MILESTONE This blog now has 100 posts. I just crossed the line. I’m reminded of a conversation at WordCamp09 where a guy said ‘You’re not a blogger until you have 100 posts.’ I started this portal in June 2008 to help sell my intangible goodness.
This 100th blog post affords me the perfect opportunity to reflect back on my own progress as a freelance writer, blogger, web content producer and thinker / organizer that specializes in helping others find a marketing path in the age of earned media. I taught myself and learned empirically the Smojoe Code of compound link building and ‘how to make keyword sandwiches’.
Readers of every description have watched and read along as Smojoe gave birth to Lenzr and everyone can see what that business is becoming… This blog is one of the best places to glean rare inside looks at traffic stats and issues. Will that project mature into the world’s best 3rd party photo contest solution?
Looking back on 100 posts I have some favourites. Below are the best ones, most of which still get a half dozen readers a day from Google search. Some are popular because they have curiously searchable keywords and subtitles, some because they have original pictures and some because they are controversial or appear on popular lists somewhere, in every case there’s a different reason.
TOP TEN BLOG POSTS
ZOS Last Tango in Jadac
This was one of the first posts I ever wrote on Smojoe, in June 2008 and it was for a LifeCapture Interactive project wherein they were executing a Bell Globe Media fund for a TV Series called Z.O.S. or Zones Of Safety. Not many people saw the TV show and even fewer people visited the website, but my Smojoe blog post about it has been very successful and I’m still getting visits and people ‘borrowing’ the images, which were mostly screen grabs from the game or interactive experience. It was groundbreaking at the time and there were indeed some chapters of this game that i will never forget. Peter Miskimmin was the producer - he was a friend from film business.
Dumpdiggers Arena Photo Battle Widget
A piece of my web development history that was made to showcase pieces of history as they were uploaded to an antiques and collectibles photo battle competition - Lenzr grew from this attraction. The photo contest website comes from this photo battle game prototype on what used to be Dumpdiggers.com. The side bar widget was similar to the present day Lenzr widget in that it showed the latest upload in three or more contests. You can read more about this photo contest engine evolution in The Story of Lenzr.
Best Case Scenario: Original Content Published Exclusively
This post, dated Nov 2009 represents a shift in my thinking away from article marketing websites and the mass replication of low quality links, toward researching and writing and publishing great original content full of good data and rare information, exclusively. To deliberately avoid all replications and make the content valuable, exclusively on high quality magazines and awesome blogs requires a whole other set of rules - a whole new economy of building relevance through bookmarks and original photography, interviews and getting the scoop for high quality ‘citizen journalism’ - but I give away these lessons in the next post right after this nugget titled, “Actually Sharing Secrets’ which became a category in my blog.
How To Stop Canpages Phonebook Delivery?
Little change has been made to the Yellow Pages or Can Pages phone book distribution model that I am aware of, as there is still an enormous stack of books down by the mailboxes in my building. What will happen to them? I may do a follow-up on this one.
Nestle Pure Life - Greenwashing The Web
I wrote this as a reaction to seeing the television commercial on CityTV wherein the female voice-over narration implies that bottled water is a healthy alternative to pop because ‘we don’t swim in pools of high fructose corn syrup’. On the Nestle Pure Life website they claim that recycling the bottles is a managed solution inherent in all plastic containers, and that their eco-friendly bottle uses less plastic and is therefore an environmentally friendly choice. It really pisses me off that they can get away with this, as this is simply not true. And the commercial is still running, and every convenience store, grocery store, hardware store, and office supply store including staples and home depot sells Nestle Pure Life bottled water in ‘eco friendly’ packaging for 2.99 a case
Smojoe Dental Surgery is White Tooth SEO
After visiting my Toronto dentist I wrote a detailed account of the experience of getting porcelain crowns and included YouTube videos and pictures and long blocks of keyword rich text. I wrote the whole story for Dr Archer so she could put it on her website, which she did. This adds to her website as a resource - a handcrafted testimonial by a skilled blogger. Then I promoted the piece on Facebook and Twitter of course, but also in bookmarks and my specialty, niche discussion forums. This blog post chronicled the original testimonial and the work I did to promote the piece. Incidentally I always led with the pictures of my teeth - which i still do today. You see the picture up top? Its a hard habit to break.
