing.  Well Lee has agreed to give away two copies of Optimize right at the end of #Blogchat!  Want to win one of these copies?  Here’s a hint: Participation will be rewarded 😉

So thanks so much for Lee for joining us tonight at #Blogchat.  Please make sure you are following Lee on Twitter, reading his blog, and you can also check out Optimize!

See y’all at 8pm Central!

 

PS: If you missed #Blogchat, here’s the transcript!

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Subscribe to My Social Media Marketing Newsletter!

Social Media Marketing Newsletter

Starting next Wednesday, I’ll be running a weekly newsletter in addition to (almost) daily posts here.  The content focus will be slightly different, however.

Here, I cover Social Media primarily, but a blend of content that can benefit the individual, as well as those that are using Social Media for their company.  But this newsletter will be aimed solely at marketers and anyone using Social Media within their company or organization.  Each week the newsletter will feature original content that’s designed to do 3 things:

1 – Help you solve an existing Social Media Marketing issue you are having.  One week we might talk about building a better blogger outreach program, the next look at getting a better handle on our blog’s analytics to increase leads.  A case study here and there will be examined.

2 – Give you tips and advice for improving your day-to-day tasks and routines as well as managing your workflow.

3 – Keep you up-to-date on where I will be speaking/appearing, and giving you information on how we can work together.

I cannot stress this enough, the content in this newsletter will be original content.  Some of it may eventually make its way here to the blog, but it won’t be that often.

So if you’re working for a company or organization that wants to learn more about how to better use Social Media to connect with your customers and/or activate your brand advocates, please do subscribe to my newletter by filling out the quick form below.  You’ll input your email address then be sent an email to confirm your subscription.

Thank you so much, see you next Wednesday!


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How to Write Better Blog Posts That Both Google and Twitter Will Love

writing better blog posts, google, twitter, how to get more retweetsThere is a definite art form to writing blog posts that can give you both the short-term gain of being shareable on Social Media sites, and the long-term gain of ranking well with search engines.  Mainly, because you’re trying to reach two different audiences at the same time.  Content that’s shared on Social Media sites typically has a lifespan of a few minutes at best as it is quickly replaced on the person’s timeline/stream with additional items.  But with search engines, content is cataloged and then retrieved later when a relevant search is made.

So let’s think about the differences in those audiences, and how we reach each:

1 – Social Media sites – Blog post title needs to be catchy and attention-grabbing.  An interesting photo that grabs attention also helps for content shared on Facebook and Plus.  But the idea is, how can you grab the person’s attention for even a few seconds so you can convince them to click your link?

2 – Search Engine – Here, we need to write content that’s consistent with the search query.  You can already see a potential conflict with writing for Social Media sites in that we need that catchy, attention-grabbing title and blog post, but both also have to be CONSISTENT with the content of the blog post.  IOW, if we have a cute and sparkly title, but the blog post is crap/inconsistent with blog post title, it not only won’t be Liked, RTed and +1ed, it won’t rank well in search results either.

So we need to write a blog post that has both a catchy title that immediately grabs your attention PLUS one that will include content consistent with the blog post title that will also rank well in search engines.  Whew, glad we didn’t make it tough on ourselves 😉

Let’s tackle the blog post title first.  As I’ve blogged about before, when writing blog post titles the cardinal sin you can make is to simply summarize the post.  I think a lot of bloggers do that because they view the blog post title as an almost ‘throwaway’ item.  But the reality is, if your blog post title stinks, it kills the chance that anyone will click to read the post.

For example, let’s say you wanted to write a post about a recent study you had done on what type of tweets get retweeted on Twitter.  Let’s also say your research determined that there were 5 specific ways to increase the number of RTs you get.

So if we wanted to write a blog post title that simply summarized the blog post, we might go with ‘How to Get More Retweets’.  Because that’s a summary in the post in just a few words.

