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Blog Friday
An associate here who regularly blogs on another website we have commented that today was “Blog Friday,” and it hit me that that is a great concept. Blogging needs to be a consistent part of your Internet marketing; something that you do every week, maybe even on the same days, regularly. It should be a habit. Now, I can’t say that I have done very well with this habit…for a couple of years now. But I’m back, baby! One of my goals for this year is to blog three times per week. So let’s explore this idea.
Why would you want to blog regularly? There are some very good reasons:
- You cause your website to grow with content. Google loves websites with lots of content. The more you have, the better.
- You can re-purpose your blogs. We’ve published a couple of books which have been very useful in spreading our brand and attracting clients. Most of the content in those books started as blog posts. You could do the same thing, turning your blog content into articles, reports, books, or anything you can think of.
- It helps establish credibility. Chances are pretty good that if you blog about a particular subject regularly, those who read the blog will think you know what you’re taking about.
- It can cause people to return to your blog to read your updates. This is a very favorable thing. You WANT people to want to come to your website to read what you have to say.
- It can cause you to think critically about what you do. If you’re constantly having to come up with something to say related to your business, it may force you to have to learn some new things about your industry and keep up with what’s going on. This is a very good thing.
So there you have it. Five very good reasons to have your own Blog Friday…or Blog Monday…or whatever day(s) work for you.
An Introduction to Local SEO
If your business operates at a local level, or has a geographically-defined market area, then it is important that you engage in local SEO. This process should probably start with Google Places.
Google Places is Google’s online business directory, similar to Yellow Pages listings, with the listings appearing on pinned onto a local map. So if I am in Savannah, and I search Google for “carpet cleaner,” Google will likely show me a few local carpet cleaning businesses. Or I may have to click on Maps to view those listings. Then Google will show me a list of businesses, along with little pins showing where they are on a map of Savannah. Obviously, you would like your carpet cleaning business to appear high up on this list.
Go to www.google.com/lbc and provide very complete information about your business. Don’t play games here. It can be a real pain to “fix” your local business listing in Google, so give your exact business address and don’t try to trick Google into thinking your office location is somewhere it isn’t. Give a detailed description of your business and include your major keywords. You have 200 characters, so make every character count. Include any other relevant information such as your hours of operation, if you have parking available, awards you have won, etc. This is not time to be modest.
Also add some multimedia. Add images and videos. In fact, add as many images and videos as Google will allow. If you don’t have videos, create some! This is the 21st century! Go get a cheap video camera and have someone record you sitting at your desk explaining how you have helped your customers. Or create an informational video explaining how you do what you do. This ain’t Hollywood. Just think of something to talk about, comb your hair, and press record.
Here are few tips:
- Use your exact business name for the titles.
- Use your search keywords in the description.
- Use your proper street address (a P.O. box defeats the whole point).
- Use your local phone number.
- If you have more than one location, fill out a profile for each location.
For local businesses, local search optimization is extremely important for generating search engine traffic to your website, so follow the above steps and you will greatly increase your odds of making this happen.
SEO Ain’t What It Used to Be
Search engine optimization ain’t what it used to be. Back in the good old days (pre-Google) all you had to do was use your keywords in your meta-tags, title and copy. You had a very good chance of ranking in search engines for the keywords. Then Google came along the with the idea that the number and quality of links pointing to your website, as well as the text content of those links, was a good indicator of your websites relevance. And thus was born the linking campaign. Now, it’s a lot more difficult than that.
Google remains the leader in the search engine race, still owning a large percentage of all search engine traffic. So it makes the most sense to optimize for Google, and work down from there. So what is Google looking at these days? Increasingly, Google is taking social media into consideration. In a way, they are sort-of forcing your hand into using Google Plus. Although other social media platforms certainly come into play as well.
Google is now looking for links to websites or social media profiles contained in social media accounts. Want to have your website appear highly ranked to your prospects? Then become social media friends with them. This will increase the likelihood that those individual see your website prominently in Google.
And ultimately, aren’t you most concerned with your website being found by those most likely to purchase your products or service?
And putting aside the idea of improving your visibility to your social media friends, it is very likely that this process will improve your rankings to anyone. If Google sees that lots of people promote your website in their social media accounts, then that will likely have a similar effect to having lots of external links from other websites.
So now you need to think of SEO in a couple of areas. Certainly, you still need to continue the process of optimizing your website in the traditional way. In other words, make sure that your web pages use your keywords in the correct way. And make sure that you have a catalog of high quality external links pointing to your website, especially links that contain your primary keywords.
A much newer area of optimization is concerned with the visibility of your website in the local portion of Google search results. This is called local SEO. I’m not going to go into the details, but there are a number of things you need to do to improve the chances of your website appearing prominently to those searching for your business in your market area.
