I recently re-read Malcolm Gladwell's book, "The Tipping Point," as an audiobook, and the marketing principles contained in it are timeless.
The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
The premise of the book relies heavily on three types of personalities whose input and influence on a movement create a true social tipping point:
The influence of each of these three groups is critical to the successful "tip" of any venture.
Some tipping points happen organically, and the results typically surprise everyone.
The most recent non-marketing tipping point was the global pandemic.
Information and ideas can, like a virus, spread epidemically.
But in our case, we want the antonym of "flattening the curve."
Balloon pop: unless you have virality or a nearly unlimited marketing budget, it's likely going to take years to "tip" the scales in your favor.
The organic tipping point in digital marketing occurs when organic reference, share and backlink influx becomes greater than the results of internal outreach efforts.
In digital marketing, the tipping point is the moment the community does more to promote your message than you could ever do.
It's a glorious thing, and it's possible for nearly any brand, but it takes time, effort, patience, and consistency.
Here's my personal tipping point formula for marketing your business online.
A critical principle of your own tipping point when it comes to digital marketing is the stickiness factor.
Not only should your content be quality, but it should also be evergreen and timeless.
In other words, it should stick. Flash-in-the-pan is the antithesis of a true tipping point for your marketing efforts.
This is just one of the reasons Google and other search engines have greatly extended the amount of time it takes to rank for competitive terms online.
Content production that is truly evergreen should withstand the test of time (and even search engine algorithm updates).
But often, content is only as sticky as the product or service it promulgates.
At the outset, your message needs to be tailored to your audience. Your greatest blunder will be creating content assets that are off-brand and do not meet consumer expectations.
Furthermore, not all campaigns, assets, or targeted copy are suited to the long-form skyscraper technique.
Have you dug deep into your customer persona?
Do you know that your ideal client is a Caucasian female between the ages of 33 and 43 with two children and an annual household income of $120K or more?
First, know your audience. Tailor your messages to their pain points, frustrations, and problems.
#2, which involves a major shift to going broadly outside your intended audience, I hate the phrase "riches are in the niches.
"While true, it negates the possibility of reaching that eventual tipping point to a broader segment.
Stay focused, but when the tip starts to occur, be prepared to engage wholly different groups.
As Gladwell puts it:
Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.
In other words, a tipping point might work well in one time and place and have little to no impact in another.
Timing and location are everything.
But how do you frame your own context?
While there are a number of features out of your control, you can focus on what is in your immediate control:
Most marketers control more than they think.
Our marketing framework holistically encompasses the "times and places" and "conditions and circumstances" to ensure maximum impact and ROI.
If you want to follow the formula of organic growth by hitting your own tipping point, wouldn't it make sense to meaningfully engage with the mavens, connectors, and salespeople?
Remember, connecting with mavens, connectors, and salespeople is what "outreach campaigns" are all about.
Gladwell discusses the connectors with "real" social connections and the "rule of 150."That is, any single connector maxes out their true social ties by about 150 people.
Beyond that, it's tough to maintain true influence over a relationship.
At the time of Gladwell's original writing, "social media influencers" were not a thing.
In his original definition of a connector, a true connector would max out their connections at the rule of 150.
Even influential movie stars, sports icons, and other celebrities were unlikely to have a way to meaningfully engage with their followers and fans when Gladwell's book was first published in 2000.
Today, these individuals wield an almost outlandish and outsized role in driving an epidemic, as Gladwell calls it.
In fact, it was the social media marketing elites who helped drive the growth of social media sites like Twitter and Instagram.
Gladwell deems mavens as "information specialists" and "information brokers.
"In the context of a "clinically proven pill that helps you lose weight," they're the gaggle of medical doctors willing to give peer-review and glowing testimonials of your product.
Mavens are the right people to effectively show (often with data) rather than tell.
These are my kind of people.
The principle that "facts don't lie, people do" is actually part of our mission statement.
When there's a budget for it, salespeople can and should be hired.
When there's not, you can rely on the good graces of persuaders among the mavens and connectors. Sometimes, small actions at the right time can make a big difference.
The very best internal salespeople will be expensive. If your product or service is unique, uncontested (either naturally or by IP), or unparalleled in its offering, you may find the luxury of natural persuaders and salespeople who'll promote your wares to infinity.
In a simple way, leveraging these connections can be highly effective.
Or, if you're lucky enough to have organically established numerous software resellers, then your rapid scale can be more assured.
Some would call that lucky, but the work and effort were likely front-loaded in the offer, not in connecting with some external persuader.
Did you know that famous home run hitter Babe Ruth not only held the record for home runs, he also held the record for career strikeouts (at 1,330) for 29 years until he was bested by Micky Mantle?
