On Episode 76 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with world-renowned nature photographer Arthur Morris, about the business side of photography and how to make money as a bird photographer!
Tag: #author
Living the Dream as a Nature Photographer With Arthur Morris
On Episode 75 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Arthur Morris who’s living the dream as a world renowned nature photographer! He’s sharing with us the story of how it all began!
The Art of Bird Photography With Arthur Morris
On Episode 74 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Arthur Morris, world-renowned nature photographer, writer, & educator! He specializes in birds and is author of the book, The Art of Bird Photography.
Show Notes
Arthur Morris’ Website: Birds As Art
Arthur Morris’ Blog
Find Arthur Morris on Facebook
Find Arthur Morris on Twitter
Information for the Birds As Art Instructional Photo Tours
About Arthur Morris & Birds As Art
The Birds As Art Online Photography Store
Buy Arthur Morris’ book, The Art of Bird Photography, online here:
Arthur Morris’ Book, Shorebirds: Beautiful Beachcombers
Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, New York City
Forest Park, New York City
South Shore Audubon Society
New York City Audubon Society
Photographer Milton Heiberg
Birds: American Kestrel
Birds: Marbled Godwit
Birds: Least Bittern
Available to Buy: Books, Videos and Training Instruction by Arthur Morris, as well as books by his friends and colleagues
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment
Sections
Introduction to Birds as Art
The Art of Bird Photography by Arthur Morris
Arthur Morris’ Career Before Photography
The College Years
The Elementary School Teaching Years
The First Thrill of Bird Sightings: How It All Began
The Marbled Godwit That Changed His Life
Shorebirds: Arthur’s First Love
Hooked on Birding
“That’s What I Want To Do With My Life”
The Beginning of a Dream: Photographing Birds
The Art of Bird Photography With Arthur Morris
Introduction to Birds as Art
Paul: Hello, everyone. Paul Parisi here with the Edge of Innovation. Today our guest is Arthur Morris. Arthur, are you there?
Arthur: I am here, sir.
Paul: Alright. You may not know who Arthur Morris is, but Arthur Morris came to my attention as I started my hobby of photography. He has a book that is still in print. It’s a fantastic book called Birds as Art and sort of a double meaning there. Art Morris and birds as art. Let me just see if I state this right. Correct me if I’m wrong. So, Arthur is really a professional bird photographer. You’re not a person who photographs professional birds. You are a person who makes money by photographing birds. Is that fair?
Arthur: That’s the plan.
Paul: Okay. I was in the field. What did you call the classes that you do?
Arthur: Birds as Art instructional photo tours. We shortened that IPTs. And one note, Paul, the name of the business is Birds as Art, and there’s a wonderful story behind that. But the first book that I did for Amphoto was The Art of Bird Photography. So, lots of folks refer to it as Birds as Art. But they’re technically incorrect.
The Art of Bird Photography by Arthur Morris
Paul: Okay. Well that’s good. Now, I will say that the book is probably one of the best books I have ever read, bar none. And I’m not saying that just because you’re on the phone. I think I’ve said this to many people. It is so easy to read. It is just a pleasure to read. And then the content is fantastic as well. But it’s very well written. So, if you’re interested in photography in the least, certainly get this book. It will just inspire you, and it’s a joy to read. So that’s what drove me to figure out who this guy was and what he did.
I took this tour here in New England, so I bought that book on encouragement of several people in a photo club I attended. And then I found out you were coming to Boston to do one of your photo tours, and I took that, and it was a joy as well. I’d say, just as we get started here, that Arthur is the quintessential teacher. He’s always taking an opportunity to teach, and that’s so important when you’re trying to improve your photography.
Arthur Morris’ Career Before Photography
Paul: So, let’s dial back to before you were a photographer because you weren’t always a photographer. When you were a kid, were you a photographer?
Arthur: Didn’t know what it was.
Paul: Didn’t know what it was. And what did you go to school for? What were you going to be when you grew up?
Arthur: Well, I guess when I was about four or five, like everybody else, I wanted to be a train engineer or a fireman.
Paul: Did you ever make it to those?
Arthur: Not in the least. And then sometime after that, I had a dream of being a professional athlete, possibly football, but my left knee took care of that. It hurts to this minute. And beyond that, I thought golf would be great. And even today, if I said, boy, if I wasn’t Mr. Famous Bird Photographer, I wouldn’t mind being one of the 20-somethings on tour with the beautiful blond wives and having these amazing careers and competition and… I’m very happy with where I am and who I am.
Paul: Okay.
Arthur: But those were the dreams. And then further on, my Grandma Selma, my dad’s mom, and, I guess, both of my parents sort of guided me towards the career path of being a metallurgical engineer.
Paul: Wow. Okay.
Arthur: I went to Brooklyn Technical High School, and from there, I turned down scholarship offers to MIT and Rensselaer.
Paul: Really. Why, I had no idea.
Arthur: Most people don’t. And then I wound up at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, mostly on scholarship. And that was the third-best engineering school in the country at the time.
Paul: Why did you choose Brooklyn over, over MIT or was it just the distance?
Arthur: Probably my mother’s apple pie.
Paul: Ah, okay. Well that’s valid. You were an engineer?
Arthur: Didn’t say that.
Paul: Okay.
