Over the past two weeks we’ve taken a look at different aspects of copywriting, including aspects such as the value of good copy, outsourcing your content, and tools to make your content better. To round out the series I thought I’d touch on auto-generated content and how to make it better.

To be clear, using auto-generated text will fall into the gray-hat to black-hat side of the equation.  Again understand that it may be technically in compliance with the concept of unique content, but it isn’t what Google really has in mind when they say “create unique content.” So don’t mix it with your good stuff and don’t come crying to me if it gets you banned or penalized.

The following information is provided for entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as SEO advice…

The problem with most auto-generated text is that it’s crap and easy to spot. People take a mad libs approach to it by jumbling up some words and hoping to cross the magic threshold of unique-enough for Google. So we start out with something like this:

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a great family vacation idea. There are many family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a great vacation.

The most common step is then to go through and looks for nouns, adjectives and verbs you can replace/swap out. Depending on the tool you use, the format varies, but the one I’m using has this format {word1|word2|word3}. The program randomly chooses one of the words to put in that spot. So you might end up with something like this:

Taking your family to {Walt Disney World|Disney World} is a {great|terrific|fun} family vacation {idea|destination|location}. There are {many|a lot|quite a few} family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do {your research|some research|some investigating} before hand you’ll have a {great|wonderful|fun filled} vacation.

When we run it you’ll get permeutations like this:

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a fun family vacation destination. There are quite a few family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a great vacation.

Taking your family to Disney World is a terrific family vacation idea. There are a lot family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a fun filled vacation.

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a great family vacation destination. There are quite a few family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do some investigating before hand you’ll have a fun filled vacation.

While there are some variation between them, there’s really not enough for it to be effective at all. We need to make it better, incorporate more flexibility, so here’s what I do (hypothetically speaking of course):

• Break the text in short declarative sentences or idea chunks
• Rewrite each of the chunks entirely with 3 or 4 variation
• Vary the way each sentence starts

With those tips, we’d end up with something like this:

{Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a {great|fun |exciting|excellent} family {vacation|trip} {idea|spot|location}|{{A great|A fun|An exciting}} {destination|location|spot} for your family {vacation|trip} is {Walt Disney World|Disney World|the Magic Kingdom}|{Walt Disney World|Disney World|The Magic Kingdom} in Orlando Florida is a {great|fun|exciting} family vacation {destination|location|spot}}. {There are many family friendly hotels like the|Choose a family friendly hotel like the|Try to select a family friendly hotel like the|Select a family friendly hotel like the} {Contemporary Resort|Polynesian Resort|Caribbean Beach Club|Wilderness Lodge} {where you can stay|as your location|for your trip}. {If you  do your research {before hand|before you go|ahead of time} you’ll have a {great|fun|exciting} {vacation|trip}|Make sure you check for {discount vacation packages|travel deals|promotional vacation offers|vacation coupon codes} before you {leave for|go on|depart on} your trip|Try to spend some time before you {go|leave|depart} {checking|looking|searching} for {travel deals|travel discounts|vacation packages|vacation delas} {so you can save money|so you’ll save some money} while having a {great|fun|exciting} {time|vacation}}.

I know it looks like a bit of mess but here’s the output:

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a exciting family trip. Try to select a family friendly hotel like the Wilderness Lodge as your location. Try to spend some time before you leave checking for travel discounts so you can save money while having a great time.

Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida is a fun family vacation spot. Select a family friendly hotel like the Caribbean Beach Club for your trip. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a exciting vacation.

An exciting spot for your family trip is the Magic Kingdom. Choose a family friendly hotel like the Contemporary Resort for your trip. If you do your research before you go you’ll have a great vacation.

Disney World in Orlando Florida is a great family vacation location. Select a family friendly hotel like the Contemporary Resort for your trip. Make sure you check for promotional vacation offers before you leave for your trip.

While the text isn’t great you can see that it is much more unique than the first run. If you tweaked it a little more, the results could be further improved, especially over multiple paragraphs. Some other ideas include:

• Don’t always link to the same website/page–make that vary with each run
• Vary your anchor text
• Don’t always include a link back to you–obfuscate your intent
• Vary the order of paragraphs or items in a list

To be clear the tactics mentioned above are considered high risk and only to be used if you understand and are prepared to deal with the consequences. No whining allowed. Auto-generated can have value for an SEO, but it’s at the bottom of the link pyramid, not at the top. And never mix the quality content with the bad content in one adsense account. Smart pricing will kill you.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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It took Leo Tolstoy six years to craft the 460,000-word War and Peace. A cheap copywriting service could churn out as many words for your website for just $9,200 (at 2 cents a word) over the course of a few weeks.

