In this Marketing Over Coffee learn :
How to blog for SEO juice, some killer wordpress plugins, and a Super Bowl Ad wrap-up. All this and more…
Show length 23:28
Brought to you by MarketingProfs.com
00:52 Christopher Penn is alive, political lists, websites and content management systems
03:34 Superbowl Observations, Miller Ad rocks, a bad year for ads
07:09 Sports Slogan Squatting, 19-0 Perfect Season Jinx, More on Sports Marketing
09:05 Meatball Sundae contest winners
09:27 Bending the blog arrow of time, Google Sandbox?
11:12 Killer WordPress plugins: aLinks, Popularity Contest and Search Meter by Alex King, Google Sitemap tool
13:55 What are Google Sitemaps?
16:10 my oovoo day event, come talk to us, bring any questions or just chat, best day is Monday at noon. First 5 to sign and tell me get a free coffee card
18:48 Chris’ Super Tuesday Video gets picked up by CNN, the sleeping giants of media awaken, blatant plug for The M Show, and yes – podcasting is back!
Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network
Get your coffee delivered!
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
Unknown Speaker 0:19
Good morning and welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn and our show today brought to you by marketing props over marketingprofs comm you can check out their forums and always get the latest news on what’s going on with marketing and some always helpful tips over there.
Christopher Penn 0:34
What’s the decent newsletter? email newsletter?
Unknown Speaker 0:36
Yes, the email newsletter which has has benefited us we’ve had plenty of incoming traffic which has been very cool if you’re coming to us from marketingprofs Welcome aboard and feel free to subscribe over at iTunes. Okay, so all right, well, welcome back. Of course I’m alive. Yes, survived after sleeping off the influenza. The New England crud that goes around So us, we’re talking about politics. And in fact, I have to say I haven’t checked the results. We hit Super Tuesday yesterday. And I got out to vote but have not heard what the final outcome was. So off the check this morning, what’s going on with that, but we talked about political tips last week, and I missed the huge one that, you know, the softball that I could just smacked out of the park was the number one thing that politicians do that everybody needs to also do is it’s all about the list, you know, you have to build your list, get the names, get the email, so you can build a relationship with these people. That’s number one right off the top of the
Christopher Penn 1:30
chart, you know, who’s got a really good website is brock obama. If you look at the it’s a social networking, it’s social networking software, I don’t know whether he purchased it or just had it developed or whatever. But it is really, really well done so that it’s more than just a campaign site. There’s a point system built into it. So like, like a frequent flyer points thing almost where for different activities, you get different points. And it doesn’t really do anything like that you can’t redeem them for anything, but it does give you a relative position. Among other site users as to, I guess, the most ardent supporter, you know, based on the number of points that you get a point for logging and get a point for referring a friend get a point from political posting of a blog post on there, but it’s a neat idea, because it incentivizes people who are Arden supporters already to can you be the the number one supporter on the website?
Unknown Speaker 2:21
Right, yeah, some positive reinforcement for hitting all the pages for chewing through all the content and hit the content blog about it and stuff
Christopher Penn 2:27
like that. There’s there’s a whole bunch of different actions that have different point values tied to them.
Unknown Speaker 2:33
Yeah, well, and that’s you know, and that’s just a trend that is continuing the whole idea of using either content management or even just blogging software as your your corporate website because it gives you so much more flexibility and functionality, you know, you can add on all the widgets and different things that are here. And of course, it makes it easier to pass off administration of the site to you know, if you’ve got somebody anybody that can edit a blog page, which is, you know, so much easier than figuring added, you know, FTP files up to the server and all that kind of stuff.
Christopher Penn 3:03
Yeah, it was the other thing that they talked about lists the one thing it does that gets that a the I think a well designed site like that does very well is it gets around the whole issue of spam filters because you’ve got the people coming to your site then to you know, participate in the art in ones the the your one percenters
Unknown Speaker 3:21
Yeah, yeah, you’re pulling them and it’s there they’re actually
Christopher Penn 3:24
hired 100% of messages get through to those folks
Unknown Speaker 3:27
are calling for the content as opposed to hoping the push gets to there. I get Okay, so the Superbowl last weekend you know, kind of the holy grail for our 32nd spot folks what if you’re into that kind of marketing this was the the ultimate anything jump out? Yeah, the curse the ultimate, you know, did anything stick? Have you heard any buzz, anything go through with it.