The College Years
Arthur: Skipping ahead a bit… So, I went to Brooklyn Polytech, and in Brooklyn Technical High School, where I went to high school, there were no girls at the time. I’d never been on a date, and my mother kept pushing me towards Poly, and once we — Brooklyn Polytechnic. And once that decision was made, she had a friend in the luggage industry whose son was AEP, Alpha Epsilon Pi. So, since I had never had a date, she wanted me to pledge AEPi. Only problem there was that having pledged AEPi, I learned to play bridge and poker. And by my sophomore year, I spent most of my time doing that, rarely going to class, showing up for the mid-terms and finals and doing okay.
So, I went from two terms on the dean’s list to like a middle C. I have all the letters in a little box. “Dear Mr. Morris, congratulations on your scholarship.” Congratulations on this and that. And then, “Dear Mr. Morris, your grades are falling. Your scholarship is in danger.”
I was doing okay, and I felt like I could still get by, but I had to pass physical chemistry. So, I dropped it a couple of times because I wasn’t doing well. And then one term I said, well look, I either have to go to a different school or pass physical chemistry. I was tutored by this kid, Paul Levitz — he’s deceased a couple of years back — and friend Saul Schmulowitz. And they were like two really smart kids. And a third guy. And the three of them tutored me. Saul was in the class, and I studied, and I did the best I could. And I went in for the first exam, and I got a nine.
Paul: Wow. Out of a hundred.
Arthur: Nine out of a hundred. Yeah. So that was the end of that story.
So, I transferred to Brooklyn College, and I decided to become a physical education major. I remember the first year I showed up for counseling. They showed me the courses I needed to graduate, and there were four really hard ones — tests and measurements, physiology of exercise, kinesiology, and one other that I can never remember. And they said, “Oh, you can’t take those in the same term. No one could ever do that. They’re too hard.”
I said, “Listen. I just flunked out of Brooklyn Poly. That will be easy.”
I took the four courses that they said would be impossible, and I actually studied, and I wound up getting four A’s in the four for-credit courses. Then I had taken this one little podunk course, Group Games for Elementary-Age Children. And the guy gave me a B+, and I was plenty pissed off.
So here I was, all set to be a physical education teacher. Last year or two in college, I had been driving a cab in New York City, another little-known fact about Arthur Morris.
The Elementary School Teaching Years
Arthur: And again, Grandma Selma came into play. She knew a guy named Paul Arden who had a cleaning store in the neighborhood and was also principal of an elementary school. So, I got a job at P.S. 299, and soon thereafter, I transferred to P.S. 106.
So, I was teaching gym in this big room. First, I did it for two terms in an actual gym. P.S 299 was a fairly modern school with a gym. And then I got transferred to P.S. 106 and there was no gym there, just a big room. And I forget when I got out of the gym. But at some point, I said — I think it was in 299 — I said, “This is too boring. Put me in the classroom,” even though I wasn’t technically trained to be in the classroom.
So, they stuck me in a room with 38 kids, whatever. And I remember the first morning. There was a little black girl with a big smile. I went to pick up my class, and Kay Cloud smiled and looked at me and said, “Good morning, fatso.”
Paul: Really.
Arthur: So that was my introduction to being an elementary school teacher.
Paul: What grade was that?
Arthur: That was probably fourth or fifth. And I taught fourth or fifth grade in the classroom for probably a good 17, 18 years. Teaching fourth and fifth grade, mostly for 16 or 17 years.
Using Nature Photography in the Elementary School Classroom
Arthur: By the time, in 1983, I started photographing birds.
Paul: Why?
Arthur: So, probably towards the end of my teaching career — no, not even. With a decade to go in my teaching career, I started bringing slides of birds into the classroom and projecting the slides. I remember the first time I did it, Paul. I gave out big sheets of newsprint and some charcoal, and I’d put up a picture of a Snowy Owl, and I put up a picture of a Killdeer. And I gave the kids three minutes to sketch in one of the squares on this big sheet of newsprint. And I can remember the goose pimples I had as I walked around. We were in the ghetto, and the only birds these kids had ever seen was a House Sparrow and a Starling. And the only wildlife they had ever seen was Norway rat running through the schoolyard. And here were these kids just making these beautiful sketches where you could tell what the bird was, and the bird seemed alive. So that was really, really fun.
And then I started developing different curriculum areas.
Paul: What made you do that for a slideshow? What was the trigger point?
Arthur: Oh, I just loved photographing so much, and I had a slide projector.
Paul: Okay. So, you were photographing at the time.
The First Thrill of Bird Sightings: How It All Began
Paul: But what made you pick up a camera? Was it somebody saying, “Here is a camera?” Or had you owned a camera?
Arthur: Oh, what made me pick up…? Okay. I’m sorry. I jumped way ahead in the teaching end of things.
Paul: Sure.
Arthur: To this day, I don’t remember. 1976 or ’77. But one of my big loves was playing three-man basketball. And it was pretty obvious that my three-man basketball career, which never amounted to much, was coming to an end. My left knee was bothering me. My back was starting to bother me. So, I was looking for something to get me outside and maybe walking. So, I asked my dad if I could have his binoculars from World War II, and he sent them to me. They were living in California at the time. And they were so out of alignment that if you looked through the binoculars for more than like 20 seconds, you got a headache that lasted for a couple of days. But it was better than no binoculars, so…
I can remember one year in May — either ’76 or ’77 — I went with my then-wife, Dana, now my former wife, Dana, and my two children to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens. And as it happened, there was a big migration there, and there were lots of Warblers. And even though the Yellow-Rumped Warbler was the most common one, it was thrilling. I had a book called the Golden Guide, and it was thrilling to see the bird on the page and match it to the bird that was flitting around in the trees. I got all excited. And my family did not.