If you're looking to swing for the fences, be prepared to strike out. This is particularly true for those looking to create viral content and powerful stories.
Unfortunately, not all the most powerful stories can have their own Dollar Shave Club moment, but that doesn't mean you can't continue working for it.
But business is not as binary as baseball.
Swinging for the fence as you strive to move up-market in your niche doesn't necessarily mean the business strikes out. It just means we need to try again.
Remember, we're playing an infinite game.
The tipping point is about finding new clients, customers, mavens, and connectors to blast your message to new markets.
It's not about digging through your CRM and dredging up dead leads.
It's never stale. No, tipping point marketing is always fresh and adventurous, with a focus on the next big thing.
SEO has always been a game that pits the marketer in direct conflict with the search engine guidelines.
Search engines funded by an advertising model will always have a conflict of interest in serving up organic results that directly benefit its own self-interest, often at the expense of the "free-riders" who game the search platform for their own benefit or for that of their clients.
This manipulation is commonly done through understanding and exploiting search engine algorithms, which directly influence one's position on the platform's search rankings.
It falls in line with the very definition:
In the scenario where rules are both created and oft-changed by a publicly-traded, profit-maximizing search engine, white hat search engine optimization ceases to exist.
And when compliance with the platform's rules means following a moving set of goalposts, course corrections in SEO and digital marketing strategies will be required to bring a website back into full "white hat" compliance.
The alternative is a slow, painful slide into irrelevance through full content deindexation from search engines.
While webmasters attempt to comply by engaging in today's version of white hat SEO techniques, the shifting sands are likely to land them in scenarios that do not bode well for long-term, sustainable keyword ranking and growth.
The introduction of new SEO metrics and the decline in value of others are routine realities webmasters have to contend with.
The days when 'keyword stuffing' was a viable strategy for improving search engine ranking are long gone. Now, not only is it frowned upon but can lead to penalties due to non-compliance with algorithm updates or rule changes enacted by major search engines like Google.
Instead, mastering relevant keywords while creating quality content becomes crucial in ensuring that your website remains visible amidst exponentially increasing internet organic traffic.
It's important also to remember that excellent user experience should never be sacrificed at the altar of optimizing 'search results.'
Building trust among users through authentic practices contributes significantly towards sustainable growth regardless of “white hat” parameters.
Most full-service digital marketing agencies are on the same team as the search engines.
They're very likely certified and partnered for all best practices related to paid search engine marketing.
They help drive revenue to the search engine by operating as agents for many paying brands that utilize the system for better results.
You can think of executing white hat SEO campaigns as the ultimate Prisoner's Dilemma.
The following graphic should prove helpful:
Only there is one caveat: there is information asymmetry and an imbalance of power. It's very different than the scenario of the Chargers and the Raiders, where a tie would benefit both, but the double-edged sword of a loss would be devastating to one but zero-sum on the other.
In our scenario, let's call the search engine Player 2.
If Player 2 defects in our scenario, there is no true dilemma or downside for Player 2 other than a few angry webmasters.
However, if collusive strategies could be instituted, it is almost 100% unlikely.
As Player 1, SEOs and marketers are typically forced into playing and cooperating with the game rules, motivated partly by fear and partly by reward.
But it's not search engines alone that mask an incentive to cheat.
In the absence of a completely open and mutually agreeable set of rules that only changes by mutual confirmation and acceptance, the party with the greatest access to the right data wins.
In our scenario, search engines provide just enough information to keep the users at bay but not enough for them to fully know all the secret sauce.
Enter third-party marketing tools.
In the absence of all the right information, third-party martech software solutions have helped to fill the void by reverse-engineering ranking factors, providing more detail on things like backlinks and specific keyword rankings in search engines.
Such solutions have helped to fill the gap, but information asymmetry will always persist.
For instance, we'll likely never fully know organic click-through rates for target keywords.
This asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in spite of Martech's attempt to even the playing field.
On the side of the marketers, the last holdout for at least some asymmetry is link building, where search engines may not fully know if a site is legit or if its link graph is poisoned through purchasing links from PBNs.
The relationship between site owners, digital marketing agencies, and search engines is simultaneously symbiotic (sometimes mutualistic) and parasitic.
Both are prone to benefit overall, but agencies often leech off the search engine host.
And the search engines don't necessarily like this relationship.
There is a lot of value left on the table that agencies are gobbling.
This creates incentives for both parties to step into moral gray space.
"I have a dream" where both parties could play together with aligned incentives, but the outline for that business plan wouldn't be worth the breath or dreamful supposition.
At its best, all SEO tuning is truly a game that pits marketers (whether direct or agency) against a platform that owns the user experience.
In such a scenario, white-hat SEO tactics do not exist.
At its best, SEO is a gray hat, while black hat SEO tactics are the worst.
