Bing is still in the headlines this week.

📰 News & updates

Alphabet Shares Dive After Google AI Chatbot Bard Flubs Answer in Ad

Google’s battle with Microsoft is not off to a good start.

Microsoft’s Bing AI, Like Google’s, Also Made Dumb Mistakes During First Demo

“I will copy every step my rival makes, even the mistakes,” must have been the motto pasted inside Bing's office.

Jokes aside, not only does Bing AI make mistakes, but it can also act like an AI overlord from a dystopian movie. Kinda freaky.

Instagram Is Killing Live Shopping in March, Will Focus on Ads Instead

It seems live shopping’s no longer the future of e-commerce.
 

🔝 SEO

Keyword Mapping: A Practical Guide for the Curious

If you’re having trouble deciding whether a keyword should be targeted by a separate page or clustered with other keywords, you need to do keyword mapping. In this guide, Mateusz shows you two ways of doing it.

What Do SEO Agencies Do? (And Tips for Choosing One)

Some tips for choosing a good SEO agency: 

• Be aware of the “we’re an award-winning” agency line

• Be aware of the “we’re a Google Partner” line

• Ask what SEO tools it uses

• Ask about budgets 

• Ask if it outsources

• Ask to see the SEO team

• Get testimonials and case studies

How to Build an SEO Roadmap in 7 Steps (Template Included)

Make a copy of Jamie’s SEO roadmap template. Then follow along as you read the post to complete it.

Affiliate SEO: We Analysed 10,000 Search Results to See Who Ranks

Of the top 100 domains ranked by how many search results they appeared in, 95 of them were part of news organizations, public companies, or large site networks. Only 5 of the top 100 websites overall were independent brands.

Best Practices for Paywalls and SEO

Google does not have an inherent bias against paywalled content, provided the website lets Google know that its content is behind a paywall. But publishers do need to make sure their paywalled content can be seen by Google so that it can index some or all article content and apply relevant ranking factors.
 

💻 Digital marketing

Marketing Funnels: Everything You Need to Know

The way to use the marketing funnel, in reality, is to use it as a mental model to tweak your marketing. 

In short, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing some marketing activities or creating content for each stage so that you’re targeting different people at different parts of the buyer’s journey.

Reality in Advertising

According to Wikipedia, Rosser was a pioneer of television advertising. This book was published in 1961, but its principles still ring true today. 

I’ve compiled my favorite quotes from the book in this tweet.

The Cup of Coffee Theory of AI

Article by Billy Oppenheimer

“This is the perennial challenge of the artist: finding the middle of the Venn diagram where one circle is the artist’s tastes and the other is the audience’s tastes. 

“Tools like ChatGPT are great at creating. AI can generate options in high quantities at high speed. It is great at providing more choices. But it is not great at discerning and choosing what to do and what not to do.”

Sunday Reads #170: Lemon Markets, Dark Forests, and a Firehose of Malicious Garbage

When it's 10X easier to fake it than to make it, fakes will always outnumber the truth. When it's easy to generate content without writing it yourself, then 99% of content will be AI-generated. If 99% of content is AI-generated, then you’ll be better off assuming that 100% is AI-generated.

Then what happens when the internet becomes a never-ending firehose of malicious garbage? You’ll start logging off the internet and logging in to more curated, closed communities.

The Perils of Niching Down

Article by Rob Hardy

"The problem with niche strategy is that it's a reliable destroyer of the human spirit. It's built on the assumption that we can segment and turn one static aspect of the self into an economic engine."

Brand-Building Ads Boost Short-Term Sales, and Now You Can Prove It

Article by Mark Ritson

Ten years since “The Long and the Short of It” was published, new evidence shows that while sales-driven ads deliver few long-term effects, brand advertising achieves both.
 

Till next time ;)
Cheers,