Added to this, standards of literacy and attention spans on the web are plummeting.

• We’re all illiterate More than half of American college students nearing graduation can’t understand the arguments in newspaper editorials.
• Google fixes our grammar anyway Google mostly ignores punctuation and these days it corrects spellings and shows synonyms. There’s less and less incentive for people to search using correct grammar or spelling or to even think about the search terms they use.
• Your brand’s probably invisible People don’t  know which website they’re on half the time, anyway. If you’ve never seen people in usability testing fail to realise they’ve moved to a different site, check out these people trying to log into facebook last week on readwriteweb.

Given all this, what’s the point in investing in well-commissioned, well-researched, well-written, well-edited, and well-subbed copy for, say, 60 cents a word?

At that rate, War and Peace would have cost $276,000 to commission.

Despite this, here’s when you should use an experienced, pricey copywriter, rather than a value service or an agency with claims like:

• “our inhouse copy writers will produces unique, keyword balanced content …”
• “[we're] skilled in the art of SEO Copywriting as is evidence by our clients top search engine rankings”?

(Really – Google them if you don’t believe me).

When to pay professional rates

When you need expertise

If you want your site to demonstrate expertise (or passion for that matter), you’re going to have to pay.

First up, you need some proper expertise. You don’t want to end up like eHow where people avoid its pages in search results because of bad experiences – such as an article on how to cure a cold by someone whose credentials turned out to be “having an English degree and loving to write for fun, but I’ve never made a profit yet”.

But you’re not just paying for the expertise – most writers can knock out a quick “how to” with a bit of background research.

Real experts know their subject in depth, can demonstrate this, and have lots to say.

The problem is usually getting them to shut up.

I’m not one of these people who reckons there’s some ideal length for a web page of about 400 to 500 words. The ideal length is however long it takes to say what needs saying (and SEOmoz found that 1,800+ word posts were more likely to earn links).

The issue is saying what you need to say in the fewest words. People read 25% slower on the web. And for every 100 words you add, only 18 are read on average.

So the trick with expertise is to have genuinely insightful copy that’s edited to as few words as possible – and, for obvious reasons,  few copywriting services  charge on the basis of giving you fewer words than you asked for …

If you want unique content that gets people to stay

The key measure of SEO is not rankings or traffic. It’s conversion (however you choose to measure it). So the actual cost of content doesn’t matter – what matters is your return. You can’t tell whether cheap copy is better value without experimenting.

Also, you need to ask what’s going to make your copy do well in the search results, and whether you want visitors to return? Have a look round the competition – there are 30,900 articles on ehow.com about ipod playlists, for instance, 1,550 about the ipad, 28,000 about changing a tire, and 36,300 about face painting.

Let’s take an ehow car-tire article at random – this one was 2nd in their on-site search. You think anyone’s going to naturally link to an article that essentially says “take the tire off, then put the new one on”? You think anyone’s going to think “Blimey, that ehow article was the money. I am so going back to ehow next time I need to know something”?

Yes, you can throw up some cheap, me-too copy, build links to it and wait for traffic to click on your affiliate links. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But to build an audience – repeat visitors and people who value your brand, want your newsletter, and follow you on twitter – you have to give them quality and you have to be distinctive.

Your tone of voice matters

There’s something about the guidelines for web writing that drains the life from copy. Take this example, which Demand Media were showcasing on their home page (is this really the best they’ve got?).

Leaving aside the apparently broken return key and missing bullet-list button, is that dry, monotonous, soul-destroying copy really how you want your brand to express itself?

I’m sure there are some great writers in cheap content agencies. But they’ve got no incentive to write creatively, or even to write like a human. Most, though, have probably had drummed into them some half-baked writing-for-the-web guidelines presented as if they were universal truths, without thinking about the context – and they are desperate to strip out any adjectives or signs of human life from their writing because, hey, that’s what everyone wants on the web, right

If you pay by the word, that’s what you get – words. If you pay for tone, you get tone. Last time I checked, cheap copywriting services were all missing a checkbox where you could pay extra for signs of human life.

