Must Design

2016 The Year of the Story
Storytelling may be the most important and least understood online marketing craft. This Curagmai post shares a 5 Tip "How To" craft a story working backwards from your landing page.

Tips included:
 

• Create A Landing Page and Work Backwards
• Place your offer in context
• Repeat 3 to 5 key brand specific themes
• Share your creation story
• Define your audience
   

http://www.curagami.com/online-marketing-5-storytelling-tips/

Adding Haiku Decks To WordPress

I love  Haiku Deck tool and figured out a way to add our decks to our blog:

http://www.curagami.com/marketing-haiku-decks/

I've been prodding  Adam Traitt, one of Haiku's founders, for a user profile (done) and more control over display (Haiku Deck team is working on it). In the mean time I decided to add my decks to Curagmai's  blog. Here's how we did it. 

*How To Add Haiku Deck To Your WP Blog*

1. Create a new Haiku Deck category on your blog. 

2. Create posts for every Haiku Deck to be added. You may want to use a date from last year or the year before to fool WordPress into moving your new Haiku Deck posts to the back of your stack. 

3.Create a grid we used WP Ultimate Post Grid and we upgraded to premium for the ability to filter by category. 

4. Redirect your WP posts to your Haiku Deck (we cheated and used the Twitter links, better to grab the nasty URL you can find in the embed area since we will drive up our Twitter share numbers artificially) we used Redirection plugin by John Godley. 

We wrote copy into this page mostly for   reasons. You can see a grid without copy here; http://www.curagami.com/magazines-2/ ;

We also use embedded  feeds behind the "Magazines" link. Each "Magazine" is firing from our Scoop.it feeds. This is how we see "websites" changing. Instead of a place where you creating everything tomorrow's sites will share your creations from all over and encourage visitors to collaborate and share too. If that sounds like we suggest you create online community you win a cookie (and I'm writing this from  so just tell me what kind you want :). Marty 

We Live In Google's World
If the web is the wild west then Google is the organizing and calming sheriff. There latest moves including slapping artificial intelligence into their algorithm and moving to real-time updates mean  we live in Google's world perhaps more than ever. 

Google's ability to balance an ever changing world on the head of a pin can be admired, feared or detested depending on where your website is coming out, on how much traffic your site is losing or gaining based on the latest.

These changes mean a favorite too, the Penguin Tool ( http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/) is about to lose it's relevance. The ability to overlay Google's moves on your Google Analytics is yet another "not provided" move. Google wants to hold and control their data since control translates into the ability to sell those tools back to us.

As my friend and Google Watcher, Bill Slawski told me he thinks web marketers should be boning up on AI. As we lose our ability to SEE and learn from the web's data Bill is right. We better know AI or diversify our multichannel marketing FAST. 

We live in Google's world perhaps now more than ever!

http://www.curagami.com/google-penguin-4-rankbrain-love/?v=7516fd43adaa 

http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/

WordPress auto blogging plugins can help you to get new content for your site on complete autopilot, it is extremely important for every blogger

Learning From Video Game Designers
Video game designers can teach you a lot about how to great great ecommerce and B2B websites. Video games are gamified, social and understand the stimulus - response nature of online interaction in a fluid and must imitate ways.  

Here are WhatCulture.com's picks for the 20 best video game websites in the world. We like Gamers With Jobs and Kotaku (though we don't understand a lot of it).  

Google SEO Buzzcut
Google can cut our website's hair, but they aren't alone. We can be vicious barbers. Our unintended actions often mess with our URLs and that messes with the infinite universe we create whenever we publish.

Lessons shared here including an October update will help your site recovery from a bad Google or self inflicted haircut.  

With 22,000+ views SEO for Web Designers blew up thanks to a defined tribal audiences, advocates and luck. Discover tips on how to blow your content up too.

Web Design Jazz is the conversational alchemy that is website design riffing important conversations your brands have with visitors and potential customers. What about you? What conversations are your having with customers? How did you get there? 

Check out our Web Design Jazz video and join the conversation:
http://www.curagami.com/master-classes/web-design-jazz/  

Jetpack's cool icon feature creates, adds & shares a mobile app like icon & link for your blog on you & your customers smartphones for free. 

Why do this? Because coolest thing since sliced bread to hit your customers is their smartphones. Getting your blog linked there is ONLY a good thing for your content marketing, community building and ecommerce.  

Tease marketing because in overwhelming times marketing needs to underwhelm, tease and inspire customers to find their truth and yours. Tease the click.

Content Marketing Is Key
Important post from Scoop.it CEO @Guillaume Decugis because the 12 step program he outlines clearly cleaves content marketing pros from everyone else. We share this post in our Design Revolution Scoop.it feed because we would add 2 more items to a solid list:

13. You aren't designing for content curation and content marketing. 14. You are building community in

Designing for content curation means incorporating the automated feeds Guilluame discusses and leaving room for community and collaboration.  

Community's pillars such as user profiles, timeliens, following, comments, wikis and blogging have to be fuilt into a design or you are talking to yourself about yourself even if you follow many of Guillaume edicts. Guillaume's 12 Step Progam: 

1. You’re not tracking your results.

2. You’re not repurposing your content.

3. You aren’t automating at least part of your social media activity.

4. You aren’t automating some of your email marketing.

5. You’re only sharing your own content – you’re not adding any content curation to the mix.

6. You aren’t testing.

7. You don’t have a content strategy that’s tied to business goals and your buyers’ journey.

8. You haven’t defined your buyers’ personas or their typical journey.

9. You aren’t creating content strategically.

10. You don’t have a centralized “vault” of all your company’s content assets.

11. You aren’t promoting your content, either via social sharing or by making it visible to the search engines.

12. You have nothing to show for your work.

Voice Search = Next Big Thing
As of 2014 we know 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search on a daily basis. Now with virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and voice recognition. 