How Blogging Saved The Beauty Pageant
This blog post bears witness to one of my greatest achievements as an interactive experience engineer. My relationship with the Miss Teen Canada World organization was founded right after speaking at a Deb Lewis event at The Spoke Club in December 2008. That cold Tuesday night I met the warm and friendly marketing people behind the 2009 Search for Miss Teen Canada World. At that time, this was a ‘beauty pageant’ funded entirely by participant’s entry fees and had no connections to modeling or photography schemes or any sponsors (or any after market sales beyond selling a DVD to the parents). Smojoe built a blog network for this organization - first it was on the OnSugar Blog Platform, a free blogging platform hosted in California, but now we have a permanent network of self hosted blogs all bearing the Miss Teen Regions of Canada. This year Lenzr Corp registered and skinned 75 WordPress blogs and already the Miss Teen Canada - World Blog Network is a very powerful marketing tool perfectly targeted to a youth demographic. Its a massive new venue for storytelling, and captures a vast amount of user generated content.
What is a freelance social relevance producer?
The idea came to me that community managers are often asked to do way too much because their role remains undefined.The relevance producer is a new vocation. The online social relevance producer is the company storyteller that sets policy and executes keyword strategy. He or she composes stories as ‘hot scripts’ which are txt docs that are in html or pre-fabricated bits of BB code that contain pictures, and links as well crafted incentives. They’re cut and pasted from the back end of the relevance producer’s own favourite blogs and discussion forums. Community managers spread the relevance producer’s messages as they adapt the core hotscript to fit their own blogs and forums in their own niches and communities.
How to tell Business Stories with Photo Contests
This will be my specialty for the next few years - how to tell business stories with Lenzr photo contests and build visual databases and dominate search engines will be my presentation. How to make great hooks that affect markets will be my case studies. I will consult with anyone telling stories in the form of interactive web challenges esp photo contests - are you thinking about doing a photo contest? Talk to me. I know how to use photo contest media to build ’social capital’ in the form of incoming links and increased reputation.
The Google search algorithm is the primary arbiter of relevance in the post information age.
Traditional Search Engine Optimization companies and veteran web developers have not kept abreast of Google’s latest changes to their search math which now favours a great deal more ‘social metrics’ and ‘usability’ over sheer volume of incoming links – its quality over quantity in the age of earned media.
Lenzr has pioneered a new way to tell stories that builds social capital in the form of user generated content on a particular theme photography challenge.
Clients should know that less than ten percent of the media appears on the Lenzr website, while more than 90% of the work is done off page when a team of skilled social media marketers communicates news of the prize, and interactive challenge to the blogosphere in handcrafted rich media articles, blogs and discussion forum posts, Facebook and Twitter updates.
Most North American SEO companies still buy incoming links for their clients from South Asian companies in the form of directory listings. These same SEO companies cannot fathom how to cheaply and efficiently buy ‘social links’ from websites that people actually use – because Google is very smart and they know what links and sites people actually use. They know Lenzr is well used. Although Lenzr is still an infant with only 5000 unique visitors a month, the website itself has a very high usability (39% bounce rate, average visit 4 minutes, 9 pages viewed). The links we plant to and from our photo contest arena are couched in the natural relevance of web storytelling. The links we plant to sponsors share that relevance and high usability message space. So for example a heads-up blog post about a cool new Lenzr photo contest is a relevant message for photographers, art lovers, and contest media opportunists alike. And so is the knowledge that a particular business URL sponsored the prize. Its part of the story.
That’s the base - its our job as storytellers to create imaginative and wildly successful challenges like A Counting Exercise photo contest on Lenzr in June 2011, which attracted over 150 submissions and garnered 1886 votes to decide one winner. The last two photos are from that contest and featured among the Top Ten picked by the membership (so I’ve used them here in connection with the contest as per the Lenzr Terms of Use).