Christopher Penn 3:49
Um, there were two ads that I actually remember. And the one thing I remember was on Twitter, the Twitter stream during the game of all a lot of us going, man, there’s been a lot of fire at agencies on Monday. See as we’re, as all as a group, not particularly memorable, not particularly clever, compared to years past and just for $2.7 billion, they went through. They went through a lot of money for not a lot of bang, I there was the air train net, which was pretty good. The one point that we know so it was really bad about this. He was there was a lack of taglines of catchphrases that you know Monday morning everyone’s saying like, Can you just pass it the Budweiser is wasa was the the portable content you could take out everybody could say everyone did say it about three months they were that’s all everyone anyone ever said. Right? But um, there was a distinct lack of memorable takeaways for me anyway. Because this uses the Will Ferrell commercial, but like no sock one that’s not it.
Unknown Speaker 4:50
That’s Yes Will Ferrell pushing the the movie was was the the best thing that I saw actually ended up being the day after And I’ll have a link to in the show notes. And I found it Joseph Jaffe had point had a pointer to it. But the day after Miller, just Miller Street, Miller beer, did a commercial. And they’ve had this series of commercials of this, this big dude who is the guy who stocks the liquor stores, you know, he’s going around with this truck and carrying the beers and he just kind of gives common sense wisdom. Well, he had a whole it’s at least 30 seconds, maybe 60 seconds ran on all the commercials from the Superbowl. So he talked about all the commercials. He’s like, you know, this one was ridiculous. And yeah, I’m remember just when the lens was great. He was talking about, you know, that commercial where the lady’s heart jumped out of her chest, and then the one where the spider ate the fly there. Those are some great effective anti drug commercials. And the other guys are going I think that was for a job search site or something. And there’s just like that awkward silence like Oh, okay. And yeah, you just all the stuff that was kind of Korean. Yeah, not not a lot. You said no takeaways, which was surprising. Usually there’s something that kind of jumps into the culture and gets running.
Christopher Penn 6:00
Todd Jefferson put a really well on Twitter, he said that a lot of people were trying to be different without being memorable. You know, they they’ve had this a lot of cash, and they said, okay, make us the most outrageous thing you can possibly think of, but not a lot of thought went into, make it memorable.
Unknown Speaker 6:17
Yeah, make it some of the people jump in now. An interesting theory I’d heard was, you know, everybody competes to try and be the one in the two or three memorable ones that get the takeaway. Some theory that the sales Genie went for the to be the worst commercial try and be the crummiest commercial was the ones where they that was the the Indian sales guy. Okay, the pandas with the ad, I just thought those were complete crap. And the whole theory of that of the will give you 100 free leads for every sales guy. So I’m like, Oh, that must be a great list. You know, if 60 million Superbowl viewers can get those names are free. Yeah, I’m sure those are gonna be some folks that want to hear from us. I don’t No, that’s was the takeaway from that? What? Oh, you know, another interesting thing too, this came up sports marketing. And one of the better books out there. Philip Kotler has a book and I can’t remember the co author but talks about sports marketing. And he had hit on this at one point, but the phrase 19 and Oh, perfect season was actually patented by Bill Belichick and some other guests from the Patriots about two weeks before the actual Super Bowl. Whoops. Yes. chinks and Pat Riley, I guess was the only other guy that’s done this he grabbed three peat when he was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers. And he the same deal at burned him there too. But for him later on, when the bulls finally won, he did manage to get a payout out of that, but I that’s just I don’t know, kind of a it’s one of those sleazy feels about it, you know,
Christopher Penn 7:52
so the so that’s one way you would patent the term or your copyright the term and then anytime anyone used it, you would send them a bill.
Unknown Speaker 7:59
You exactly You could put the arm on them or you know, of course you would print up your own to do your own shirts and hats and blah, blah, blah. And anybody that tries to jump on board or do some licensing. Gotcha, I just
Christopher Penn 8:10
start patenting random sporting events.
Unknown Speaker 8:12
Just pick that there. You could do sports slogan squatting. We could just
Christopher Penn 8:19
why not I in copyright copyright stuff is relatively cheap. Yeah, yeah. Your investment
Unknown Speaker 8:23
No, it’s a it’s even cheaper than domains. Yeah, probably is easier to ride less hassle to once it’s pushed through. That’s it, you just sit back and wait for the checks to show up. Just the whole litigation thing, just kind of
Christopher Penn 8:37
grinds me down. Marketing over coffee will be coming up with its marketing over sports line.
Unknown Speaker 8:43
Well, that and of course and remember using the marketing over coffee phrase without the Express written consent of marketing over coffee,
Unknown Speaker 8:50
cup of coffee, at least
Unknown Speaker 8:52
expect a call from the attorneys.