Marty Note:
The way you get your content into their voice box is all about how you structure DATA. This post gives a great overview of schema and how to use it to win hearts, minds and loyalty as Siri shows your stuff instead of theirs.  

Might want to sprinkle a little predictive analytics and  AI-like branching too. Read this post and understand the new SEO. 

Burn Your Website Down
Websites are about to become an expensive tyranny. Tomorrow's e-commerce happens everyone and at any time on any device. Still demanding customers come to your website?  Crazy! 

Better to "burn your website" and all of the preconceived notions about what a website is and should be down today. Recreate your site as a fluid expression of content, community and commerce.

Here's how:

http://bit.ly/burn-down-website

5 Super Secret Marketing Trends
One of the "Super Secret" Marketing Trends we see for 2016 is Nowism. As defined brilliantly in a TED Talk by Joi Ito (embedded in the post) Nowist plan less and react more. Nowist look to the web to provide the collaborative means to react to what is happening now.

Nowism brings several important design considerations including:

* Incorporation of Social Media Feeds

* More space for Content Curation 

* More flexibility and less rigid and static boxes

* More movement and change throughout a site

When something BIG happens and a web design looks and feels the same the sit steps away from the now. One of http://www.Moon-Audio.com major partners is about to launch an earth shatteing new product. 

Moon's site needs to have the ability to curate, create and spin content about this innovation fast and furious. The more your content marketing and website live in the now the stronger its relationship with your customers.

See the other 4 Super Secret Marketing Trends for 2016 here:

http://www.curagami.com/5-super-secret-marketing-trends/?v=7516fd43adaa 

Designing a good website that accommodates a lot of content is a tricky balancing act to pull off. Does one attempt to present the user with all the information

Beating Content Shock
We don't disagree with author and web marketing guru Mark Schaefer. There is too much content chasing too little attention. Once you have attention you need to convert visitors to buyers.

Creating content "magazines" is a great way to beat Schaefer's content shock, create trust, win hearts and minds and engender loyalty. This LinkedIn Post shares a synopsis of tips shared on Curagmai including:

• Find 3 – 5 content groups that interest your visitors.
• Decide your schedule (we recommend monthly updates at first because that is a big commitment that must be kept to gain trust).
• Curate content from trusted sources such as brands, manufacturers and even competitors.
• Automate at least one of your content groups with feeds.
• Find and nurture free visual media sources such as Haiku Deck.

The Curagami post is here:
http://www.curagami.com/ecommerce/5-tips-magazine-content-marketing/?v=7516fd43adaa 

And The http://www.Moon-Audio.com example is here:
http://www.moon-audio.com/chord-hugo/magazine.html#

The LinkedIn Synopsis is here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-magazine-your-content-marketing-martin-marty-smith 
 

Canonical URLs Explained
The Yoast post provides an easy way to understand why rel=canonical is a powerful new SEO tag. Yoast has a dog in the hunt. They make a Magento plugin that easily writes the rel=canonical tag into a product page's head.

The explanation about WHY canonical URLs are so important is only half right. We have a million ways of expressing and sharing URLs these days. Without rel=canonical we end up duping content to distraction.

Here's the rub. All ecommerce sites dupe content. They must. When I was a Director of Ecommerce a single product accounted for 50% of our profits. You better believe I merchandised that product into every nook and cranny our site offered. I duped that product and it's content to distraction.

There are other ways to limit duplication including:

* Use of your Robots.txt file.
* Locking content behind a firewall.  

* Use of blockquotes & rel=canonical tags. 
* Rewrite duplicated content so it's not as duplicated (lol). 

We included our email output into a folder with a "no follow" line in our robots.txt. You may think such a move is enough. It isn't. Be sure NOT to drive links from spiderable content INTO that folder or you eliminate the effectiveness of the robots.txt.

In the end every ecom site worth it's salt MUST duplicate content. Rewriting sounds like a good strategy, but it isn't. Content = time and time = money when managing million dollar commercial sites. You will be duping content.

Best to use rel=canonical because it shows Google you aren't trying to STEAL anything. Reminds me of what a friend shared about the disavow tool (used to deny inbound links or signal they may be untrusted).

 My friend was using the disavow tool daily on his clients accounts. "So you are brown-nosing Google," I kidded him. "Exactly," was his answer. Rel=canonical tells Google you are TRYING to do the right thing and sometimes that is enough. 

17,162 People Later
We've been asked to make the presentation that created our most viewed Hiaku Deck again at the Iron Yard Code Academy again (made the first presentation six months ago). There were important ideas we shared last time:

* SEO THRIVES or DIES with graphic designers.

* Graphic designers are heroes under siege by many groups.

* Set REALISTIC expectations.
* Set reasonable boundaries (with gorillas looking for bananas).
* Shared a few easy to remember tips to help designers improve their technical SEO skills.

Obviously we hit a nerve. We will be updating benchmarks shared six months ago to see how those we mentioned fared since.  Remember technical SEO is important, but your content must engage, be exciting (visually too) and develop sustainable online community to win over time. 

Good luck and if you have SEO questions we didn't cover email them to martin(at)Curagami.com and we will include and send you a Curagami Rules tee.  

Website MacGuffins are ideas such as Free Shipping whose absence hurts more than their presence helps. What are your website's MacGuffins?

Good News & Bad News
As a rare web marketer with more than ten years experience,  I created our first site FoundObjects.com in 1999 (gone now sadly), we want to confirm something every likely reader of our online marketing post already knows - the low hanging fruit is gone plucked by previous generations of pickers.

What to do now? Be something online and start today with these "be something now" tips.