But Dan Zarrella actually did the study.  Look at the blog post title he chose: [Infographic]: 5 Scientifically Proven Ways to Get More ReTweets.  Isn’t that a great title?  Here’s what I like about the title:

1 – It makes a specific claim that the blog post backs up.  Dan’s research found 5 specific ways to get RTs, so that’s in the title.  Instantly makes it clickable.

2 – It solves a problem.  Want to know how to get more RTs?  Here’s 5 proven ways to do so.  This makes the blog post not only more clickable on social media sites, but also it helps with search engine results.  Now the one caveat to this approach is that by including an infographic, Dan isn’t including many words in the post, so that might hurt its ability to rank in search results versus a blog post someone else writes on how to get more retweets.

3 – It has the shiny word INFOGRAPHIC in the title!  This doesn’t really help with search engines, but does make the blog post do better when shared on social media sites.

 

Now I had to do a bit of revising to the title for this post.  Originally, I was going to go with ‘How to Write Posts That Google and Twitter Will Love’.  That’s ok, but then I realized that it wasn’t specific enough, and it was leaning a bit toward simply summarizing.  So I changed it to ‘How to Write BETTER BLOG Posts That Google and Twitter Will Love’.

Why the change?  Think about it, what are most people more likely to search for ‘how do I write better blog posts’ or ‘how do I write posts’?  So by adding ‘better’ and ‘blog’ to posts, I make the title more descriptive, and more search-friendly.

But I also need to make sure that the content of the post actually backs up the title, plus it helps if the same terms in the title, are in the post.  Note how many times the phrase ‘blog post’ is in this post?  Several times, and especially near the beginning of this blog post (see there it is again!).  That’s a cue to Google that the content of the blog post is consistent with the title.

So if you are wanting to optimize your blog posts for both search engines and social media, keep these tips in mind:

1 – Pick a catchy blog post title that’s also relevant to the blog post.  You want something that immediately grabs the attention of the reader because on social media sites, you’ll probably only have a few seconds to grab the reader’s attention before they move onto the next tweet.

2 – Focus on relevant keywords and phrases in the blog post title as well as the blog post itself.  Note that the term ‘blog post’ is in the title as well as the post, several times.  That’s a keyword phrase that I am focusing on because I want this blog post to rank well when someone searches for this term.

3 – Putting ‘Twitter’ in your blog post title gets you more retweets.  Dan proved this in his blog post linked above 😉

 

UPDATE: To prove the point that Social Media traffic (especially Twitter) can be fleeting, 20 mins ago Dan Zarrella RTed this post, and within 5 minutes there were 60 people online here, according to Google Analytics. That’s a record for this blog.  15 mins later, that number had fallen all the way to 8.

Traffic from Twitter is fleeting, if you are only optimizing your posts to grab traffic from Twitter, you can get a short-term bang, but you might miss the long-term views.  It’s best to optimize for both Search and Social.

NOTHER UPDATE: I just did a Google search for the exact phrase ‘How to Write Better Blog Posts’.  This post was published about 5 hours ago, and already it’s the #3 result on the internet for this term, out of over 50,000.  Not too shabby and with Dan’s RTing example above shows that this post is doing well for both Search and Social.

How to write better blog posts

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How I Used Twitter to Increase My Blog’s Traffic by 60% in Two Weeks

Hey y’all, I wanted to update you on my progress on using Twitter as a tool to grow my blog’s traffic.  As I posted last week, I was able to increase my blog’s traffic by 41% in one week by using this method:

1 – Every morning starting at 8am, I would RT a link to a blog post/article every 10 mins, from 8am-10am.

2 – At 8am I would link to the blog post I wrote the previous day.  At 9am I would link to the blog post I wrote THAT day.  I would link to that day’s blog post again at noon and 3pm.

3 – During the day I would link to other interesting blog posts and articles I found or saw other people sharing.

That’s it.  But the main thing is that I started sharing links from 8am-10am, when most people are settling into their desks and getting the work day started.  Next week I might change the timing to coincide with lunch, maybe do it from 11am-1pm.

