SEO Marketing: The Pitfall of content generation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become something of a buzzword that many people are aware of but very few people seem to understand. Places like Airtasker are filled with requests that are some variation of "I need SEO." But with no explanation or understanding if they mean they want their website tuned to have a high SEO score or if they want to undertake SEO marketing. SEO tune-up of a website involves a few hours of work to make sure Google has an easy time indexing the site. SEO marketing is an ongoing effort that can be very expensive.

However, the lack of understanding of SEO but the vague feeling that it is something necessary has to lead to the situation that many people are falling prey to unscrupulous "experts." The so-called "black hat" SEO tricks that artificially boost Google ranking but lead to long-term issues with Google penalties is rife! The other pitfall is spending a lot of cash generating content. But the content in question, not generating any benefits. Either because it didn't drive eyeballs to the website it was designed to promote or because the visitors to the page were not becoming customers. In short, SEO can be a black hole of time and money for the unwary.

SEO content marketing can spread a brand and keep it in people's minds. I mean, I find myself visiting Domain a few times a month just because stories from their news section keep appearing in my Facebook feed. I'll certainly Domain if and when I need help with real estate. Of course, I keep going back to Domain because their articles are interesting and good. Good content like that can be expensive to produce. Even with online job boards offering up writers and infographic designers for reasonable costs. Still, I do think SEO content based marketing is worth pursuing.

For my part, when I built this website, I made sure to ensure that this website was optimized to make it easy for Google robots to index it. Squarespace, of course, made life easy and I am grateful for that.  I paid less attention to SEO when I built the website for my company. This was because I wanted the website up as a placeholder while I worked to get apps released on the Google Play Store. Now that I have a few apps up, I am starting to layout marketing plan. This includes tuning my company website. But also, looking at setting up separate websites for each of my apps and using said the website for focused marketing. At this stage, I would probably generate all my content myself. That could be an interesting task. Especially for the Tea Tracker. I am looking forward to researching different types of teas so I can write about them!

Meetup: App Marketing

This year, my New Year's resolution was simply to be more social because I have been very neglectful of my friends, family and industry peers. To that end, I have signed up for a number of groups on Meetup and actually attending meetups for groups I had already signed up for. One of the new meetup I joined is a monthly meetup is Brisbane iOS/Android App Marketing Meetup that aims to teach members about how to market apps. The meetup itself is new and had its first ever meeting last Wednesday.

We had two guest speakers for the first meeting and we also got a presentation from a member. It was all very instructive. For example, it never occurred to me that Facebook Ads might be the most cost effective due to how well you could customise it. Also, hearing things from the point of the view of the marketers explained a number of things I had been observing regarding online ads. I got some good tips that slotted in well with what I was already learning from studying up on SEO marketing. But I'll talk about SEO marketing on a separate post.

I would say that my apps are still a bit off before it is worth me running a paid campaign for them. But hopefully, by the time I do. I will be able to run a good targeted campaign that offers a good return on investment.

The Art of Photography: Open2Study & Harvard on Alison

I have previously written about Alison online training. Per the post, I did not much care for the platform because I felt that the courses there were simply repackaged material from elsewhere. I am not certain that the new that Harvard University has released their photography course on Alison changes my mind about the platform.

My reservation is that like the other course I found on Alison, the Harvard University course will just be repackaged set of lectures. Not something tailored for Alison itself.  I could be completely wrong and just picked the wrong courses to sample when I was trying out Alison. I mean, I found at least one course on Udemy, which is my preferred online learning platform, that was an unedited repackage of what appeared to be a one day course on Unity. If I didn't know that the vast majority of Udemy courses are created natively for Udemy, I would get the wrong impression of the platform as a whole.

However, the reason I am not keen to give Alison a second chance is that I am already doing an "The Art of Photography" course through Open2Study, which is an Australian website offering courses through the Open Universities of Australia. They have a mix of free and paid courses. The paid courses lead to recognised accreditations. I am not as interested as official accreditation. So I am doing the month long free short course. I am enjoying it, and I also feel more connected with fellow students because of the Google Plus community.

As for why I am not interested in getting official accreditation. There is the question if photography accreditation is worth paying for given that the industry is in decline. But mostly I am not looking to do photography professionally. I am more on the series hobbyist side of the spectrum. I am happy to take photos for my own amusement, shoot friends and family or personalised photo gifts, perhaps a few paid jobs through platforms like Airtasker, although a quick look at Airtasker clearly shows that photography is a field awash with professionals, nothing more than that. 

My First Bangla App!

Virgo 19 has released its second major app! My First Bangla App is targeted at kids up to the age of 5. It teaches Bangla nouns for many pets, farm animals, body parts, wild animals, fruits and vegetables. We have plans to expand it to include counting games, fun quizzes and the phrases. But for now, it has over 70 nouns that can be taught to my niece, I mean, your kids!

Demise of Pebble Smartwatch

I did not back Pebble Smartwatch when it first launched on Kickstarter. This was not because I didn't want to but because by the time their campaign came to my notice, they were already 1000% funded or something ridiculous like that and I knew they were not going to be able to deliver their pledges on time. However, the Pebble cemented my growing interest in the personal wearable space and I quickly bought a bright red E-paper Pebble at the end of 2013.

It was also around the potential of the Pebble that I wrote my AWEAR project, which unfortunately failed to get funded. Around about the same time I was trying to get AWEAR off the ground, Pebble launched its second Kickstarter and this time, I did back them. I got my Pebble and was still enamour by its potential. But sadly, Pebble never got the chance to realise its potential. It did launch a third Kickstarter, which was successful. However, it has now been revealed that despite the series of successful kickstarts, things were not rosy back at Pebble HQ.

I think for too many people, smartwatches remain a solution in search of a problem. Too many people thought of Pebble as a watch first and wondered why they needed to replace their perfectly functional dumb watch that was still functioning. Others, many of whom had stopped wearing watches because they got their time from their smartwatches, didn't see the need for a second notification device. I cannot blame them because the average consumer doesn't care about the potential of a platform. They care about the solutions said platform provides them here and now. Pebble's true potential was yet to be realised and would need years of research on the software side.

This is why Fitbit was successful. It's a straightforward product that makes clear what it is offering. Not to mention, since weight loss is a goal of many people, Fitbits are a bit like gym memberships. You get them because you think you'll use it, even when you know you most likely won't. But since Fitbit already has established its identity. I think Pebble's IP in future Fitibt products could yield good things in the near future.

As for me, I still have my Pebbles. Also, I am still experimenting with my Metawear sensors. I will certainly looking to combine Pebble with Metawear and see where it goes.