Posts by Danny Denhard

Epic Guru Post on Banning Awesome Ninjas and Rockstars

October 14, 2011

The online marketing world has always had its own lexicons, though in the past these tended to be more technical than colloquial. Over the past few years as digital marketing has matured and come to the forefront of public attention: this has come hand-in-hand with an effort to make the medium sound cool. This has caused a handful of words to be taken out of popular usage and twisted to fit into a digital marketing context that they really, really don’t belong in. This post started out as a list of my own most hated digital marketing buzzwords, but it turned out to be a great exercise in crowd sourcing too:

Ninja – Submitted by Paul Madden and Dan Sharp
Definition: a member of the ninja who were trained in martial arts and hired for espionage, sabotage or assassinations; a person skilled in ninjutsu
This old favourite has been doing the rounds since the IT geeks were confined to the basement. Ninja, albeit a word that conjures up some pretty cool images, has got to be banned! Unless you lead a secret double life, dishonourably dispatching evil dictators and tyrants by night while working as a SEO consultant by day, you’re probably not an SEO ninja.

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Caliber Abroad: Travel Bloggers Unite Innsbruck Review

September 16, 2011

If there was one thing that stood out about the Caliber team’s recent trip to Austria for August’s Travel Bloggers Unite conference was how beautiful Innsbruck actually is, not just in the sun but in the rain and believe it or not in one day we had all four seasons.

The trip itself was an eye-opening experience, as on several occasions it showed me that doing something you love doing can be the most really important thing in your life. There were delegates from as far afield as America and many travelling from European cities – was a great thing to see something evolve from a small discussion group on Twitter to a full tweetup-style conference.

Caliber were at TBU to help travel bloggers and a handful of corporate bloggers with SEO (and what turned out to be a refreshing social media marathon). To that end, we put on three workshops aimed at beginners to the super-knowledgeable. One of the key things that stood out amongst our discussions with delegates was that while many people had an idea of what they wanted to do with their blog, they didn’t always have the chance or right plugins to do it easily. Some even overthought the process.

Each workshop had some great questions, and it was great to be on hand to actually help a large number of bloggers with their questions.

Some of the stand-out questions from the sessions included:
•    How do I increase my on-site metrics?
•    What metrics are best for measuring my blog score?
•    How do I lower bounce rate?
•    What can I do to increase the number of links to my site?

The one surprising question was……
•    How do I increase my Klout score?

Believe it or not, a lot of PR companies are using Klout as an actual metric to gauge bloggers’ reach and how well they might be able to help push press releases for them. Personally, I’m straight-up against ‘gaming’ social metric scores, but I did have a few cheeky suggestions, such as: tweeting less, lowering your follow to friend ratio, and interacting on hashtags to gain retweets from non-followers. One thing many bloggers did not have on their radar was PeerIndex, another social influence scorer which I personally believe to have a better list system and allows bloggers to compare themselves to their ‘competitors’.

We also had one-to-one site clinics which we offered from Saturday morning until the middle of the afternoon. Many queued and missed sessions for our advice and guidance – this was really an honour for us.

Some of the interesting things which came from the sessions:
•    What plugins should I delete? You wouldn’t believe the average number of plugins delegates make use of – one lovely women even had over 40.
•    What audience should I actually target? The answer was not travel bloggers but normal people.
•    “Our custom Facebook URL doesn’t work!” – It would appear Facebook settings aren’t as easy as first thought.
•    “Do people actively search for my blog posts?” Well, if you have to ask please take it as NO.

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