Facebook Product Manager Greg Lindley wrote on the Facebook Newsroom Blog:

“Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion.”

Hashtags are useful on Twitter, where we use them for Twitter chats and to search different topics. However, the use for hashtags on Facebook seems a little more blurry and most of us are scared that it will just get plain annoying.

The hashtags will have some benefits and positive functions:

• Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar.
• Click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram.
• Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.

The downside is we might be seeing a lot of useless and nonsensical hashtags from those friends of ours on our newsfeeds. Luckily there is still the ‘Hide’ feature.

Google Tests Various Offer Amounts

First, let’s see the evidence:

Here is the old $100 offer

I get these as an AdWords Certified Partner

Here is an offer for $200 free when you spend $50

This was a PPC ad I saw this morning.

So as you can see, Google is testing a lot of different offer amounts right now to see what yields the best response. How are you testing?

Ideas for posts

There are a ton of sources of inspiration for writers. Conversations, real world problems, articles or other blog posts, reviews of products, wandering minds, and a million other sources. But that doesn’t mean that you’ll be flowing with topics to write about and it also doesn’t mean you’ll write about topics your readers will be interested in. Many struggle with this. Throughout the day you may come across several different ideas but don’t think to write down your thoughts or you forget the topic when you sit down to write. To help with this I like to keep a note file on my phone (or a notebook and pen–if you still own those things) and I constantly refer to it throughout the day. This helps me think about topics to write as well as remind me to record those ideas when I come across them. And then when I sit down to write I can review those and start crafting an actual post. Usually I just add drafts with thoughts and then over time work those into a published post. Another way to generate great ideas for your blog is through the use of analytics. As you look through where your traffic is coming from you  can identify what people are looking for. You can identify what they wanted to know and see if you addressed what they were looking for sufficiently.  To do this more effectively you can use HitTail to help automate the process and come up with a systematic solution for post ideas that will help you gain additional organic traffic. They will give you recommendations for topics based on your existing search traffic and their algorithm to identify the best opportunities. The beauty of HitTail is that uses your analytics but is geared towards helping you target blog content so you don’t have to filter through a lot of other information to get keywords that you should be targeting.

 Rel Authorship/Publisher

Another step to taking your blog to the next level is setting up rel authorship. This is the process by which you verify your identity as the author of specific posts with Google. The idea is that Google will favor authors who create high quality content and social engagement. They will also show your image in the search engine results which can help catch the attention of those searching and lead to a higher click through rate. You can do this individually as the author, and then also set up a “publisher” to identify the content coming from your company. There are many posts on how to implement authorship, so I won’t do it here. Check out the following posts:

Search Engine Land: Guide to Google Authorship

Search Engine Journal: How to Setup Google+ Authorship

Invite Guest Bloggers

One common problem with blogs is trying to get enough content published to keep readers coming back. For SEO, the more content you have the better your site will rank for long-tail keywords. But if you can’t produce much content yourself it can be hard to get that additional organic traffic. So one thing that helps is to invite guest bloggers to your site. The goal is to provide consistent high quality content on a variety of topics targeted towards your audience. You probably will need to start off reasonably small inviting people you have good relationships with, but as your blog becomes more authoritative you will have an easier time convincing people to write for you. You may have to explain the benefits of SEO and blogging depending on your industry and guest authors understanding, but most people will understand when you tell them that your site gets traffic and the post they write will link back to their site or social profile to help them gain exposure. Make sure you review posts before they are published (at least until the writer(s) prove themselves if they are going to be writing on a regular basis for you) so you can weed out spammy posts and focus on high quality guest posts that provide real value to your readers.

What I Learned

1. Enhanced Campaigns is NOT popular among professional PPC folk – I’ve always felt like Google had the concerns of large PPC advertisers pretty close to their hearts. With all the sophistication and advanced options it seemed like the product team listened to them a lot. However, with Enhanced Campaigns I get the feeling that the AdWords team made a deliberate decision to NOT listen to large, sophisticated advertisers. Let me explain.

   The burden for a small, unsophisticated advertiser to switch to Enhanced Campaigns is small. They don’t have a ton of campaigns usually and they probably weren’t doing a lot with mobile and tablet. The additional bidding flexibility and ad group level sitelinks are a big plus. However, the burden of switching to Enhanced Campaigns for large advertisers is immense. Many had a mobile campaign, tablet campaign and desktop campaign for every major theme & geography. They probably have mobile optimized pages and maybe even tablet optimized pages. While ad group level sitelinks are a boon, with thousands of ad groups, creating and managing all of them becomes a large task.

   Basically, Google seems to have said, loud and clear, that the revenue gained from switching over all the small & medium advertisers to Enhanced Campaigns outweighs the trouble it causes large advertisers. And you know what? I think they’re right. Large advertisers will complain, but ultimately AdWords traffic is too big and important to not use. Painful, but true.

2. Test, even if it seems it won’t work – This observation came from the session on optimizing your CTA. John Lee was sharing results of an ad copy test where the objective was to test one ad with a CTA and one ad without a CTA to see which did better. Seems like a dumb test because, of course, the ad with the CTA should do better (that’s best practice after all). But it didn’t. And you need to run the test on your own campaigns to know if that is the case for your industry/product/company.
3. LinkedIn PPC is the red-headed stepchild of the PPC industry – Obviously AdWords was a major focus. Bing attended in force and showered swag upon attendees like manna from heaven. Facebook PPC had a full session talking about it. The most talk I heard about LinkedIn PPC was at a roundtable discussion on Day 2. I do quite a bit of LinkedIn PPC and I know some very large companies that spend a large amount of money there with good results. However, it doesn’t seem like it’s getting the love yet.
4. Excel is more awesome than you can imagine – They did an entire session on Excel skills and Sean Quadlin made the seemingly dry topic hilarious. Microsoft should hire the guy to do a series of Excel training videos because I have never seen anyone bring that kind of enthusiasm to the topic. But more importantly he showed off some seriously cool stuff you can do.

There you have it folks, what I learned at Hero Conf 2013. If you have questions, leave them in the comments below.

“Once connected, Provo will be one of the first cities in the world where access to broadband will flow like water or electricity,” Kevin Lo, general manager of Google Fiber said.

Google bought the fiber optic network that was laid years ago for the iProvo project that was never completed. Because of this, they hope to have Google Fiber in every home by the end of the year.

This is cool. But what does it mean for the growing tech scene here in Utah County? Well, first, I think the fact that Google Fiber is setting up shop here is proof and recognition that the tech and startup scene is, in fact, really awesome where we are.

Provo/Orem was ranked number 2 in the nation for the number of patents granted in the country. Don’t believe me that we have hundreds of tech startups here? Check out this list. Oh, and we’ve been rated one of the best places for businesses and careers by Forbes. So for the residents here, it makes sense that Google would join in, and everyone is excited.

With Google Fiber, businesses will have access to the fastest Internet in the world, speeding up downloading and uploading processes. The Utah County tech scene will be on the cutting edge of the future of the Internet.

This will also be a huge incentive for companies to relocate to the Provo area. SAAS companies would especially benefit from the fast Internet that will be offered.

As a startup in the Provo/Orem area, we are excited to see Google Fiber implemented, and even more excited to see the growth it will bring in the future to our neck of the woods.