Unknown Speaker 8:55
All right, so the voicemail bucket is empty. We blew through all that last leg. So yeah, that’s one Thank don’t call and we know no more voicemail or really don’t need any more questions. And congratulations to our meatball Sunday contest winners, Christopher Johnson was the the fifth person to get through and got a copy of the book. I also had an extra copy. So Reed Smith managed to score a copy also because he was the first commenter and the fourth, he was just like, I really want this thing. And so I scratched up another copy for him. So we got a nice, very
Christopher Penn 9:24
nice.
Unknown Speaker 9:26
Alright, so I had a blogging thing. This has been kind of fun. We’ve been vlogging at work, and it’s been hugely successful to the traffic has just been out of this world. And an interesting we’ve gotten some Google juice in the last month that really makes me feel that all the talk of some kind of sandbox is legit, because we’re about three months in and suddenly it was like a switch flipped, right? And we’ve seen all kinds of inbound links now and a lot of cool stuff. But the that what brought this up was the idea of you know, a lot of bloggers kind of view it. blog is a diary and they do a post, you know, here’s what I’m doing today, here’s what’s on my mind today. And it just has a forward progression. One of the blogs or with the guy who’s working on it, instead views it as a constantly evolving body of work. And what he’s done is he’s hooked up Google Analytics, and he’s totally psyched about that. So now he goes through on a regular basis, and he looks at his past posts and checks out the ones that have very high exits and very low click throughs you know, if it’s, if 90% of the people hit that page and are gone, he’ll go back and edit the post. Yep. And try and make it more interesting add more links. And he puts a disclaimer down at the bottom or a note saying you know, this was originally posted on x date I’ve made some edits on why date and you know, it keeps it all it doesn’t make it he’s not just recycling the stuff right but he is tweaking the back content. Yep. And it’s it is actually working for him he’s getting you know, the the click through, rates go up as people get more interested in the features the right links, and people don’t leave the site, they start clicking through to other stuff. And so I thought that was a pretty interesting idea, the fact that you could have a library of content and you don’t always have to come up with fresh stuff you can fix or update previous stuff and get, you know, at least some benefit out of that.
Christopher Penn 11:12
Yep, there’s a great plugin for WordPress called a links that I use on my blogs. And what it does is it lets you essentially define a set of keywords inside of it and the links that you want them to go to and stuff like that, which is handy because that way, that way, if you’re doing stuff like in a particular vertical like I do in student loans, you have to remember to hyperlink your key phrases all the time ago software does it for you, which is nice in and of itself. When you have your 1400 blog posts like I do on my blog, it’s going back through the backend, the back catalogue would be really painful, right but well the other things that it does very well and I see this a lot on a really big sites like Mashable and TechCrunch and stuff is it will help you it’s called deeper links. It will help you go through and an isolate posts that contain phrases that are similar so As an example if I want to look for marketing over coffee or my personal blog any of the phrases that would they have posted come up that had that phrase it would be linked to each other we would start linking to each other saying you know related posts about marketing over coffee and creating more internal exits for a post that let you keep people on on blog longer. So between that and your and your keyword lists the external keyword list it’s a really fantastic tool I mean, I have no idea if it exists for anything other than WordPress but if you use WordPress and you’ve got a body of work in your vertical it is it is the the tool to go go with
Unknown Speaker 12:39
you know, that’s what I’m looking for WordPress for a plugin I want to do something where I’ve seen this on I think it was typepad has a plugin that over on your sidebar, you can do top 10 most popular posts WordPress does that does it?
Christopher Penn 12:52
Alright, I gotta take that out and hold off the popularity meter by Alex King.
Unknown Speaker 12:56
All right, cool. Cool. Excellent. I will get that wrong because you don’t Think about that. But you have gems buried in your blog that, you know, you see it in your analytics all the time that you these are the ones that are getting the Google juice that getting the traffic just because they’re the good stuff that’s out there. And so bring that up to the front page. So new visitors can come in and see the ads that you’ve got the best of Yeah, because it’s, you know, it is when you do this, I mean, you may have a week where, you know, two or three year posts are just they’re not best, you know, for whatever reason, not enough time or not enough to write about. So to have some links to the stuff that’s good. So people can always at least see that you’ve got some decent stuff out there, as is the way to go.
Christopher Penn 13:32
Yeah, there’s, there’s a ton of good plugins out there, as well, a popularity contest by Alex King. And he that goes in tandem with one he called He has called search meter and the two of them combined. popularity contest is really neat, because it will feed into the Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress. So the more popular post becomes, the higher it will rearrange in the Google site.