The flame wasn’t really lit, but I was sort of interested, and I was looking at the Golden Guide. And I should go back and say the reason I got the Golden Guide is that I had been fishing the fall before by the Plumb Beach Bridge in Brooklyn, and I came off the beach at sunrise. I had been fishing several hours through the night for Striped Bass without success that night. And there was a little tide pool, and there was a black and white bird with an orange bill, and it was flying up and down in this pond — just back the forth. And each time it was would go over the pond, it would put its bill in the pond. And every once in a while, it would just go — cha — and grab a Killifish. And it was just mesmerized. I stood there watching it for about a half hour like a tennis match, and it was really, really still, beautiful reflections. So that’s when I grabbed the Golden Guide and found that the bird was a Black Kkimmer.
So now we go ahead a couple of years, and I’m at in May with my family. And I think that was pretty neat, but I didn’t really get hooked. Then in August, I went to Jamaica Bay again by myself, and I took a walk around the west pond, and there was a logbook where people would write down their sightings. So, I had my trusty Golden Guide, and the first line says, “American Kestrel, male.”
I look in the book, and I go, “Oh my gosh. These people are so stupid. They expect me to believe that there’s an orange Falcon with blue wings flying around New York City. That’s ridiculous.”
So, I walked around the pond and in short order, I saw a male American Kestrel with an orange body and blue wings. And he flew into this row of trees, so I followed him. And the next thing I know, some guy in a truck was honking his horn, and he said, “Hey, you, get back here. Don’t you see the signs, Do Not Enter?”
I said, “I’m sorry. I was transfixed by that American Kestrel. I’ll stay on the path.”
And he said to me — name was Bob Cook — he said, “If you’d like to go and get really close to the birds, cross the street and go to the East Pond.”
The Marbled Godwit That Changed His Life
So, the very next morning, I go back there, and I think I still had just my crummy binoculars, my dad’s binoculars from the 2nd World War, and there was a single bird, a single big shorebird sitting on the mud. It turned out to be a Marbled Godwit. Beautiful bird with cinnamon colors and a long bill. And the base on the bill was alabaster pink.
So, I’m standing there and behind me, less than 100 yards is Cross Bay Boulevard, and there is hundreds of trucks and cars thundering by every hour, thousands in a day. 200 yards in front of me are the tracks for the A train and the C train taking tens of thousands of people to and from New York City from Far Rockaway and Rockaway. And then, 500 yards on the other side of the Bay is Kennedy Airport with these huge jetliners from all over the world and cargo planes are landing and taking off, you know, virtually every two minutes, 24 hours a day almost.
And I remember having this thought — Here’s this beautiful bird, and none of these people know it’s here. And as I’ve written in a couple of books — my first book was Shore Birds, Beautiful Beach Combers — I’m pretty sure that I wrote in there something to the effect that, at the time, I had no idea that seeing that single bird, that beautiful Marbled Godwit would change the course of the remainder of my adult life. But that’s exactly what it did and much for the better for me.
Shorebirds: Arthur’s First Love
Paul: So now, at this time, back in ’77, that time frame… You’re very articulate about the type of bird and what it is now. Were you that insightful at that time? Did you know that much about birds or was it just, “Oh, that’s a beautiful bird. I’ll look it up”?
Arthur: Yeah, I had my book, probably, in my hand. I had no clue what I was. And from that moment on, I started going birdwatching every day.
Paul: Wow. So you really got hooked on the birds.
Arthur: I got hooked at the bird and the birds, and shorebirds became my first love. They exhibit a variety of different plumages each year. They have different plumage when they’re young birds, so you can age them. And they undertake these fantastic migrations. Most of the shorebirds that visit New York City breed just below or just above the Arctic Circle, and many of them get down to South America for the winter. And a good number of them get down to Tierra del Fuego — White Rumped Sandpiper, Pectoral Sandpiper, Hudsonian Godwit. So that was remarkable.
Hooked on Birding
But I just got hooked on birding. And for seven years, I birded ferociously, birding before work and after work. I remember when I was teaching in Queens, and it was May, and I would try to change my prep period to be adjacent to my lunchtime. And I would take my then good binoculars and run to Forest Park for an hour and 45 minutes to see if there were any migrant warblers.
So, I was really hooked. And then probably in the sixth or seventh year of doing all this birding, I met this man named Tom Davis. He was a shorebird fanatic, and I would see him on the pond every day for years in the season, which was July, August, September, October, November. We would cross paths, and he was never talk to me, like two ships passing in the night. He was a well-known birder. He was the voice of the New York City Rare Bird Alert. He birded a lot in South America. And probably after seeing me out there for three or four years and never saying a word, one day I walked by him on the pond, and he said, “Good morning, Artie. How are you?”
And oh my gosh, I was so happy. I went home and told Dana, “Tom Davis is my friend. You wouldn’t believe it. He was down in the mud.”
I asked him to draw me a diagram of Bared Sandpiper, tell me about places to go in Forest Park. And of course, the next week I saw him, and he walked by me again without saying a word.
Paul: Wow. Okay.
Arthur: He was a somewhat mystical character. But when he went out on the pond, he had this huge thing with him about three feet long that looked like some kind of rifle. But it was an old-style telephoto lens called Novaflex. And it was like a sub machine gun with two handles. And I learned later that he focused by moved one of the handles. And this guy was six-foot-nine, 145 pounds. It was quite a sight to see him out there.