Anyway, here’s the traffic results I saw.  As I posted last week, traffic increased 41% over the previous week.  Last week, traffic increased another 14% over the previous week’s level:

blog traffic, twitter, increasing traffic, retweets, google analytics

As you can see, big jump in the 2nd week, and a smaller, but still respectable increase last week.  I was honestly hoping to see last week’s traffic increase by 10% over the previous week, so seeing a 14% gain was a pleasant surprise.

Now, by itself, saying traffic increased by 14% last week really isn’t enough to warrant a new blog post.  But something very interesting happened Monday night and I wanted to share that with you.  As I was watching the Daytona 500, at around 9pm or so, there was a bizarre series of events.  First, there was a wreck, and that brought out a caution, and a few trucks came onto the track to clean up the debris.  But as one of the cars (not involved in the wreck) was driving around the track, suddenly something ‘broke’ in its steering, and the car slid out of control, and directly into one of the trucks that was on the track cleaning up the mess!  And this particular truck just so happened to be carrying 200 gallons of jet fuel, so when the car slid into it, it immediately resulted in a huge burst of flames, and it was a miracle it didn’t explode.

But this meant that NASCAR now had an even bigger mess to clean up, and it took about an hour to get the track cleaned up and ready to finish the race.  Two interesting things happened during that hour.  The first is that during the delay, driver Brad Keselowski, who was smart enough to have his phone with him inside his car, took his car out and began live-tweeting the cleanup and what was happening.  Fox, which was carrying the Daytona 500, made several references on air to Brad tweeting, and Brad picked up over 50,000 Twitter followers during the delay.  Great example of Brad capitalizing on the delay.

But when the fire for the truck with the jet fuel was finally put out, it had created a huge sticky mess that needed to be cleaned up.  So how did NASCAR get rid of all that gunk?  By bringing box after box of Tide detergent onto the track!  Tide got an incredibly fortuitous ‘product placement’ during one of the biggest sporting events of the year, and they were a very popular topic among Twitter users at this time.

The problem was, Tide wasn’t active on Twitter at this time, and as I blogged about, their last tweet was several hours prior to the wreck.  It appeared that Tide had stopped tweeting around 5pm, and wasn’t monitoring Twitter that night, and didn’t notice all the free publicity they were getting until the following morning when they finally checked Twitter.

A definite missed opportunity for the brand, and I quickly wrote  a blog post Monday night (while the race was still going) about how Keselowski took advantage of the delay to group his Twitter following, but Tide totally dropped the ball by (apparently) not even monitoring Twitter during the race.  Now I was hoping that this post would be one of the first ones on the events, so I did make sure to optimize it for certain keywords like Twitter, Tide, Daytona 500 and Brad Keselowski, because I was hoping it would pick up some search traffic.  And it definitely did, here’s what my traffic looked like here on Monday (Note the spike at the end of the day when the post went live):

tide, daytona 500, brad keselowski

That spike was almost completely due to search traffic, as everyone was watching Fox mention how many followers Keselowski had picked up, and they were Googling to see what had happened.  Luckily, my post was one of the first ones on the story, in fact I scooped Mashable by 2 hours 😉

And the next morning when ESPN’s Sports Business Reporter Kristi Dosh was doing research for a post she was doing on the race’s events, my post was the #2 result she found for Tide and Daytona 500.  So that led to her contacting and interviewing me for her piece, which ran on ESPN’s site later on Tuesday.  So being proactive and blogging the race’s turn of events not only led to a nice bump in traffic for me on Monday night and Tuesday morning, it also led to me getting interviewed by ESPN.  Not too shabby!

The goal for this week is to again increase traffic by 10% over last week’s levels.  To do that, I’ll need to average almost 600 visitors a day, which would be almost double the traffic I saw here two weeks ago.  But it does prove that by blogging more, and leveraging a site where you are active like Twitter to help promote your blog, that you can quickly grow your blog’s traffic.

If any of you have started using this method for sharing and promoting content on Twitter to drive traffic back to your blog, what have your results been?