But that doesn't mean you get out of the game.
So much of winning in internet marketing is gifted to those who are able to survive those proverbial "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune".
I greatly applaud those who simply do their best to stay inside the guise of the rules of white hat SEO strategies, even if those rules are somewhat nebulous and shift with frequency.
In reality, marketers truly interested in the long-term viability and sustainability of their clients' SEO campaigns should always seek to be on the cutting edge of white hat SEO practices.
But can you blame the marketers if they never dip their toes into darker waters?
Clients always ask, "How long does it take to rank on Google?" It's a loaded question, partly because:
We have noticed a disappointing trend, particularly as it relates to high-volume, global keywords:
The process for ranking and vesting, which used to take 6-9 months, now takes closer to 3-5 years.
In some cases, and for some keywords, it takes even longer.
That's a heart-wrenching prospect, particularly for a startup that may want to outrank a long-standing competitor.
We put together a comprehensive list of all the most highly correlated Google ranking factors.
But chief among them, which is not listed, is TIME. That includes a vesting time for:
Keep in mind that this vesting assumes all else as being equal to other high-ranking websites, including the quality of the site's content in driving organic traffic.
Let's explore some of these issues a bit further.
If you wanted to give users the best possible online experience, would you want flash-in-the-pan upstarts with a little technical system-gaming know-how to be able to unseat 50 to 100-year-old established brands?
The search engine doesn't think so.
You need to build trust, and trust takes time.
Backlinks are only one of the Google rankings factors that help determine trust.
Trust comes from search engine crawlers, working to understand your site structure and how it fits in with the rest of the web.
So, here's the good news: as your website ages past the three and 5-year mark, you will notice something, and it will suddenly become easier to rank.
Your backlinks didn't change, and your content may not have updated in a while, but suddenly, your site finally starts to rank for things that matter to you.
Consider the following two studies by Moz and Ahrefs:
The older your page is, the higher the likelihood it will have of achieving higher Google rankings in the SERPs.
Consider this: the average age of position 1 in Google is nearly 950 days old! That's the average!
If you've been blogging like a beast for two years, tuning all your pages and doing plenty of off-site promotion, and you're wondering why you can't seem to beat the "XYZ brand," who outranks you in search, just give it time.
If you've been engaging in link schemes, buying paid links, or otherwise pushing too heavily in one area but ignoring factors in another, your web page may be subject to a reshuffle.
There are also algorithm weights that change with each update in Google's algorithm, which may trigger re-shifts in your Google rankings.
A reshuffled is also known as the Google Dance and can last for a day or for months at a time until you make the necessary changes.
Here are just a few.
If you wanted to change from:
SEO.co/backlinks to SEO.co/link-building or even from BobsMarketingAgency.com to Marketer.co, you are likely to see a negative impact on your site's rankings.
While it goes without saying that, in doing so, you would also create the appropriate 301 redirects in either your .htaccess or REGEX file, you should also consider the rankings impact of such a decision.
While most of the ranking will continue to flow, your redirect may pose its own issues and even cause a drop in rankings or, worse still, a reset of your vesting for a particular phrase or term. A vesting reset can drop you back and take months or even years to resurrect fully.
While admins at Google will tell you they ignore spammy backlinks for ranking, they don't tell you that the worst backlinks can actually cause your rankings to be pushed down even more.
Negative SEO (aka, "Google bowling") typically consists of either site hacks or pointing backlinks to a competitor's site from nefarious neighborhoods on the web.
While you can disavow and request the removal of these links, they may have a negative impact that could add months to your site vesting and keep your rankings suppressed for a very long time.
If you work to scale your total indexed pages in a relatively short period with increased content velocity, you may see an overall drop in your rankings for the following reasons:
You need enough content to rank but be sure you don't garble the message by creating content just for the sake of SEO content.
You'll want to create relevant content that adds value to your target audience.
When your website is not diversified in its ranking factors, there is a higher likelihood of receiving an algorithmic adjustment downward, particularly in the next Google algorithm update.
Notice I did not title it "algorithmic penalties."
An algorithmic penalty is a misnomer.
Search engines will mete out manual penalties or manual actions, but the algorithm only adjusts based on math and weights.
What may look to be a penalty may simply be the algorithm:
Unless you have had a manual action, algorithmic blocks are typically not permanent and can be reversed, but you just have to focus on fundamental search engine optimization (SEO) strategy on-page and off-page.
When it comes to ranking more quickly, there are a few questions you will need to ask, particularly as it relates to your content marketing strategy:
We have found the best way to shorten the gap to rank is as follows:
Your content doesn't need to be longer, nor does it use the Skyscraper technique (length does not always equal higher quality), but it does need to be better.
