Synergy of Search and Social Media

"Research has shown that display ad exposure can lift consumer response to paid search."

This research refers to paid search activity, but it seems fair to assume that organic search activity would be influenced in the same way. The point to take away from this article is that your marketing efforts through different approaches support and enhance one another. It is not a good idea to conduct all your marketing efforts through a single vehicle. The success that you have in each approach reinforces the success that you have in other approaches.

To put it another way, look at all the tools that you have available to promote your site and make use of several of them simultaneously rather than putting all your eggs in one basket. Your web site itself, is the core around which your other marketing revolves. This core effort is then supplemented and strengthened by your activities with blogging, newsletters, article publication, press releases, social media sites, reciprocal links, and, yes, even paid Internet ads! Plan to use several of these tools in concert based on your personal and business characteristics and capacities to support different approaches.

While our focus here is on Internet tools, don't overlook the importance of what you do in more traditional marketing through your use of business cards, letterhead, brochures, promotional gifts, and networking, which also reinforce your online marketing efforts. A well managed mixture of approaches could be more effective for your business than a single-minded focus on one strategy alone!

How to Launch an Article Series

"... how to get more marketing mileage out of my blog posts"

We frequently comment in our Internet Marketing Clinic that "Content is King!" What that means is that having good content on your web site is the best thing you can do to achieve good rankings in search engine results.

Almost everyone with a web site feels the pressure of generating good content for their site and is looking for ideas to get more material. This blog posting offers a nice technique for creating more of that content as a spin-off from the work you have already done. The basic idea is that you elaborate on things you have already done. Every good article that you create has points made within it that can suggest further detail that might be of value. Not only can you review your previous articles to look for these points, but you can anticipate this whenever you draft a new article by thinking in terms of lists of relevant points that are easily expandable in the future.

Every time I browse my web site, I find ideas that I could say more about or points that leave me feeling that I have not completely described what I was trying to say. Try this on you own site. Re-read your material and ask yourself, "if I were not familiar with this issue and reading this for the first time, what questions might I still have?" I am sure you will find triggers for more articles with this process!

Paying for Creativity in a Digital World

"Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”"

This is a concept that is central to promoting your business over the Internet, and one that businesses new to the web frequently have to struggle to understand. As we emphasize constantly in our free Internet Marketing classes, content is the key to success on the web, and the content must be meaningful and valuable to the targets of the outreach effort that the web site is.

Businesses that are accustomed to selling their knowledge have to realize that their model of promotion over the web involves giving knowledge away in order to attract prospects. This often requires an adjustment in understanding the business model. Different businesses have different problems with adjusting to this proposition. In the article cited, sales of ancillary products are used to make up the difference in income production. Krugman describes how the Grateful Dead gave away their music, but made up for that through sale of "hats, T-shirts and performance tickets." That model will not work for many professional businesses that are now marketing over the Internet.

Attorneys, CPA's, counselors of all kinds who have specialized knowledge have to learn how to present their services with a different value proposition. One idea is that what they are really selling is not their knowledge of a particular environment, but the expert application of that knowledge to a specific situation that the prospect is facing! Anyone should be able to understand the difference between getting general advice over a website and the value of having a knowledgeable professional examine your particular case and help you determine how to deal with whatever problem you are attempting to solve. It is this sort of distinction that professionals have to get comfortable with in order to be successful in marketing over the Internet.

Using SEO as an example, we give away a great deal of knowledge about optimizing a site for substantial performance, but there is no substitute for having a professional SEO marketer work with the particular requirements of your business, your marketplace, and your site to achieve a dominance on the web that rewards your business with a high level of targeted traffic. Every business faces slightly different challenges, and knowing the tools that are available and identifying the best way to utilize them in each particular situation is where the value of the professional practitioner comes into play!

Using Press Releases Effectively

I just read an excellent article offered on the site above as a free eBook download. this piece is chock full of great advice and links that everyone should know about. I recommend that everyone interested in enhancing his/her site performance read, no, study, the complete document, but I will attempt to summarize below the concepts that particularly caught my attention in it.

"New" means marketing directly to the user, not just through the media that press releases used to be addressed to. Media attention now becomes a "fringe benefit" of your press releases!

Press releases used to be about "big news", but no more. Anything your organization is doing can be fodder for a release now. For example (as the author suggests),

• CEO speaking at a conference? Write a release.
• Win an award? Write a release.
• Have a new take on an old problem? Write a release.
• Add a product feature? Write a release.
• Win a new customer? Write a release.
• Publish a white paper? Write a release.
• Get out of bed this morning? Okay, maybe not… but you are thinking the right way now!

Use distribution services to get your news out to the broad audience available. The article suggests four well known services, which can also be found in my file of useful links (Search the links page in the file for the phrase "press release sites".)

Don't forget to include the news on your web site. You should have a PR section of your site where you collect all your releases. Keep them there for as long as the information is relevant (why not forever?)

Consider "answering questions" and "browsability" in creating content! Keywords emphasize the first, but navigation and suggestions emphasize the second. Suggest things to people that they didn't think to ask!

Include the Press Release as a PDF in case people want to print it for any reason.

Pay attention to links in the PR. That gets people to your site, and increases your ranking. This means that you have to have the appropriate content on your site. That may mean writing something for the site before creating the PR.

Speak in terms that your buyers/users/clients use. That may include jargon, but mostly does not.

"On the best sites, content does more than just sell product – it directly contributes to an organization’s positive reputation by showing thought-leadership in the marketplace of ideas."

Segment your audience and release to every segment specifically!