(If you’ve ever referred to the contents of the folder containing your draft web copy as “assets”, you probably won’t get this point.)

Your press releases have a purpose

Press releases should be judged on their ROI. Why are you putting out a press release? Let’s assume you’ve got something newsworthy to say – and you want journalists to pick it up, because you want to earn links or promote your brand.

Here are two options:

• Pay someone who knows nothing about your company, the market you’re operating in, the journalists involved or their publications. Get them to write something. Maybe you can stick it on some online PR site? Then you can start a news section on your site, too. No one will pick it up, and you’ll go off the whole press-release idea. In a few months, anyone clicking the news section of your site will think nothing has happened at head office for ages.
• Or do some proper research into who is likely to cover the story and how you can grab their interest – and pay to craft the release with care to appeal to those people.

I’ll let you do the math on that one (as I believe you say in America)

Quality costs

Adweek wrote in December about how:

“the race is on to use data and automation to produce content that people (and advertisers) want at as low a price as possible.”

One of the commenters despaired:

“Every time I click on one of [AOL's] business stories, their “content” is filled with obvious typos, grammatical errors and completely unfocused, unorganized writing throughout. How can you trust anything written in a story so poorly put together? AOL is starting to resemble a cheap blog produced in some kid’s basement vs a professional content provider. “

The problem for you is that if you’re commissioning cheap content, you’re probably not investing in editing or subbing. (For that matter, you’ve probably not given that much thought to what you want in the first place, and how appropriate it is.)

These stages cost money too. If you skip them, you’re not going to improve the quality of what you produce.

Journalism.co.uk, the UK site devoted to journalism, recently worked out that it cost them £37 ($58) on average to produce an online article, and estimated that a national newspaper would pay nearer £400 ($630). That is what quality, original copy really costs if you want it done properly.

Which end of the pay scale is suitable for your website?

Short-form content is even harder

Hemmingway famously came up with this six-word story:

“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

Similar attempts by copycat storywriters are invariably lame. But short-form copy can be the most compelling. Whether you want to just do it, get the best a man can get or are after the real thing, you’re not going to get a great six-word slogan for 12 cents.

In fact, for a given subject X, you’ll probably end up with something with “matters” at the end. Subject-X matters – get it? It means “it’s about subject-X” and that “subject-X is important”. Brilliant.

(That’s not to say the professionals always get it right – Warner Bros managed to use “Titans will clash” as the tagline for, er, Clash of the Titans. Inspiring. And UK retailer Dixons used “the last place you want to go” as its slogan, hoping to suggest that you’d visit its shops after checking online. Or as most people read it, that it was somewhere to steer well clear of.)

Want to see this in action? Dustin Curtis demonstrated how, in 4 steps from “I’m on twitter” to “You should follow me on twitter here”, he increased clickthroughs by 173%. That is copy advice worth paying for.

The same applies to meta descriptions. They affect clickthrough rates – so don’t make the work-experience guy type them mechanically into a spreadsheet. Lavish the same care and attention to them as you would to a magazine front-cover strapline.

Again, if you pitched a need for 20 150-character meta descriptions to a cheap content agency then they won’t be that interested, and very little thought will go into it.

Strategy? Huh?

One of the advantages of a professional, experienced copywriter is that they are likely to ask questions. Why is a blog a good idea for your site? What’s the long-term plan for your content? How should the content be structured? Have you thought about the artwork? Is your site structure ideal?

If a cheap copy service asked any of these questions, they’d cost themselves money. As the answers will often be, “You’re right – no one will be remotely interested in our blog”. Or “No, we haven’t given any thought to how people are gong to find this stuff – we thought we could throw it up and maybe someone would give it a twitter for us. My nephew’s on twitter, you see. Time for a rethink.”

To sum up

I’m not obsessed with ‘content-is-king’. The internet isn’t a monarchy. You can write great content, and no one will ever see it if you don’t have a way to get it found. Yet you can scrape other people’s content and clean up.

Nor am I opposed to platforms that match low-cost writers with those who need words (it’s easy to find examples of bad writing from content mills – but that doesn’t exactly prove anything as you can do the same on mainstream media sites.)

It’s horses for courses. The key when commissioning content is to think about what it’s for. If it can affect your brand, you want to build an audience, or if you want something unique, pay for quality. If not, then don’t.

Right, now what rate did I agree with Michael for these 2,000 words … Eh? What’s a guest post?