And then — I don’t know — after the sixth year, one day it was raining, and he said, “Let me show you my baby album.” And he had a little collection of photographs of the juvenile Sandpipers, Least Sandpipers, Semipalmated, the Short-Billed Dowitcher. And that opened my eyes to photography a bit.
“That’s What I Want To Do With My Life”
And there was another gentleman around named Tony Manzonie. He was an Eastern European immigrant, and it could be 100 degrees at the pond in August, and Tony Manzonie would be there with his heavy brown corduroy coat on and a little 500-millimeter mirror lens. And one day he invited me to a slide program at South Shore Audubon Society. I went in there, and I got in a good seat up in the front. And the first slide is this beautiful bird called Least Bittern. He photographed it at Big Johns Pond at Jamaica Bay, a place that I had been many times, but I’d never had the privilege to see a Least Bittern. And when I saw that picture, that was it.
Paul: Wow.
Arthur: I said, “That’s what I want to do with my life.”
Paul: You see, you said that in your head. Did you go home and tell anybody? Or, you were still working at the time.
Arthur: I was still working. I was still teaching. I was still married to Dana. In 1983, I bought my first telephoto lens on the advice of my good friend, Peter, and I can’t remember his last name. He was a guy that had met from Linnaean Society. His name will probably come to me in a minute. He suggested that I get the Canon 400-millimeter 4.5 lens. So I bought that for about $800 and, I think, a Canon A1 or maybe an AE1. And for seven more years, I went around photographing with what today would just be a little short lens.
And in the beginning, of course, I wanted to photograph the shorebirds, and I took my first roll of film, and I didn’t know anything about exposure, barely knew how to focus. And when I got the film back, I looked at the pictures, and I was hugely disappointed because it was like there were these little specks on the film. Are those the birds?
Paul: Right. It’s like taking a picture of the moon.
Arthur: In pretty short order, I started wearing my old clothes to the East Pond and getting down in the mud and crawling through the mud to get close to the birds. And I got very good at that. And before you know it, the lens focused down to about 12 feet. I was actually getting closer than that to the birds, and I learned that by adding a hollow tube called an extension tube, I could get to about nine feet. And then a least sandpiper looked pretty big in the frame and on the film.
The Beginning of a Dream: Photographing Birds
So, I started making a few decent pictures, and that continued for a couple of years. One year in November there was a Snowy Owl, and I walked up to it at Jones Beach and made a few nice pictures. But I still didn’t know what I was doing. I had taken one course in nature photography at New York City Audubon with a guy named Milton Heiberg, and he taught me some of the basics. And then after that, I had a dream, and it’s amazing how it came true.
More Episodes:
This has been Part 1 of our interview with Arthur Morris. Listen to Part 2, here!
Also published on Medium.
Rich Content Publishing: How It Helps With SEO
On Episode 66 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Ed Alexander of Fanfoundry.com, about content rich publishing and how it helps with your website’s SEO.
Show Notes
Ed Alexander’s fanfoundry.com
Find Ed Alexander on Twitter
Contact Ed Alexander
Find Ed Alexander on LinkedIn
Find Ed Alexander on Facebook
Search Engine Optimization: Getting on Page One
Google Webmaster Tools
Beginner’s Guide to Google Webmaster Tools
Google Trends
Moz: SEO Software, Tools & Resources for Smarter Marketing
Grammarly: A Free Writing Assistant
Link SaviorLabs Cybersecurity Assessment
Sections
How To Market Your Product
Webmaster Tools: Building a Content Rich Website
Making Your Website Usable
Grammarly
Does SEO Really Exist?
Location, Location, Location
Relevance of Content Is Always Relevant
Price Is Not The Only Factor
Rich Content Publishing: How It Helps With SEO
How To Market Your Product
Paul: Hello, everyone. This is Paul Parisi with the Edge of Innovation. I’m here with Ed Alexander of FanFoundry.com.
So let me bring up another proxy we can go over. So you have a new writer, wants to write a book. And, in the old way, it would have been to send it to a million and one publishers, get it returned, and all that different thing. Well now you can publish your own. You can go to Amazon, and you can have a book published. But you’ve got to get people to buy it. So I can put posters up on telephone poles and say, “Buy my book.” That’s probably not going to have a lot of return on the investment. It might be so strange that people might do it. But so what would we say?
We’ve got a brand new writer. They’ve never written before, and they want to put up a website and sell a book. What do they do? Tough one.
Ed: It’s a tough one, and I’m going to talk about two aspects of that that are, that I’m familiar because of my client work. One of them is we have the good fortune that the Amazons of the world and then GoodReads of the world, the book ranking indexing agents are very helpful to the author. You can create your own book listing for sale and have it categorized by its genre, maybe even the person who is the most likely reader for this book.
Paul: So we can git on the right shelf.
Ed: Exactly, right. So when you and I are searching for a book or maybe have bought a particular book, you’ll see the recommendation engine pop up. Oh, Paul Parisi wrote a book on the same subject. He may be interested in that. A little recommendation engine approach. That happens over time. It’s just like a crawl bot or anything else. It will do it for you over time. You may not show up in someone’s recommendation engine early on in the early stages of getting word to your work out there. But it can improve over time. It can happen.
Another helpful way is if someone has exactly read your book and writes a positive review about it. You can encourage reader reviews. Reader reviews themselves improve the ranking and the visibility of your book in a recommendation engine. So it’s a self-feeding sort of mechanism that you could employ on your own behalf.
