16 Meaningful Blog Posts from the Social Web – PLUS 1 Takeaway From Each

By on November 19th, 2009 in Social media

Follow the trail of trusted content.
Follow the trail of content.

If you’re like me, you’ll have those moments where all you want is to be presented with a kick-ass list of relevant and personalized content to consume on demand.

Despite my attempts to pull together the uber RSS feed list, I’ve always been left wanting – until yesterday when I invented (for myself) the idea of Social Breadcrumbs for content discovery on Twitter.

I’m referring to my last post – HOW TO: Use Twitter as a knowledge filter – that illustrates how you can build your own library of automatically filtered content by using Twitter lists to keep track of a few select rock stars and their favourite things, and more importantly a process for creating your library.

In a super short time, you can uncover a bucketload of inspirational material that will be there for you every day.

Sounds Like a List of RSS Feeds

Yes it does, but it’s not. The difference lies in the fact that the your Twitter library flexes and bends at a much more rapid rate and includes not only the content of the people you respect, but the topic du jour that they pass down the chain.

And so, to complete the circle of my social breadcrumbs idea, here are 16 articles I found by traversing the last 24hrs on my own Twitter library.

As a bonus – in the spirit of the value-add filter – I’ve gone ahead and read every one of these articles to provide a takeaway for each – “The one thing I learned”.

CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION

1. Which Test Won: PPC Landing Page A/B Test – Which Version Made More Ecommerce Sales?

http://whichtestwon.com/ppc-ecommerce/
One Thing I Learned: Gut instinct is important when it comes to landing page design. Why? Because impatient visitors use their guts to decide how they feel about your landing page. And for the record I chose the right answer in the test. :)
Via: @copywritermaven

2. 10+ Free Resources for Creating High Converting Call-to-Action Buttons

http://www.wingify.com/conversion-blog/free-resources-for-creatinghigh-converting-call-to-action-buttons/
One Thing I Learned: Despite being a functionally simple component, the “button” is cause for much speculatory design in an attempt to make it more clickable: from visual design to the writing of the Call To Action.
Via: @pricing @wingify

INTERNET MARKETING

3. 9 new marketing tools you need

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/25136.asp
One Thing I Learned: There are a massive amount of new apps out there that could genuinely make a difference to your work life. “The biggest challenge is finding the time to give them all a real trial.”
Via: @aaranged

Side Note: they need to update their URL structure – the 25136.asp post name is a tad old school.

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

4. 65+ Popular Web Design And Development Blog To Follow On Twitter

http://www.themeflash.com/65-popular-web-design-and-development-blog-to-follow-on-twitter/
One Thing I Learned: That the principles I’m advocating with this post (and the previous one) about trust networks are ringing more true as I write this. This is an awesome collection of design and dev sites and a great source for building a Twitter List.

If they’d ended the post with a ready-made twitter list of all 65 sites that would have been epic. Aaaand having thought that, I had to go off and do it myself.

You can now subscribe to the entire 65 Twitter accounts in my new list here 65+ Popular Web Design And Development Blog To Follow On Twitter.

Via: @copywritermaven

5. Typography is the backbone of good web design

http://www.thedesigncubicle.com/2009/11/typography-is-the-backbone-of-good-web-design/
One Thing I Learned: Using letter-spacing (CSS) to improve typographic styling when using all-caps. There are beautiful examples in this post.
Via: @behoff

SOCIAL MEDIA

6. Matrix: The Four Social Support Strategies

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/11/18/matrix-the-four-social-support-strategies/
One Thing I Learned: The 4 ways you can respond to your customers using social media along with their pros and cons. Most have something to offer – some more than others (automated responses via Twitter would just be like lame email autoresponders: impersonal and frustrating) – and can be leveraged across your many customer interface points.
Via: @jaypiddy