Unknown Speaker 13:54
Right. All right. And for people that Google sitemap is is a critical feature if you’re doing it Especially for
Unknown Speaker 14:02
any website you need is Google’s sitemap you it’s you
Unknown Speaker 14:04
can go to Google tell it that you are doing a sitemap, and you have an XML file. And there’s tools that will automatically generate these for you, like we just mentioned. But it’s a, it’s just a file full of data saying, here’s all the pages on my site. And here’s how important I think they are. So when you search, you want to hit these certain ones first. And it’s a good way to exclude content, you know, if there’s pages you don’t want Google to at least have at the top of the list, you rate them as very low. And it’s great just to keep Google up to date as to what pages on your site. So you don’t have to worry about Google spidering everything properly, because you can give them the list. Right? And that’s something it’s a few spam sites bothered to do this. So it puts you in a higher quality of site, right? Because got a registered, verify that you own the site and all that stuff. Right, right. And it’s linked to your other accounts, too. They know if you’re an AdWords buyer and things like that. Yep. So definitely something to add to your site if you don’t have it already.
Christopher Penn 14:56
And with WordPress, there’s a plugin for it that will automatically get it set up. For us and stuff, so it’ll generate the sitemap. Every time you put you post a new blog post, it’ll update it and everything like that. When you use it, it stays current. And when you tie it in a popularity contest, then you’re starting to get some real juice,
Unknown Speaker 15:12
right right now you’re, you’re reinforcing what they’re already driving to us, as you’re saying. That’s the important stuff. That’s wonder that’s almost like psychological that, you know, grappling with Google. Yeah, you’re like giving them some positive reinforcement. You’re just saying, hey, oh, yeah, you’re doing exactly right. Look, our numbers are the same.
Christopher Penn 15:31
Exactly. And it was when you think about it, a lot of people say oh, blogging is important for business and things like that. And it’s, there’s there’s the whole soft side of it. Well, it’s it’s brand building reputation, but a lot of these tools, lobbies plugins for WordPress and stuff like that. Bring the hard side right back in. Yeah, here’s the analytics. Here’s what’s popular. You know, Mister CEOs who’s blogging, here’s you, here’s what your blog is doing.
Unknown Speaker 15:55
Right, right. All right, you know, that’s good. We should. We’re gonna do another Come on blogging, because there’s a lot of interesting stuff that we’ve been writing to as I’ve been doing this project, and we’ll have to kick some of them around some more in a future episode. If you have blogging questions, feel free to send those over. Okay, I have to give a plug for the EU Day event, who is Ovie? Oh, you check out hulu.com. Of course, it’s like Skype, except it’s video enabled also. So you can have six people on a line at the same time. And we’re going to be part of a promotion that they’re doing, called my Hulu day. And if you want to come in line and chat with us, we’ve got a bunch of slots open. The big one will be this coming Monday at noon, because both of us will be on that one. I’ve signed up for a bunch of other ones and we’ll see kind of what goes on. Maybe other rope Chris into a few more depending on we’ll see the first one. Exactly right. Well, we get crap. Here. We’re cool. Yeah, that was exactly the idea. If we throw a bunch out there, we’ll see what’s going on. And of course, if you check out over at Ronan market, Here at my blog, we are bribing the first five at least for the first day, you can get yourself a marketing over coffee coffee card, and hook yourself up. I have some of them leftover from the American Marketing Association thing that we did a couple weeks ago. And but actually the other big thing too, of course, you know, obviously pimping our stuff, but it were, it’s running with a great crowd and going to do some of those guys have plugs folks like Mitch Joel is going to be there. Steve Hall from Mad rants, I’ve signed up for that one because I haven’t. I have not ever talked with him personally. We’ve emailed once or twice. I just seen Of course, if you’re into the who’s the web celebrity David meerman. Scott and his new roles in marketing and PR. Scott Sigler, the author who’s done, he did a bum rush this chart style promotion, and of course, cc Chapman and Laura Fitton from pistachios doing a presentation on more effective presentations. Okay, it’s not how to lose cameras. No, no, it’s not exactly known for losing cameras is on the line, but she will also be there. So yeah, you know, sign up. Don’t make us the pariah if everybody else saw signs up only have like two people, we’re gonna look terrible. And of course, being marketing guys, we better be good at this. Well, actually, we will be good at this. You know, it may be, you know, five of my aunts and uncles, some homeless people that I’ve paid to show up on these things, but we would rather have folks who want to learn about marketing or talk about and to be honest to be a good marker. This is just a plug your stuff. Yeah, you know, whatever you’ve got, if you want to come on and ramble on about it, we’d be more than happy to let you take up one space and promise we won’t kick you off at least until five minutes. And if you’re too blatant,