If you’re self-publishing, and you don’t want to publish on Amazon, and you really want to just make it available to your audience, and you’re going to promote it in a more insular way to a smaller audience, then this is of no relevance to you. But if you’re intending to make revenue from that book, if you’re goal is revenue and you mean to get publicity from it to as broad a distribution as possible, then by all means, use the features available to you on the bookseller sites.
Paul: Excellent. Okay.
Ed: They’re very helpful.
Webmaster Tools: Building a Content Rich Website
Paul: Alright. So we’ve generally covered SEO at a high level, and I want to reiterate it for our audience. So you have a website, and it is sitting there. Let’s assume it’s largely static. That’s its current state. The biggest action that somebody needs to take is to go in and create relevant content, on, at a certain cadence — whether that’s weekly, monthly… Probably monthly is about the biggest time frame. I don’t know if you’d do quarterly. But at some cadence, you’d want to create new content that the people who are your target would find interesting. They’d find it organically interesting. Is that fair?
Ed: Certainly. Yeah, that’s a fair assessment. Sure.
Paul: So and then you want to make sure that you have Google searching that, and if they’re not searching it, you want to check and make sure that you’re in the Google index and in the Bing index. Because if they’re not searching it, there’s something wrong because they haven’t found you yet. And there’s tools. I think they’re called Webmaster Tools, which allow you to take your website and tell Google or Bing about it so that they will go out and look for it.
Ed: Exactly right. We hadn’t touched on Webmaster Tools or any of the — what I like to refer to as — on-page SEO tactics. We’ve talked more about rich content publishing.
Paul: Okay. So what is that next, that on-page stuff? So I have the article. We’ll go through the attorney again. You know, electrocution, and there’s one article about this lineman that was killed, etc. Do I put in the sidebar two other articles? Do I just put links there to my two other articles? Or do I just have that one blog post?
Ed: Well, to answer the original question of on-page SEO, think of it as this. I like to simply it, and I’ve… Pardon me if I’m dumbing down, but I like to think of it as child’s play. The old childhood card game of Go Fish.
“You got any threes?”
“No, go fish. You got any sevens?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a seven. There’s a match. I win.”
Likewise, any search crawler will do that same Go Fish game. It’s goal is find out if there’s more at home like the first match it found for you, and it will improve your search ranking based on how relevant the other stuff is.
Where does it go look? It goes looking at things like the tags on your website. What’s a tag on your website? Every time you type something in boldface and use the header command, typing in the… You know the WYSWIYG word editor we all have? If you’re using Drupal or WordPress, you’ve all seen it. You can decide that this is going to be a title, and you can decide that that title is going to be a big title, which is an H1 or a Header 1 that goes with the big font, and it automatically uses the same default shape and size and color header for every single webpage so it looks consistent. It’s all programmed into your WYSWIYG editor.
That H1 title tag is really important to the crawler, the search bot. It decides, oh, okay. The information in that header is absolutely relevant to what this dozen or a hundred thousand people are searching for. It’s approximately the same or exactly the same phraseology most often used.
Well I put in my Header 1 and my Header 2 a subhead tag, my Header 3, sub-sub head tags, relevant key phrases that match the other research I did on Google Trends. I will reuse that, and I will make sure the subheads and subtopics within that blog article are written for humans but they borrow the best examples from the way your search result has occurred by the majority of users over the recent one to three to five years, whatever the trend is telling me.
Paul: We’re giving the search engine hints of what’s important.
Ed: We’re giving it more crumbs, more breadcrumbing saying this is relevant content and so is that and so is the other. It’s all used in that same latent semantic indexing, that old approximate and analogous content matching process. Your tags on your content help you do that. They help you make it visible and clear to your search engine that that’s what you’re doing.
It’s especially important when you’re doing what I recommended earlier, which is a 500 to 1,000-word article. You certainly don’t want to run hundred or a thousand drone-on sentences with no paragraphs or breaks. So break it up into manageable chunks that are scannable and easy for a person to read and understand, because we’re all busy people. We’re not lazy. We’re just busy. And sometimes all we can do is skim the headlines to get enough of a general notion that this is the right attorney to be calling for this case that I want to pursue.
So using the tagging and the analogous matching and then, again, I’ll cite that once again. Try using Google Trends. But you could also use Google’s, oh gosh. It just flew out of my head.
Paul: Oh, well.
Ed: They have plenty of tools.
Paul: Webmaster Tools?
Ed: Thank you. Webmaster Tools. But they give you another free tool. What the heck is it called?
Paul: I don’t know.
Ed: SEO analyzer is free. If you have a small budget, you can buy a tool like Moz, or buy a license to Moz, and it gives you analyzers that will then allow you to apply it to the content you just wrote and feed back to you, kind of reflect back through that looking glass what it thinks you just wrote. What is it telling me? Which words appear the most? If I happen to use the words “you know, you know” a lot, it’s going to say the most commonly used word is “You know.” Is that relevant to your topic? Well, probably not. You may think about removing the word “you know” from place to place and replacing it with something more germane on the topic so the most relevant words are what are matching the search.
Making Your Website Usable
Paul: Okay. So we’re talking about SEO, but we’re always talking about just making your site usable to the humans as well as to the search engines. So in the question I had earlier where we had the article about the lineman, is it wise — because you went down appropriately the right track of saying that I don’t necessarily have to put a side link to say, “Here’s article three and article four” because the search engine will know that. But now from the human point of view, if I’m reading about a lineman here, personal injury, and I want to have relevant articles to there, should I put an excerpt, or should I put a link to just the headline? Is there any guidance there you can give us?