Malcolm Coles wrote this post – he does internet content strategy. You should follow him on twitter here. He’d quite like some more links to his UK website on setting up a business – as it’s currently a shining example of how good content without any promotion gets no visitors.

photo credit: Photos8.com

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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What Bestselling Authors Know About Writing Titles

They vary by genre, but the majority of bestselling authors and editors return to the same hooks time and again to routinely sell obscene amounts of books. On the recommendation of Clayton Makepeace, a celebrity in the web’s direct response copywriting world, I decided to visit a bookstore and peruse the titles on their shelves and take note of what titles grabbed me.

As Makepeace explains:

“Just step through the front doors and take a deep breath: Can’t you just SMELL the money?

“This year, we Americans will spend considerably more than $30 BILLION on books and magazines.

“For the numerically challenged among us, that’s thirty thousand MILLION dollars!

[...]

“As they’d say here in North Carolina, ‘That’s some powerful BIG binnus!’

“Now, with that many shekels at stake, you’d expect the competition to be ferocious. You’d be right.

“Take a look around the store. How many book and magazine titles do you figure you see? 10,000? 20,000?

“Guess again, oh Prescient One. This is one of the bigger temples.

“You are in the presence of nearly 200,000 titles! Lay one copy of each end-to-end, and they’d stretch out for some 25 miles!

“Imagine being the marketing guy or gal whose product is only one of 200,000 competing for your prospects’ attention …

“… AND being limited in your quest for A-I-D-A (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to a single thought that will fit on a book jacket – or worse – on its spine!”

(I’d just like to point out, for those of you self-conscious about pumping schlock by the barrel, that there are at least 5 different writing style tactics used in those few lines.)

I selected the following titles for their brass-knuckles-in-your-face aggressiveness in calling for attention. They’re augmented by some selections found on Amazon’s 2009 Best Seller List.

Self-Help Category – Hook: Improve Your Life

- How To Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons On Finding Hope In Unexpected Places

- How To Talk To Anyone – 92 Tips

- Finish Your Old Year Wrong! Hangover Survival Guide

- Eat Out & Still Lose Weight

General – Hook: Curiosity About The Unknown

- Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

- Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, SuperAthletes And The Greatest Race The World Has Never Seen

- The True and Outstanding Adventures Of The Hunt Sisters

- Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story Of A Band Of US Soldiers Who Rode To Victory In Afghanistan

- The Cure: How A Father Raised $100 Million And Bucked The Medical Establishment In A Quest To Save His Kids

This category particularly fascinates me, so I thought I’d add in my grain of salt as to why these titles work. I don’t know that you can generalize to all books in this category, but the following traits stand out to me at least in the above set of titles.

1. We love stories. We grow up with them, science has proven we remember them better and so on. These books promise a story (or several)…

But not just any story!

2. These books promise a remarkable, quirky or otherwise unexpected story, often explicitly – with words like “outstanding adventures,” “extraordinary story,” and “quest”.

What really strikes me though is the variety of  implicit ways the titles make the promise of such a special story.

• “Patriotic prostitutes” makes me think, “Huh? That’s an unusual adjective to associate to prostitutes… “Global cooling” and “suicide bombers” buying life insurance are equally quirky. The book Spunk and Bite that I referred to in my previous post on schlock explains that to achieve this stylistic element you just need an unusual adjectives noun-pairing. The trick is to find a pair that isn’t contrived.

• “Hidden” and “the world has never seen” plays on our near-universal desire to know secrets, as any unimaginative marketing salesletter-page guru will tell you.

3. There seems to be a thread of ‘belonging’ or what Maslow’s hierarchy of needs addresses as “social needs” – the human desire for relationships with others.

Patriotic prostitutes belong to a nation.

A hidden tribe – well, that’s pretty explicit.

Sisters have family bonds.

We see a ‘band of soldiers’. Not just a group – an organized team with links between themselves.

The father was out saving his kids.

4. This may just be me, but I think there’s a bit of self-actualization (the peak of Maslow’s pyramid) hinted at or made explicit in each title. I’ll let you guys look them over and figure out the details.

Politics – Hook: Prove What They Believe

- Hot, Flat And Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America

- Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America (by Ann Coulter, naturally)

- The War On Success: How The Obama Administration Is Shattering The American Dream

- Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You And Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists And Union Bosses

- An Invonvenient Book: Real Solutions To The World’s Biggest Problems

Essentially, these titles just repeat back to people what they believe or are concerned about. The right wing titles (which outnumbered the left wing books in the store I visited) also aim to boil readers’ blood.

