Content marketing tools and training.
This is another addition to our ongoing series of tutorials and case studies on landing pages that work.
It occurred to me late last year, as I was readying yet another Landing Page Makeover, that the end of one year and the beginning of the next was a good time to do a “Where are they now?” post. So first things first, I went back and contacted all makeover participants from the very beginning of the series.
If there’s any one thing that can be said about SEO with certainty, it’s that it manages to cause a lot of confusion.
For example, it seems like many people’s idea of SEO was formed 10 years ago, and hasn’t bothered to change with the times. Even an online veteran like Robert Scoble is completely clueless about modern best practices for search engine optimization.
So, before we go any further, let me answer the question posed by the headline . . .
Yes, SEO copywriting still matters.
Here’s why.
Those of you who subscribe to the Internet Marketing for Smart People email newsletter found out on Monday what Brian and I have been up to for the past few months.
We knew it would be cool, because, well, we designed it to be cool.
We wanted to build something people would really get value from.
But still, when we saw what people were doing inside after the first day, we all looked around at one another and pulled a Keanu.
Whoa.
The McGuffin has been a powerful storytelling device for a long time. It was Alfred Hitchcock who popularized both its use and the name that sounds like it should be on a dollar menu.
The McGuffin has a cool job: to keep the plot, character, or situation rolling along. It draws us into the story and drives the action. The McGuffin is often an object of high value, which everyone covets. It can be ambiguous, entirely undefined, generic, or left open to interpretation.
Remember the suitcase in “Pulp Fiction?” Classic McGuffin. Though it showed up a few times throughout the film, and was important enough to get a handful of people peppered with bullets, we never actually saw what was in the suitcase.
Conversation in social media is supposed to be “open source,” right?
We’re supposed to gain energy and excitement from being open to the entire internet, to ideas that come to us from literally every corner of the globe.
But too often “social media” turns into a predictably closed circuit of the same people having the same conversation.
Finding your own tribe can be a wonderful thing. It can also make your blog unbearably boring.