Ed: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s not something that I do faithfully, but I have from time to time used the metaphor of a recommendation engine in a little call-out on the side of a blog article embedded with the content saying, “If you like this, you might also like that.” Not in those exact words, but have a little callout that says, “Lineman recovers miraculously,” or something related to the subject that people who are interested in reading more about can indeed do easily because I gave them the link and the callout that shows them where to find it.
Typically, my references show up at the bottom of my articles. Call me a fool, but that’s how I do it. It’s just a habit. I could do better, I suppose. I could put the links further up.
Paul: Sure. Well I guess that’s a whole ‘nother subject is where, what is the optimal place to put all those things and how do you actually derive that. The, well we’re talking about SEO but we’ve really stumbled into content marketing. Is that true? Is that fair?
Ed: Absolutely fair. Content marketing is really part of SEO, and I don’t know that I’ve ever had a single SEO discussion in recent years that hasn’t also included content marketing as part of the discussion.
Is SEO really a Thing?
Paul: So is SEO really a thing? I mean, it sounds like it’s a byproduct of reality.
Ed: It’s changed. The tail is wagging the dog. We really can’t allow ourselves to be algo slaves to algo terrorism because it’s no longer a thing. What’s happening, frankly, Paul — and I think we see it in our everyday lives — is Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and the folks at Microsoft… Let me digress from that for a moment and remind people, for those of us who were around then… In 1999, when Google first went public, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as cofounders, put in their public mission statement, the first four words in their mission statement were “First, don’t be evil.” In other words, do something beneficial to people. But they quickly, when they rang the gong on the New York Stock Exchange, were interviewed by CNBC, and they were asking, “What are you really up to, these guys? Are you going to make a lot of money on ads? What’s your modus operandi here? You’re saying first don’t be evil.”
And their frank response was then — and it’s still true today — is no, we’re going to be the world’s biggest artificial intelligence engine. This is 1999 when they first stated that. These guys had been thinking about it years before then, before they even decided Google was going to be their mission.
What’s happened, here we are 25 years on, and we’re indeed working with artificial intelligence. Now there’s different layers of artificial intelligence, and I’m only going to digress into the subject of AI for a moment here, but humor me. Artificial intelligence is a search engine. Artificial intelligence is the CRM software you use that allows you to say, “If this, then that.” If I get an email, I want to send this automatic reply saying, “I’ll get back to you because I’m on vacation.” We use artificial intelligence at its very, very basic level in many, many aspects of our lives. It helps us avoid having to scale and do every single chore singlehandedly by hand. Think of that as the outer shell of AI, is sort of a apriori or mimicry or analogous workflow kind of thing. And so we’re using artificial intelligence to everyone’s benefit. Industry is using it to our benefit.
What we haven’t done, and I think it’s kind of the next shoe to drop for most people, is beyond the basic use level — if this, then that, monkey see, monkey, apriori matching process — is to then get into the next level of AI, which is not just mimicking but learning.
Can more website learn to improve the way it presents my content without me having to mechanically, deliberately perform it? My vision is this: Wouldn’t it be cool if this latent semantic indexing process were something that my WordPress or my Drupal or my publishing platform had that built in, so it could help me while I’m typing — not just as a semantic or a typographic error detector software will use. Right? If it also had the feature that says, “Well, you’re writing about this subject of the lineman who was electrocuted, but he spent an awful lot of time talking about his beagle. Maybe you should focus less on the beagle and more about the case.”
It helps you through the writing process so that you’re providing authoritative content and that learning process becomes part of the benefit of using that platform to do your publishing.
Grammarly
Paul: There’s a tool out that’s being heavily marketed called Grammarly. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.
Ed: Yes, exactly what I’m referring to.
Paul: But they’re doing that in the grammar space.
Ed: I use it.
Paul: Yeah, so it would be interesting to extend that to the topic space and actually analyze what you’re saying.
Ed: Now if I’ve imagined it, and you’ve imagined it, someone else is out there building it. I’d love to meet them because I’m no genius. So who else is out there doing that sort of thing? That’s the next layer of the onion I’d like to peel back in terms of content marketing and authoritative marketing and search engine optimization.
Paul: Right. And you could imagine how it would be done if you’re writing an article about an emerging news story. All the news stories relevant to what you’re writing come up and even highlight that for you. It really brings the research to the researcher as opposed to having to go out and look for it.
Ed: Sure. And the third layer of artificial intelligence and among the three obvious layers would be for me to have my word platform not just use the Grammarly approach to help me remind myself to stay on track when I’m authoring an article, but incorporate latent semantic searches that tell me, “Geez, other people looking for the stuff you do are also searching for these other topics.” If that’s relevant to you, maybe that should be the subject of your next blog article. In other words, the trends help me determine what to write about next because it’s in season or the trends seem to be leading in a direction where I want to meet them at that future point. Anybody who remembers Wayne Gretzky, the goalie for the LA Kings was always fond of saying, “I never skate to the puck. I skate to where it’s going to be. And that’s how I score more goals.”
Can we apply that same simplistic thinking to the way our engines evolve that we use to publish our authoritative content. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Does SEO Really Exist?
Paul: So, does SEO really exist or is it just a byproduct of reality?
Ed: Oh my gosh. We haven’t even had a single beer yet.