The Obamanomics title repeats back the following widely held views. Many people are disgusted by the bonuses Wall Street paid itself from the average American’s taxes, which anger just boils even further when these same people hypocritically argue for fiscal restraint as concerns other Americans e.g. in terms of providing health insurance to the poor.

Thomas Friedman’s title does the same sort of preaching to the choir (“we need a green revolution”), and adds in the national-aspirational bit in a way that seems to simultaneously strike the ‘belonging’ and ’self-actualization’ chords.

Miscellanea:

- The Long Shadow Of the JFK Assassination – I liked the shadow image

- Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road From Glory To Disaster – I think this addresses our curiosity and incredulity at the near-failures of the Big Three.

- Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer – And How To Prevent Getting It In The First Place – This seems to be another hook targeted at incredulity, combined with a self-help hook. “Cure” cancer? Prevent it? Awesome!

Conclusion

If you’re ever rocking away in your chair trying to knit up a title to fit your piece, a trip to the bookstore might be just the inspiration you need!

Gab Goldenberg wrote this post on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, an online marketing company in Dublin offering savvy search engine optimisation and web design.

photo credit: Jean & Nathalie

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Google has long been an advocate of “build great content”; however, in reality, it’s turning into “build great content … and if we like it we’ll take it from you, put it on our pages, and deprive you of that traffic. Without compensation.” Strong accusations, sure, but I’m willing to step up to the plate, put my money where my mouth is, and show you how it’s being done.

Let’s say you live in the Miami area or are thinking of taking a vacation there. You might want to bring your family to the Miami Seaquarium, and it might be a good idea to find out exactly where they are and what hours they are open. So what do you do? Fire up your browser, head on over to Google, and search for [seaquarium miami]. You should get a result that’s something like this:

So what’s the problem? First of all, Google gives away the hours right in the SERP. There’s no need for the people to visit the website. While I don’t know for a fact that traffic growth is a success metric for the Miami Seaquarium, I think it’s a safe assumption. By denying the Miami Seaquarium that traffic they deny them the opportunity to upsell visitors to the upcoming aquarium programs. Now Googlers might counter by saying that it’s all about “providing a better user experience.” Maybe at the next conference I’ll improve the movie going experience of some Googlers by telling them the surprise ending of the latest movie before they see it. I mean, I saved them money and two hours of their time, right? That’s gotta be a better user experience.

See that review and link to “more information”? Click either of those and, instead of being taken to the Miami Seaqurium website, you’re taken to the Google map listing page. Google stole the information they wanted from the Miami Seaqurium, hijacked the traffic for themselves, and put them on a page with contextual advertising that puts more money in Google ’s pockets. The only person that gets a better user experience out of that is someone whose paycheck directly results from that advertising. Really this is nothing more than a scraper adsense website designed to hijack traffic away from place it should be going. Because Google controls the SERP’s they make sure they are at the top, guaranteeing clicks, traffic, and revenue from that page.

This is almost the exact behavior I described in my debate with Danny Sullivan a few weeks ago on Sphinn. I stand by my position that giving Google the copyright to the information for free right out of the gate is the same as giving them permission to steal and develop a money making operation based on your labors without giving you any of the action.

Want another example of Google stealing? Sure, here we go …

Let’s say I decide I want to go to nice steakhouse for dinner. I know there’s a Bryant & Cooper here on Long Island. I wonder if it’s still any good, so I type in [bryant & cooper steakhouse long island reviews]. Here’s what I get:

So it’s got four out of five stars based on 48 reviews. That’s pretty good. I can call and make reservation right away and my mission is accomplished.

So what’s my beef here (pun intended)? Another long-standing Google suggestion is to build a website, service, or product that people want to use and place value on. This is what’s called a Point of Differentiation or POD. One way to do that is with user-submitted reviews. I wonder where Google got those 48 reviews? Let’s  check it out.

Let’s see…there are some reviews from Google, but the majority are from Zagat and CitySearch. Let’s review. Google says build great content and a service people want to use, which Zagat and CitySearch did. Then Google went and stole that content from them and put some adsense advertising next to it. If we go back to the original SERP and scroll down a bit … yep, we’ll find Zagat and CitySearch. Google hijacked that traffic, and those two sites got nothing to show for it.