And of course the newest area involves using social media to influence search results. Regardless of your opinion on the effectiveness of social media as a lead or sales generation tool, it cannot be denied because of its effect on your search rankings.
So regardless of your comfort level being social online, it now must be a part of your overall Internet marketing strategy
Need some help? Work media would be glad to assist with this process. It is time consuming and not necessarily all that intuitive. Call us today at 615-375-8793. Or e-mail us at info@workmedia.net.
How the Little Guy Can Take on Expedia
Work Media has been doing some business with a company in the destination lodging industry and they have, like everyone else in the industry, an interesting and difficult problem that I think is probably going to be more prevalent across other industries over time – the problem is well-funded, much larger competitors crowding them out – crowding them out of search rankings and obtaining traffic that should be their’s. In this case, it’s companies like Expedia and Travelocity that are both crowding the search results and becoming such dominant players that companies like our client have no choice but to get leads from them.
Interestingly, in this case, most people don’t realize they get the same deal just by working directly with the company in the first place.
We’re finding that there are two strategies which the local companies need to utilize in order to fight back. These strategies are being local and being social. Local optimization and social media marketing. Expedia is not a travel agency located in Miami, Florida. It is not a hotel located in Nashville Tennessee. That Nashville, Tennessee hotel has an advantage from a local search perspective because it has a local address which can appear on Google maps and thus can have a strong presence in Google Places. Similarly, that Nashville hotel can build a following and an audience for itself on Facebook, Twitter and other social media properties. It can have a personality specific to its market. It can have a conversation. It can be of much greater use and value to those looking for a Nashville hotel than Travelocity or the other large travel aggregators.
So the key to competing against these types of much larger, better funded organizations is to combine aggressive SEO with strong local optimization and very systematic social media marketing. If you want to take it even farther than that, you mix in paid search and e-mail marketing – the two other components that can add even greater leverage to the overall package of strategies.
In this particular post we’re not going to go into the details of local search optimization or Facebook marketing. But needless to say, just do it. Go set up a Google places account. Set up a Facebook account. Set up a Twitter account. Start updating these accounts daily. Even if initially you don’t have any friends or fans, you got it started.
Time to Build Your Own Marketing System
You should spend serious time thinking about how you market your business. You need to design and IMPLEMENT a system for delivering leads to your business. I am a student of guys like Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy – guys who have helped millions of business owners like me build successful businesses. But there is an advantage that you have – and that I have – over those marketing geniuses. The advantage is this:
You know your business.
So it’s not a matter of having to learn how a business or an industry works. You already know how it works. You have a product or service that your market needs – you just need a way to bring them to you. Again…you need a system.
And I’m sure you have lots of time to sit around doodling marketing ideas on napkins and daydreaming about your vision for your business. Hey, I know where you’re coming from. I’m struggling with it myself right now. I finally managed to hack out a marketing plan but I’m already struggling staying on schedule because there’s just so much work to do. Not that I’m complaining. I wouldn’t want it to be the other way around. But you and I have got to have the discipline to carve out the time to build marketing systems for our businesses.
Your marketing is a funnel. At the top of the funnel are a whole bunch of prospective customers. But where do those prospects come from to start with? From whatever devices you use to promote your business – sales letters, advertisements, referrals – and of course search engine marketing. As these devices drive people to your website or cause them to pick up the phone, that’s where you hopefully move them further down the funnel. If you get them on your mailing list, that moves them along. If you can get them to request a free book or download, that moves them along. Anything that causes them to interact with your company helps move them along.
So what do you do with those prospects who request more information, download something, or perform whatever the required action is?
You want to do whatever you have to do to get them to trust you. This generally involves giving away a lot of free information, dripped to them indefinitely. In other words, once they have held their hand up and said “we are interested in what you have to say,” then you need to nurture that relationship until they finally buy something from you. Then you continue to nurture that relationship even more until they buy more goods or services.
In other words…you need a system for delivering prospects to your company and converting those prospects into paying customers. This is not something that should be taken lightly. In fact, it is probably more important than the actual product or service you are selling. There may be lots of companies selling the same thing. You have to figure out how to capture as much of your market as you can. As the owner or marketer for your business, that is job number one. Sell, sell, sell.
The Power of Try
“Try” is a powerful word. It represents the difference between success and failure.
Between glory and mediocrity.
Between pride and despair.
Work Media is doing well. I think the company has a very bright future, and I am proud of where we have come. But it has not, by any means, been easy.
I always wanted to be one of those guys who got really rich in business at a young age – one of the ones who made it look effortless. It just wasn’t that way for me. I made my first attempt at starting my own business when I was 23.
I crashed and burned.
Then for the next several years I had a number of jobs in the fields of website design, programming, and Internet marketing. After finishing one particular contract job, for which I admit with no pride that I gave little effort (there were extenuating circumstances, but I still mailed it in), I had much difficulty finding my next gig. So I made my second attempt at starting my own business.