Create something of interest that you can "mail" to people. Yes, snail mail, so you get their real addresses! Downloading is good, but sometimes people will want printed content that you can add value to.

Google: The Search Party

"the idea is to anticipate a user’s intent in a search query."

I just watched the author, Ken Auletta, at the New Yorker magazine, talk about Google with Charlie Rose, and a thought came to me about this concept. It seemed more obvious in the show than it does in this article, but the question is, "With Google customizing searches based on what it knows about different searchers, are we coming to a point where different searchers will get different results on the exact same search?" And, if the answer to that is "yes", what does it mean to web masters who are trying to optimize sites for the broadest possible reach? I don't have an answer to that question, but will certainly be thinking about it.

This article makes very interesting reading for general information about Google, how important it is, and where it is going. For example, it reports that Google has a market value of just over two hundred billion dollars. By comparison, ExxonMobil, the richest corporation, has a value just under five hundred billion. Google is only about ten years old!

This year, 2008, their ad revenues are expected to reach sixteen billion dollars, close to the combined revenues of the four top television broadcast networks. Google's ad revenues are increasing, while revenues for other players is declining.

Andy Grove, the former chairman and C.E.O. of Intel,says, “Google’s power is shaping what’s happening to other industries.” According to ComScore, Google does an estimated four hundred billion searches a year, which amounts to about sixty percent of the searches worldwide.

One other interesting point in the article is that "Americans spend the same number of hours a week online as they do watching television—fourteen..."

What does this mean to those of us who are working in the SEO field? For one thing, it emphasizes the absolute dominance of Google on our results, and suggests that this will not change in the immediate future, but, in fact, will probably become more pronounced! It says that we have to stay on our toes with the way Google rates our work, because that rating is constantly changing, with possibly serious impact on our results. And, finally, it illustrates the importance that the Internet has taken on in everyone's lives, and how that presence will likely become more significant rather than less significant, as we tie in more devices to the Internet (cell phones, for example!) Our field, while continually challenging, is only beginning to become what it will be in the future!

Mastering Both Kinds Of Link Building - Authority & Reputation

"... presence builds presence - simply being present in more channels will lead to you getting more links, more authority, more PageRank."

Here is a nice article outlining several important points about successful link building approaches.

The author makes a distinction between pursuing links based on page rank versus links based on anchor text. I have never made that sort of distinction in my own campaigns, but it is an interesting perspective.

What I like about this article is that he talks about the importance of getting good anchor text on internal links (those on the same site) as well as on external links (those on other sites that point to yours.) He also emphasizes the benefits of LOTS of promotion, that is, getting your presence out on the web in as many ways as you possibly can (see the quote above)!

Many of our classes have addressed such tools as article sites, press release sites, and blogs. These are all valuable tools for increasing your visibility on the web, and part of their appeal is their residual power once you have gotten them out there! With this residual power, the placements are also accumulative, that is, they all add up to more and more power for your site.

For effective marketing, the lessons are still, "Content, content, content" and "persistence" in pursuing good techniques for your site.

An In-depth Look Into Free Press Release Site | Increseo Search Marketing Blog

"FREE doesn’t always equate to GOOD. In the press release case, some free press release sites do not provide backlinks, or anchor text links, or even any readability at all. In this post, we are going to have an in-depth look into the free press release sites. "

As a companion piece to the prior posting, this site reviews various press release sites and provides comments on which it found to be most helpful. This is a great resource for evaluating where to invest your efforts to accomplish the most for your marketing effort.

Press Releases as Marketing Tools » Online Marketing Blog

"Press releases were originally designed as a communication tool between company PR staff or public relations firms and the media. But now that online news sites such as Yahoo News and Google News contain such an abundance of press release content and RSS makes it easy to syndicate news, press releases can be effectively used as a direct to consumer communication tool."

We have been talking for some time about the effectiveness of using press releases to promote your web site. This article documents how effective that approach can be, but also points out that success is not so simple as simply writing an article and sending it out. The author points out ten steps to follow in setting up your article to be effective. Some of these steps involve managing your site configuration to be able to measure your effectiveness, and some focus on making your press release interesting and informative to the recipients. this last point comes back to another of our mantras, which is, "Content is king!" Your content has to be meaningful to the readers in order to achieve its maximum effectiveness!

Following this article are a number of comment posts that provide supplemental information and are well worth reading for anyone who is considering investing time and energy in utilizing press releases as a promotional tool for a web site.

Understanding the True Value of a Resource Library for Your Website

"The most common objection a search engine optimization company hears when recommending that a site add a resource library is 'I want to sell my product, not educate.' However, this is shortsighted. It is important to reach buyers at all stages of the sales cycle. "

Here is someone who understands and explains the importance of CONTENT on a web site! In the quote cited above, the author addresses the principal objection and misunderstanding that one encounters when trying to get site owners to support creation of content.

He points out quite clearly what the benefits of this material can be to the site, and provides illustrations of sites that employ the technique successfully. For a good example of how this can be implemented effectively look at one of the web sites we discuss frequently in our clinic, Jason's site dealing with air tools. Jason also carries battery chargers and jump starters, so he provides an article on "How to jump start a dead car battery".

When you look at this page, note the references on the page to additional informational articles provided on the site. Also note that the article provides an easy step for the viewer to get to the listing of the products related to the article content.

To reiterate the authors points, this content does three things for the site. It provides a good reason for visitors to return to the site, it can attract important inbound links from other sites and blogs, and it can boost rankings on important keyword phrases. This last point is particularly relevant for phrases buried in what we refer to as "the long tail" of less frequently used search phrases.

As we say in every class, "Content is King!"