Paul: Well I… ‘Cause I guess what I’m saying is that SEO seems to happen because of what you wrote. Now writing something smartly or intelligently is going to get you better results than if you just put random words on the page and post that. So what you’re saying is that, make sure your content is relevant, as opposed to the old days where it was like, “Oh, you’ve got to have metatags. You’ve got to have this. You’ve got to have this. You’ve got to put this type of formatting in.” I mean, yes, headings help.
So if you want SEO, make sure your headings are relevant and make sure your text is relevant and post it with some regularity. Is that fair?
Ed: Absolutely fair. So search engine optimization, SEO, per se — whatever you want to use for better or worse as a catch-all phrase — has certainly evolved. It’s different now than it was then. We’re not gaming the search engines because it’s no longer possible thank you to the sophistication and evolution of the way search engines perform. And thankfully, I have to say, I’m pleased at the way it’s going in that, if I’m doing the search, it’s going to find me, good, authoritative, relevant results for what I’m really looking for as opposed to someone who has done a good job of gaming their webpage.
Paul: Right. Of course.
Ed: All those things are looked at in total by a crawler to really help validate the authority of the source it’s referring back to. So it can’t be gamed.
Location, Location, Location
Paul: Interesting. Very interesting. You had talked a little bit about location. And I’m wondering about if you have any insight into the difference between location. We happen to be on the North Shore of Boston.
Ed: It’s a beautiful location.
Paul: If you say to people, “We’re a company that serves the North Shore,” they understand that. And that means that if you have a business in Danvers, you serve Beverly, and you serve maybe even all the way to North Andover. How does Google deal with that? Because I might be in Beverly. I’m sitting in Beverly recording this right now. And if I say, “Gee, I want snowshoes,” it’s going to list the stores that are closest to me.
Or let’s use the attorney example. I want an attorney because snowshoes are, I’ve got to go find the model I want, and I buy it. But an attorney is more relationship. It’s deeper. So there might be 50 attorneys here in Beverly and 50 in Danvers and 50 in all the towns. So I’m going to get a lot of attorneys. How can I get the most relevant attorney to mine? If we use the personal injury, that’s going to certainly separate them, sort of like the cream off the top. I can say, okay, personal injury lawyers. But I’m just wondering if you have any insight on how we can effectively market ourselves if we’re an attorney in Beverly but we want to make sure that people in North Andover know about us.
Ed: Great question. At the very architecture level, I would make certain that in my description of my business, I may want to include the word “Massachusetts.” Massachusetts has its location in common with all the cities in Massachusetts. So on an indexing basis, if I was a search engine or a search engine bot and I’m trying to deliver relevant results, I know I’m going to deliver a result based on Beverly, Massachusetts, not Beverly, Iowa. Danvers, Massachusetts, not Danvers, California.
So Massachusetts becomes an authority term to help with location discovery. That’s simply the tagging and the meta layer, that middle layer of your website.
Paul: So you would say that in — just to reiterate. So in the meta tag on the page, you’d put in Massachusetts. Would you also put Beverly in or would you not?
Ed: Certainly. Why not? Because both Beverly and Massachusetts are relevant. Beverly as a micro and—
Paul: Would you put Danvers in, which is the next town over?
Ed: Great question. Fortunately, one of the things that a — and I know this is true about Bing. I’m not so sure about Google because Bing comes from Microsoft, and they have all of their directory listing and have been working on for years. The approximation of Massachusetts and Danvers is just as valid as the approximate match between Massachusetts and Beverly. They’re neighboring towns. And so search, people’s searches on, let’s say, “Pizza joints North Shore Boston,” for example, will find Beverly, Massachusetts, Danvers, and such. That search result, that’s pages like this, recommendation engine approach, to delivering results benefits anybody, not just a pizza joint but the lawyer in the North Shore of Boston. So an approximate match on Massachusetts in Danvers will help find you if you’re in Beverly, even if the word Beverly isn’t in your meta tags, although it’s helpful to have Beverly there. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If you’re getting enough business right down the street, you don’t have to list every neighboring town.
Paul: Sure.
Ed: You could also use zip approximation. The zip GIS database is also linked.
Paul: Interesting. So here now, let’s reverse that. So I imagine in your business, it doesn’t matter where your customers are, and you have people all over the world. So do you list Massachusetts or do you not? Because I, I would imagine if a customer came to you from Massachusetts, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, I don’t want that.” Of course not. You’d say, “We’d love to work with you.” If a customer called you from Ohio, you’d say, “Oh, I’d love to work with you.” If a customer called you from England, you’d say, “I’d love to work with you.”
Ed: Yeah, if location were not a concern, I could absolutely understand that.
Paul: So do I put the company’s address on the website? Is that going to thwart me, or is that going to help me.
Ed: I’m not sure that putting the company address on the website is either a help or a hindrance really. I think it does something else. In other words, I wouldn’t dissuade anybody from putting their address on their website. I think it’s an advantage to prove you have a physical presence.
Paul: Would you write an article about our services, are relevant for people in Massachusetts and Ohio and the rest of the country, or… So in other words, is that in the About page? That’s putting a lot of responsibility on the search engine to be able to parse that and understand that we serve the three-county area, or whatever you want to say. And Google doesn’t know what the three-county area is.