EMAIL MARKETING

7. ‘Share-to-Social’ Email Tools Grow Up

http://www.marketingvox.com/share-to-social-email-tools-grow-up-045542/
Some good numbers from a report on the effects of social sharing from emails.
One Thing I Learned: The average social sharing rate on emails is 0.5% – compared with the less than 0.1% rate realized by earlier-generation forward-to-a-friend campaigns.
Via: @jaypiddy

SEO/SEM

8. Whiteboard Friday – Link Growth Patterns

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-special-wednesday-edition-link-growth-patterns
One Thing I Learned: Search engines position may spike then fall if you don’t maintain your rate of link acquisition surrounding a PR push at launch – Google may overcompensate showing an over-performance followed by a sharp dip.
Via: @seomoz

9. Flying Solo: The One-Person In-House SEO Team

http://searchengineland.com/flying-solo-the-one-person-in-house-seo-team-29873
One Thing I Learned: When communicating to management about the potential success of an infant SEO strategy bey honest: “SEO efforts are just underway; there is no historical data that can be used to create meaningful predictive models, and any numbers I could come up would basically be bunk.”
Via: @aaranged

10. Headsmacking Tip #16: Meet the Linkerati in Person

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/headsmacking-tip-16-meet-the-linkerati-in-person
One Thing I Learned: That people respond better to the personal touch, always. And being authentic and having the balls to engage someone on a personal level can pay off massively.
Via: @randfish

11. 5 Simple Tips for Better SEO Value from Your Feeds

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-simple-tips-for-better-seo-value-from-your-blogs-feeds
One Thing I Learned: You can do a lot more with your RSS feeds than simply have a link to them on your site.
Via: @randfish

ANALYTICS

12. Funnels on the Fly in Google Analytics

http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2009/11/funnels_on_the_fly_in_google_analytics.html
One Thing I Learned: You can feel like a secret genius by using retroactive advanced segments to break down your conversion funnels after the fact (yeah that’s what retroactive means) – which gets around having to know in advance exactly what you need to measure.
Via: @dannomatic

CMS

13. WordPress Wins CMS Award

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/wordpress-wins-cms-award/
One Thing I Learned: WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Seems it’s grown up to the point that it’s not just a blogging platform. I concur.
Via: @honeypot_mkting

USABILITY

14. Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html
One Thing I Learned: Great content is timeless. Despite being published in 2005, and despite his insistence on called a blog a weblog (perhaps blog hadn’t caught on yet) – this post by Jakob Nielsen still rings very soundly true. Now if only he’d use his brain to write a NEW book…
Via: @joshsummerhays @KISSmetrics

GOOGLE

15. Google replaces URLs with breadcrumb links in search results

http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-replaces-urls-with-breadcrumb-links-in-search-results/
One Thing I Learned: There is a lot of passionate debate over whether it’s a good idea to remove the URL crafted by the site’s owner and replace it with an architectural breadcrumb that exposes a sites inner hierarchy.
Via: @patrickaltoft

FUNNY

16. Australian Society of Section Car Operators

http://www.assco.org.au/
One Thing I Learned: When creating an acronym for your company, do a big paper prototype and look at it from across the room before having a logo designed.
Via: @chrisgoward

The one BIG thing I learned

I can TRUST my network to come through with great insight and content. And remember, this is the result of a brief look over my network highlights from the last 24hrs and right now my list only contain about 30 key people. When I fill out my complete top-100 it will be pretty fine.

Many thanks to the authors of these excellent articles. Keep ’em coming.

Props go out to: (Follow these people)

— Oli Gardner

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About Oli Gardner
Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner has seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet. He’s obsessed with identifying and reversing bad marketing practices, and his disdain for marketers who send campaign traffic to their homepage is legendary, resulting in landing page rants that can peel paint off an unpainted wall. A prolific international keynote speaker, Oli is on a mission to rid the world of marketing mediocrity by using data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike. He was recently named the "The 2018 Marketer to Watch," in the under 46 category, by his mother.
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