Creation of the Carnage - Carney
The Daily Carnage

Creation of the Carnage

How we gained 11,378 email subscribers in one year.

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your Site

You might be surprised when you see this podcast is coming to ya from Copyblogger; they know they’re not technical SEO pros. That’s why Sonia Simone will be focusing on something else instead: answering the question, “What do the search engines mean by a “high-quality site”?

In her most recent episode, she’ll be getting to the bottom of what search engine bots are looking for when looking at your site. Check it out: 

  • (04:00) Some of the things (both simple and complicated) that can mess up your search rankings
  • (04:25) What smaller businesses and individuals websites can do with keywords that aren’t overly competitive
  • (07:25) Why you need to use professional-quality tools if you care about your web traffic, like premium WordPress, paying for site monitoring, etc.
  • (08:45) What it means to have a site that got “borked by a bad SEO.” Think, someone good at sales with little technical SEO ability and implements problems because of it. (ie. keyword stuffing, buying a lot of bad links, etc.)
  • (09:25) Why SEOing as a verb can be a red flag
  • (10:45) The 10 factors that generate the “signals of quality” that search engines look for…
  • (11:05) 1: Posting mostly original content (not scraped)
  • (11:55) 2: A reasonable commitment to quality
  • (12:30) 3: Freedom from stupid tactics like keyword stuffing
  • (13:20) 4: Using the language of your audience (in other words, keyword research)
  • (14:25) 5 and 6: High-quality sites are useful and true 
  • (15:05) 7: Why usefulness and truth isn’t enough
  • (16:20) 8: Smart content promotion – start thinking about things like developing our professional network, about cultivating a community of publishers in our topic, about supporting each other’s work.
  • (17:10) 9: Solid links from credible websites
  • (18:05) 10: Breadth, depth, and richness – showing you truly know the topic
  • (19:35) Other ways to get discovered beyond the search engines and what Sonia means by saying “Google is not the only game”

Dive into the full episode (transcript included) for deeper insights on these signals-of-quality factors.  

 

How We Gained 11,378 Email Subscribers in One Year

FACT: The Daily Carnage didn’t exist one year ago today. Now? We’ve gained over 11,000 subscribers. Who wants to hear the story of how we did it? ::raises hand::

Buckle up because it’s a wild ride full of twists, turns, and even some drama. Okay, there wasn’t any drama. Here’s the skinny:

We had gotten tired of constantly fighting with social media algorithms to get our content noticed, so we switched directions. Email is the one place where you’re not controlled by an algorithm, so it made sense to focus on building an email list.

Small problem: We knew if we were going to build a huge list, we couldn’t do it with the blog at the centerpiece of our content strategy. There’s already a ton of marketing content out there. Rather than add to the noise, we decided to take the best content, and summarize it.

Our goal was to give our subscribers as much value as we could possibly fit in the email itself. Then, if they needed more info, they could click a link to the original source.

So, we started doing just that, and it worked…slowly.

Once we realized that people were starting to like our little newsletter, we got serious about marketing it. We chose a handful of tactics to build the size of our list:

  • Social media promotion. Okay, we weren’t completely done with social media. We still share the newsletter every day with our followers.
  • Facebook ads. We love using FB ads for our client projects so we had to use them for ourselves.
  • Link building. With the Daily Carnage being our “Pillar Content,” we focused on finding publications who had featured similar newsletters.
  • LinkedIn posts. From our personal LI accounts, we write text posts that talk about the Carnage and tag people whose content we’ve featured. Example.
  • Word of mouth. An added benefit of truly trying to create valuable content is people love to talk about it!

Runningoutofwords. Get the full story and all of our subscriber-acquisition tactics below ↓

Meat Us at Arby’s

Pop quiz: what do the words: kott, mesa, mish liha, and meco all have in common?

Answer: They’re all words for “meat” in other languages.

Arby’s, the fast food joint with all the meats, launched an absurd new ad, just in time for the Winter Olympics. With plenty of other brands trying and failing (looking at you, Pepsi) to tackle the importance of unity, Arby’s has taken a…different approach.

They’re focusing on the importance of meat across cultures. Because, according to them, that’s really what unites us all. The good news is, they know they’re being ridiculous and they’re embracing it.

“Marketing used to be about making a myth and telling it. Now it’s about telling a truth and sharing it.”
Marc Mathieu

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