Neal Schaffer

Over the last twelve months, my blog earned roughly one click for every 700 impressions in Google Search. The reflex is to call that a ranking problem. It isn’t. Of my pages ranking on page one with at least a thousand impressions behind them, 41 out of 45 run under a 1% click-through rate. People were seeing my content. They just were not coming to get it. Answer engine optimization is the industry’s answer to that gap.

Ask ten marketers what a brand ambassador is and you will get several different answers. One pictures a celebrity in a fragrance ad. Another pictures the person handing out samples at Costco. Both of them are right, which is exactly the problem with the term. I have been on the inside of this arrangement rather than only writing about it. I am an official Adobe Express Ambassador today. Years before that, All Nippon Airways brought me on as one of four brand ambassadors for a new service launch.

If you spend quite a number of hours on Facebook, Twitter or any social networking sites, I’m sure you’ve stumbled-upon social media contests before. I love seeing how businesses are using contest to promote their business, especially brands that I’m already a fan of.

In November 2021, Facebook invited me into a paid creator program built around Reels. I took it seriously. I went far enough into the process to see exactly what participating would require of me. The specific terms were confidential and they stay that way. What I can tell you is the shape of the deal: a set number of Reels, on a set schedule, for a set window, in exchange for guaranteed pay. Then I said no. And in the years since, I have not been invited back.

Two advertisers can run the same offer to the same audience in the same week and pay wildly different prices. One pays $4 to reach a thousand people. The other pays $12. Neither of them changed a bid. That gap is placement, creative, and objective doing their work inside Meta’s auction. And most of the articles you’ll find on the cost for Instagram ads flatten all of it into a single blended average, which is the least useful number in the whole conversation.

These days, video is an increasingly valuable part of most brands’ advertising and marketing efforts. Whether you’re doing a video for content marketing, customer education, or overall PR, brand video is increasingly important for building relationships with existing customers and acquiring new ones. However, not all branded videos are created equal. In this article, we’ll talk about several types of brand videos, and examine some examples.

I opened Instagram on a Saturday night and started tapping through Stories. Friends at dinner. Somebody’s dog. A conference photo dump. Three separate people at the same concert. I kept tapping. Dozens of Stories later, I finally hit an ad. One. In an entire session. That’s the strange thing about this placement. Stories is where a huge share of the actual sharing on Instagram now happens. And yet the ad arrives alone, full screen, with nothing else on the glass competing for your eyeballs. No sidebar.

I have never spent a dollar on TikTok ads. I wrote this post while working out whether I should. My paid budget goes to Facebook Lead Ads, TikTok keeps coming up, and at some point “I should look into that” has to turn into actually looking into it. What follows is what I found, shared on the assumption that plenty of you are standing where I am. Curious. Not yet spending. Not sure whether TikTok earns a line in the budget. I will tell you where I landed, and the two things that would change my answer.

A TikTok Duet is a split-screen video that plays your recording alongside someone else’s original, both at the same time. Making one takes about ninety seconds. What you are really doing in those ninety seconds is borrowing a finished piece of content. The other creator already supplied the topic, the hook, and the sound. Your half only has to supply the thing they could not: your expertise, your product, your correction, your face.

You added the author bio. You cited your sources. You rewrote the opening in first person so it no longer sounded like anyone could have written it. Three weeks later you checked Search Console, and nothing had moved. That gap between doing the work and seeing the work is where most people give up on E-E-A-T. Not because the advice was wrong. Because nobody told them how long the proof takes, or that the thing being judged is bigger than the page they just fixed.