What you need to do is ask yourself a question. Do you think Google is going to use less information or are they going to take more? Are they going to decide they can better serve the customers in your market by stealing your best content and putting it on their servers, where they collect the ad revenue, while they kick you to the curb faster than a no-good, two-timing, philandering spouse? Do you feel confident betting against the all-consuming data borg? Well do ya, punk?

The problem is that, as SEO’s, we’re the canaries in coal mine. We’ll notice trouble before it happens. Probably a few of us are going to have our websites killed by Google before the main stream press and Government notices. But the sooner we see the truth for what it is and stop burying our heads in the sand, the sooner something will happen to change it.

You may have friends who work for Google, but Google is not your friend. Google is like the feudal lord who grows rich off of the peons, serfs, and indentured servants who labor in the fields. No matter how hard you work you will always serve your digital master.

Update Patrick Sexton’s Video Response

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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If you pay attention to the ads that monetize most of the web, you’ve likely noticed a trend towards ads that promote content. Glance at these nifty alternatives to traditional banner ads, make some observations of your own, and then join me again at the end for my own analysis.

Is web 2.0 moving marketers to view community-building is a desirable goal?

AMEX

The AMEX ads above are the strongest affirmative answer to that question. The ads’ main goal is to drive entrepreneurs to AMEX’s Open Forum initiative, where the business owners can pick up expert tips to manage their businesses. Not only that, but AMEX has developed a ‘Connectodex’ service that helps SMB owners make connections amongst themselves.

In exchange, AMEX gets brand awareness with excellent targeting, filling the top of the sales funnel. They’ve also got a direct response effort going on at the site itself that succeeds in balancing AMEX’s revenue goals with visitors’ learning goals. You might have also noticed the subtle ‘Apply Now’ call to action in the banner’s upper right corner that ties into this.

Neutrogena

This co-branded ad with the Glam network tries to target 20- and 30-somethings, judging by the models and the text of the ad. And instead of talking about “me,” the ad focuses on “you” by offering tips presumably geared towards their audience’s interest.

I didn’t click the ad (I already know how to stay fabulous, duh), but I’m guessing by the co-branding with Glam that Neutrogena’s chosen to answer my question in the negative. They don’t want to build their own community of 20-something women.

Chase / Visa / Marriott Rewards

The ad targets an  affluent demographic of travelling businessmen who would presumably care for a hotel-rewards card with content that solicits them by name, as with AMEX’s focus on business owners. But the approach appears to be the same as with Neutrogena – sponsor content without hosting/ “owning” it.

(As an aside, I think the particular piece of content they’re sponsoring is brilliant given the bulls-eye targeting it affords Chase/Visa/Marriott.)

CLDS / Mormon.org

The Church of Latter Day Saints (CLDS) has a pretty unique situation:

• They have the express offline goal of bringing you into their community
• Their website features more content, just like AMEX
• The website’s format isn’t so much of a traditional online community where you have a multilateral conversation, but more of a guidance counsellor office type of place where you can put your questions to a missionary 1-on-1

As with other lead gen campaigns, the Mormons seem to have concluded that offering content and then gradually nurturing the lead is more effective than going for an immediate sale. This is reflected in their ‘Find a Meetinghouse [a Church]‘ call to action getting secondary treatment below the fold.

But by promoting their content (particularly with the clever flash-animated instant messaging  format), the CLDS is clearly promoting its content to build community.

What about SEO?

The lessons from these campaigns aren’t unique to banner ad campaigns.

When you’re buying or building links, you can be quite successful going with a content marketing approach. And if you own the community, you get the opportunity for both brand awareness/top of mind campaigning and your own customized direct response package. Which means you can be more aggressive with your SEO (eg by buying links) as well as reduce your dependency on search traffic. Inhouse community-building FTW!

{|- Last second update -|}

It appears the clairvoyant John Battelle called this as a 2009 prediction. In fairness, his Federated Media works with many of the companies employing this strategy, as he reveals in his 2009 Predictions: How Did I Do? post. Also, I recall Aaron Wall highlighting the foundation for this trend – advertisers creating their own content sites [not to be confused with website copy] – but it seems that hasn’t stopped them from advertising as Aaron suggested; instead they’re just advertising content.

Gab Goldenberg wrote this post for Red Fly Marketing, an Irish search engine optimisation and online advertising company. You can find Gab on Twitter @GabGoldenberg.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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