Ed: If you’re doing a location-based search for a result, and your zip GIS database is attached to the search, process, it’s going to find you, even if you’re within three and five towns. If you include your zip code, that’s even better. As you probably know, analogous or neighboring zip codes have approximately the same first their digit prefix. That’s close enough. It will look at 019, which is — guess what? — North Shore of Boston. 01906 is Linn, and 01907 is someplace else, and 01918 is another part of Beverly. 019 helps. And if it’s somewhere near the word Massachusetts that’s a good approximate GIS search. You can do things by using your own address to help you get found if it’s location based.
But to answer your question, if you don’t care where the customer is because it’s not location-based, now I’ve turned a whole other page, and we can spend some time on that too.
Paul: Okay. Well how do you deal with that?
Ed: I have customers who are all over the world, and I get searched because it’s a relevant topic matter. If they don’t care where I live, and I don’t care where they are either, then we’ll do it based on the relevance of the content.
Relevance of Content Is Always Relevant
Paul: But it sounds like relevance of content is relevant, always.
Ed: Sure. That’s all anybody wants these days. It’s got to be relevant. I’m way too busy.
Paul: So is that the summary of content marketing in its simplest form, just providing content that’s relevant to people?
Ed: Yeah, you boil it down to a simple word, which was value. If we’re not exchanging value, where are we paying attention? We’re probably not.
Paul: Yeah. Exactly. So how do you counter the person that says, okay, “I’m an expert in the sports equipment, and I can tell you what the best snowshoe is, and I happen to own a snowshoe firm that sells snowshoes”? And Amazon sells them for $20 less than I sell them for. How do I prevent my blog article from not driving sales to Amazon but people investing in me? Is that even possible? Because I want to say, there’s three new models of snowshoes this season, and here’s the pluses and minuses of them, and this is the recommended, my editor’s choice of the snowshoe. And here’s the click link. You can buy it for $29.95.
People are lazy, but they’re also cheap. Not in a bad way. I mean, it’s their money. They want to be good stewards of it. So are they going to go and then click on that, see what your price is and then say, okay, I’m going to go over and search on Amazon and buy it from there, and I’m done.
So I just invested all this time writing an article, promoting it, getting traffic, and I didn’t receive any results for it.
Price Is Not The Only Factor
Ed: That’s a great question. If I were ruthlessly focusing first on price above all other factors, I might just buy from Amazon. But therein lies the answer. If price is not the only factor, and it rarely is…right? You want to think about the reputation of the manufacturer; you want to think about the ability to get your product serviced if it ever breaks. If you’re a conscientious consumer, you think about those things. It’s snowshoes are slightly more mechanically complex than, say, a book or a CD or a music download because they’re physical objects that break. Now those things factor into my pricing decision.
I probably, to use the example of snowshoes, since we’re on that, not necessarily think of Amazon as being the first resort. If I need to get my snowshoes serviced, I may prefer to go to a local sporting goods store with somebody who has some expertise and knows how to fix these things and can keep them running in good condition. Heaven knows we’ve actually had a few snow events around here on the North Shore of Massachusetts where, if one snowshoe breaks, you’re going nowhere because you’ll sink knee-deep in the snow, and you can’t walk that way. You have to have two good snowshoes that fit you. So you’ve got to keep them running and tuned, and maintaining your snowshoes is like brushing your teeth, some winters around here. So you think about that, besides just price.
Paul: So you’re saying that it’s from a product that needs maintenance, potentially. That’s a motivator. What if it’s a product that doesn’t need maintenance, per se? A book.
Ed: Great. So let’s focus on, yeah, a book or a service or anything that’s not a physical, tangible good that’s going to require maintenance in proximity to repair and all those things. Rent versus own. Lease versus buy. What are those arguments? What factors into them?
Maybe you’re the authority on why you’re the best answer, and you can defend your price based on things you know. And you can say to the public, this, “I am your safest bet, even if I’m not the cheapest. And these are the reasons why.” That’s a great blog article. It might even be an evergreen page to have on your website to help people decide favorably that you’ve thought it through, and you recognized why you deliver the value you do and that your price is fair, and I can agree with that.
Paul: So that’s sort of an appeal.
Ed: It’s an appeal, but it’s based on something other than sentiment.
Paul: Right, right. But you’re laying out the real sort of construct of, “I’m the expert. I’m giving you this information. Please honor that and buy from me.”
Ed: Sure. Yeah. I have a client who is in that same business right now. It’s crowded. It’s competitive. There are many ways to solve the challenge. There are many ways to access the service they provide. And one of the pages on their sites spells it out saying you’re better off using our option than others if you’re this type of buyer. Rent versus own. If you can afford to own with the whole enchilada, go buy the whole enchilada. But be aware that you’ll be in for maintenance headaches and everything else. If you’d just as soon rent because you’re only an occasional user of this service, then we could be a safer bet, and here’s why. We’ve thought it through on your behalf. You’re welcome.
Paul: Fascinating.
Ed: Be the authority on that aspect of the buying process, not just about your product.
Paul: Okay. That’s fair. So I guess what, in summary, we’re talking about content marketing, which is really the new way of search engine optimization because you’re feeding the search engine beast what it wants, and then it takes and turns around and hands that out to people who are looking for things. And it gives them relevant things. That’s the goal is to give you the best answer possible, hopefully with a search engine.
Ed: That’s right. Two words. Go fish.
Paul: Well we’ve been talking with Ed Alexander of fanfoundry.com and you’ll be able to find out more information about Ed and his company in our shownotes as well as links to some of the resources we’ve talked about.
Thank you very much and we look forward to next time on the Edge Of Innovation.