It needs to be MORE informative, MORE engaging, and MORE entertaining.
We have an internal formula that we implement for that.
ChatGPT or other AI tools can help create structure, but they mostly regurgitate for landing pages.
They are not as good at creating content quality that hits all the buttons.
In short, your content needs to draw website visitors in and keep them on the page, following along.
Compare your content to the top-ranking pages and posts and fill the gap.
We suggest using the following SEO tools:
These tools scan your pages and add the appropriate target keywords and LSI keywords to the body, title tags, headers, and meta descriptions so you are comparable to the competition.
To dive deeper, tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs will also show you where you are deficient relative to your competitors and show you how you can close the gap.
Deficiencies could include more than just your written content but might encompass technical SEO like loading speed of the page, keeping in mind that sometimes tunes will indicate page load times should increase (typically because the content page is exhaustive and loads more slowly).
But beware not to over-tune or overoptimize!
Content promotion and link building outreach services are critical, but if your content is epic enough, it will promote itself.
So, if you can make it viral, then others are more likely to link to it, reference it or share it on social media. Just be careful where it is you are acquiring your backlinks from. It's better to get quality than to even touch low-quality links that can drag down your search engine rankings.
While not a direct Google ranking factor, fixing negative Google reviews can help with overall brand perception, particularly if you're in a local market.
Good things come to those who wait, especially in search engine rankings.
We often suggest working less on new sites and putting more time into older, more established sites.
It can be discouraging when new sites don't receive the rankings gains you want, even after a year or two of work.
Be patient. To rank in less than a year is partially based on luck, partially based on lots of input and hard work.
But your time will come if you focus on fundamentals and white-hat SEO strategies.
The internet has a ghostwriting problem.
In some cases, published articles are posted on the web with either no distinct author or with an author bio that is either thin or non-existent.
The author of this post is listed as "Nate Nead."
But even if you get past some of these basic checks that the best web crawlers perform, you still can't be certain Nate was the actual author of the blog post.
Twitter is currently dealing with similar issues with so-called verified accounts.
Here are the various scenarios currently seen with authored content online.
Each of the above is listed in terms of their level of algorithmic and manual-action risk to your website.
While Google absolutely hates remuneration for dofollow links, there is really no way to algorithmically figure out which links are paid or not.
Consequently, you need to pay attention to which areas Google has control over:
Google wants legit profiles.
Ethical considerations and ethical behavior play a crucial role in maintaining the integrity of your website.
Google wants guest post links nofollowed.
It's getting easier to determine if an author is real and has true authority in his/her niche.
They also claim guest post links have little to no impact:
But, with a little effort, an illegitimate profile can look real.
And therein lies the rub, especially for the link builders.
When it comes to link building for SEO, the ghostwriting problem becomes even more pernicious, particularly if you write articles that are produced with the express purpose of obtaining links. The scholarly nature and particular subject of these articles can be compromised by such practices.
And this is where Google is using artificial intelligence to detect guest blog posts, articles written with AI, illegitimate article profiles and (in particular) websites established for the express purpose of inserting outbound links.
There are a handful of signals Google uses to detect the most pernicious paid link schemes, including:
Either way, great care should be taken when you're in the red or orange zone for any of the various above-listed scenarios.
You'll also notice that because the rules are so stringent, it makes creating and promoting a site organically online much more difficult than it ever has been.
It's also even more difficult if the site is raw and new with no backlink connections from other websites. Ghost written content has become a common practice in such scenarios, further complicating the process.
We often give more credit to machines than they are due.
Certainly, the software is becoming more complex, but it's assumed the software is doing more behind the scenes than it actually does.
This is especially true in the case of conspiracy theories when we want to assume the software is being nefarious or collusive in some way.
However, Google E-A-T is currently insufficient in solving all the problems with fake authorship and ghost writing online.
Signals are there, but the problem will persist until technology can catch up.
I envision an eventual world in which blockchain, combined with artificial intelligence, could be used to establish true and authentic authorship for content online.
It'll be the blockchain version of a verified professional writer, and the AI can tell if the post was written in your style and flow. This will ensure that only a good writer receives proper recognition for their written work.
That day is coming sooner than you think, and when it does, the idea that links will even be needed will become a fantasy of a bygone era.
It will also make doing white label marketing or white label SEO work much more difficult. The common practice of needing to hire a ghost writer to maintain the first person narrative in content creation will be challenged.
When the internet was blossoming when I was a teenager, the common joke was:
Of course, [insert fact] is true. I read it on the internet.
The authorship problem online remains a real, tangible threat to credibility and authority.
When facts are not presented by qualified experts, some may be prone to take them as gospel truth, act on them, and make decisions accordingly.
A fact that could quite literally harm an unsuspecting public.
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