Christopher Penn 18:32
or the first mention of porn or Nazis,
Unknown Speaker 18:34
yeah, that’s true, too. If you’re, if you’re on the PPC pills porn casino path, we will, we will bounce you out for that. So let’s see what else I have
Christopher Penn 18:46
on the list. amusing, little amusing side thing from yesterday from Super Tuesday. I created a real short video of just the opening polls and ended it and I submitted it just a bunch of different sites for fun. CNN actually ended up running it on their homepage which was
Unknown Speaker 19:03
kind of neat that was pretty good so so what you were just down there at the polls you had the video camera we
Christopher Penn 19:08
have a little video camera out and just did a quick thing and then because I was running late anyway just let it render in the car while I was driving which is a great use of a 45 minute commute but submitted over to CNN and got it got published stuff in both in text and in the video the actual video itself which was kind of nice. I did see a pretty big uptick in traffic on my on my personal site yesterday which was interesting. So I guess the lesson there is if you have some content that is you know, videos or like a video newsreel kind of release kind of thing, where as long as it’s not a blatant ad, if you’re submitting it to all the video sites anyway submit it to those you know, CNN I report things and stuff like that. Just throw it out there and at the very worst is just going to say no and not bother posting it. But if you do get some exposure out of it, it it’s it’s the I guess it was a pretty big uptick in traffic. Yesterday normally my my personal site gets around, you know, for 450 visitors a day and it’s just around 6000 so
Unknown Speaker 20:07
that that’s one thing is getting to me an exciting time because the Sleeping Giants of our awakening right you know so many of these established media places are waking up to this and yeah, you just get huge and bounced. A similar thing that I’ve seen there was a report just this week about one of the one of the major data groups put a thing out about podcasting. Yeah, numbers are way up yes they are and But the big thing is that you’ve got you know, PPC is firing out tons of great stuff NPR doing a lot of great stuff, you know, all these places have finally you know, they’ve gone the smart guys have gone from being haters to realizing that hey, you know, actually we are the best content creators out there and we can use this too. You know, now granted the models not what they would like it’s not as profitable right out of the gates as it was, but you know, they can go so the big, you know, takeaway from all that is now is you’ve got to be niche because you’re fighting against guys who have Huge deep pockets and experience. And so
Christopher Penn 21:02
they have content creation teams that dwarf the individual.
Unknown Speaker 21:05
Right, right. There’s no way you can set so if you have a crappy podcast like the am show is trying to be general general news, you better get on the ball and start mixing it up because you’re gonna get crushed by the
Christopher Penn 21:16
steamroller. Yeah, you know, I’ve seen that it was flat for a while I’ve seen pretty significant growth recently in the financial aid podcast, I’ve seen adding, you know, maybe I was doing a 1% growth for the longest time and something changed a couple things around saw some growth out of that, that started off a little bit but like the last two months, I’ve added probably, I want to say 15 20% new new folks, just five or six new folks a day. You just see the signups coming in and see the email addresses coming in and stuff like that and thanks so it’s it’s getting, it’s like someone flipped a switch and suddenly podcasting is starting its back his way out of the chasm.
Unknown Speaker 21:57
Yeah, right, right, because it finally reached the bottom The trough of disillusionment there. Yeah. You think part of its Christmas effect a bunch of people get iPods for Christmas and jump on board or,
Christopher Penn 22:07
uh, you know, I wish I could. I wish I could say one way or the other.
Unknown Speaker 22:10
It’s interesting to see that go because I think, you know, maybe it is rounding the human corner just of, you know, it just takes years for this stuff. You know, it’s like the web tip because it just for years, it kind of started to accelerate. But it wasn’t until kind of you hit that point where grandma got on board and then suddenly the network itself that exponential growth.
Christopher Penn 22:29
Yeah. Now it’s also partly be seasonal, too, because this is, you know, a big time of year from financially the first four months of the year. Right. It may just be a residual from that too. But anyway, slicing I’ll take it
Unknown Speaker 22:40
Yeah, no, exactly. Don’t we take the beatings when things fall so don’t be afraid to take the phrase when things go in the right direction. Exactly. No way to do that. All right. Well, that that’s a good note. We will hit the road. So enjoy the coffee. Enjoy the coffee.
Unknown Speaker 22:57
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. You can hear Mr. Penn daily at the financial aid podcast and read more at Christopher penn.com. Mr. Wolf blogs daily at Ronan marketeer.com. And podcast the M show every Monday.
Unknown Speaker 23:16
The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at the pod safe music network pod safe music network.com or follow the link in our show notes.