In Des Moines, IA it is tough to find good seafood and when you find a place that has it – you keep going back. Our place of choice is Waterfront, but as you can imagine, fresh seafood in Iowa costs a little more than it does on the coasts. So last week, we decided to try to make our favorite Waterfront cuisine ourselves at home.

To our surprise, Waterfront offers up their recipes on their website – in printable 4×6 recipe cards. They also have a market attached to the restaurant that sells fresh seafood daily.

Many businesses consider their recipes top secret – whether it be business processes, industry knowledge, or expertise. So why does a business like Waterfront embrace it? Why do they give out their recipes and all the means to make it yourself when their core business is to prepare and serve you food?

This act of giving away information is core to the Freemium business model. It is fundamental to the content strategies Doug and I discuss on our internet business podcast and is something I teach my clients when we discuss organic SEO. It’s the reason I blog, record a podcast, tweet industry details, etc. I give away my successful internet business recipes daily – but for what? Why give away something when I can have people to pay me for that knowledge?

Lets return to Waterfront… They give you a recipe and the ingredients – and send you on your way to make that delicious Halibut Royale that you’ve eaten in the restaraunt a number of times. Excitedly you arrive home and start cooking. As you work your way through the recipe you find it’s not as easy as you had thought. And when you finally pull it out of the oven and take the first bite – you realize it’s not near as good as it is in the restaraunt. So next time you get the craving for fresh seafood you will likely return to the restartaunt and purchase the expert-made halibut royale rather than attempting to prepare it yourself.

So I give away all my web strategy recipes. Some people will take them and run – never requiring my consulting services. But many will take the recipes and try to make them work themselves only to realize they aren’t cut out for it. Upon this realization who do you think they will return to? … the chef that gave them the recipe.

This principle forms a significant cornerstone in how we are changing our business in 2010. Do you give away your recipes? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums.

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• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Does that make sense? The basic idea is that more people search for obscure, multi-keyword phrases than they do popular keywords. This has a lot to do with search users becoming smarter over the years to where most people search by phrase rather than by keyword – because they’ve been trained this behavior narrows results.

What does this mean for your business? Well you should start targeting long phrase, long tail keywords in both your content and SEO strategies. Using this method you can target multiple long tail keywords and still have a better chance at generating more traffic than optimizing for a single, popular keyword.

Here’s an example… A couple weeks ago I was talking to my good friend TJ about optimizing his e-commerice site RIPTApparel (cool t-shirts by the way). We were discussing keyword targeting. My advice was to quit targeting the keyword “t-shirt” and start targeting long tail, multiple word keywords such as “cool graphic tees” and “limited edition t-shirts”. Not only do you increase your chances of being found by targeting the long tail – there is much less competition for those terms in both organic and paid search results.

So if you find that you aren’t “being found” online, try some long tail and localized keyword targeting to increase your chances… Look at the keywords coming through in your web analytics to see what long tail keywords people are using to find you and start optimizing for those. And if you have any questions at all on targeting keywords – jump into the forums and ask away!

Charts via SEOmoz | Illustrating the Long Tail.

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If your content strategy is to “Go Viral” than you need start over. As Scott Monty says above – “viral is a result, not strategy”. If you produce engaging, quality content – then you may be able to go viral. If you set up a good syndication and distribution system by creating content outposts – then you may be able to go viral.

But don’t think by just putting a video up on YouTube, it will go viral and that’s the end of your content strategy. One lesson we teach all our clietns and members is that simply building a website does not mean people will come. That’s the first misconception we always try to reverse. A killer website is only as good as the community that is built around it. Viral content needs an engaged community. Start with web strategy basics and becoming viral will be a result

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Here’s a great slide deck from AlchemyContent on “Why Content Strategy Matters”

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1. If there is an issue with the syndication or delivery of the content you will find it as soon as possible
2. If you made a grammatical error, you can fix it fast
3. You can make sure it looks right (formatting, alignment, images) when it hits the RSS reader or email inbox
4. Observing how your audience consumes your content gives insight in how to optimize it
5. You can see how the subscription process works (ie what happens after you subscribe to our email newsletter?)

I’ve witnessed the benefits first hand many times. For instance, I found a bad formatting error in the email newsletter on my internet business podcast – luckily before we had built a subscriber base.

What other reasons should you subscribe to your own content? Let us know in the comments!

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What are your tips for increasing engagement?

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Now you have your keywords. Title your post “How To Install A Showerhead”. In the content of your post, use these keywords in your copy… For instance: “Here is the video of my company installing a shower head on a recent job”.

1. Think of how you would search for what you are writing about
2. Use those search terms in your copy
3. Tag your post with those terms

Also Remember – it’s important to have relevant content for the keywords you are targeting. You don’t want to use “installing a shower head” as a keyword if you are installing a sink. This will lead to high bounce rates for search results.

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