I crashed and burned.
So came a couple more jobs. I eventually landed at Shop at Home TV, where after working with a good guy named Fred Bergman doing Endeca programming (a sophisticated shopping cart search platform), I eventually became their Manager of Search. That was a cool job.
Then the company got sold, and I was on the street again, small severance check in hand.
So what did I do? Well, of course, I started my own business. This time around, I did not crash and burn. Not that it was easy. There actually came a time when my business partner (and brother), Chris Work, and I decided to shut down. This was about three years ago. Only thing was…there weren’t any jobs to be had anyway! So we carried on.
And then things turned around. Work Media is now well-established. I don’t worry about going out of business. It took three times, and even then it was often like pulling teeth, but we pulled it off.
What is the underlying theme throughout all this?
We kept trying.
No matter what happens in your life, if you have a goal…a dream…a vision for what you want your life to be, it can happen as long as you keep trying.
One thing that is interesting is that you will find yourself stumbling into opportunities and good situations which were not at all part of your original plan, but these things often end up sending you in even better directions, and providing opportunities you never imagined.
But it never happens if you don’t try.
Recent Events Around the Office
Jerry Work here. Well…so much for my “2010 30 minutes writing every day” challenge. I used to blog every day, but business has been so good this year that I just haven’t had time (or the discipline, I should probably say) to do much blogging. But I am once AGAIN re-starting my blogging efforts. I thought I would start by just providing an update about what’s going on around the office.
To start off with business is good. We’re working with some very large companies, like Kirkland’s and Comdata, as well as many much smaller companies. That’s what is great about the world of search engine marketing: everybody is on a level playing field. If you’re willing to put in the work (or pay a company like mine to put in the work), then you can give yourself as much as or more visibility than the biggest companies in your industry.
For example, we have a legal client in Nashville that is a MUCH smaller firm than his big budget local competitors, yet for his practice area, he ranks above the bigger firms (in the number one spot in most cases) in just about every possible keyword related to that practice area for Nashville. It doesn’t matter that the bigger companies have more money…our client has US. And we don’t like to lose.
Anyway, we have created a new company (a corporation with Work Media as the majority shareholder) specifically for offering Internet marketing services to the legal industry, Virtuoso Legal Marketing Inc. We don’t have an official website up for it yet, but our legal marketing portal (http://www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net) will serve as part of our online marketing presentation for the new company. The company is created and has its own checking account, but no marketing. However, we do have a very high quality person ready to lead it to success. Mr. Brad Hart is our newest associate, and he arrives with many years of experience specifically promoting law firm websites. We are thrilled to have Brad on board. Our core team is now rock solid and we are ready to tackle anything that comes our way.
I have paused sale of the new social media book (Be the Magnet) while I revamp it. There are some things that I have changed my mind about or do differently just since finishing that, so I want to take another look at it and make it better. In addition to book publishing, we are also about to enter the world of magazine publishing. We are working on the debut issue of our first magazine, tentatively titled The Journal of Law Firm Internet Marketing. The first issue of that should be finished this month and it will be released as part of the marketing push to promote the new company.
How to Increase the Number of Twitter Users You Can Follow
Twitter’s 110% rule (that says that the number of people you can follow is a maximum of the greater of 2000 or 110% of the number of people you are following) creates a problem for marketers. The top way to generate new followers of your own is to follow others. One way to increase their followers without bumping up against this limit is to maintain a ratio of followers to followees of around 1:1. But this is easier said than done unless you have some specific strategies in place to manage it.
Refollow is a fantastic, free online service that allows you to dismiss users from your Twitter account in order to manage that ratio. The tool lets you view all of the Twitter users who you are following, those who are following you, as well as groups of users based on particular criteria. They are presented in a grid of icons which display information about each user.
Unless you are already a celebrity or of a status where people are naturally going to follow you, you are going to have to manage your following list. The first thing you are going to have to do is eliminate those users you follow who do not follow you back (not counting people you genuinely enjoy reading). Refollow makes that process easy by showing you exactly who is not following you back and allowing you to mass-unfollow them all at once.
Another option is simply to buy users. There are many options available for doing this, so I won’t recommend any particular one here. It seems a bit unseemly. And the practice does violate the concept of using Twitter as a platform to communicate with those you find interesting. However…business is business, and if this is something you need to do to get past the 110% limit in order to keep growing your account, then it is a viable option.
If you can create a genuine buzz within the Twitter universe about yourself based on the quality or entertainment value of your updates, then you might not even have to worry about any of these options. If people flock to your account because they are genuinely interested in what you have to say, there will be no need to manipulate the ratio of followers to those you are following.
Most likely, however, at least in the beginning, you will have to take some specific steps to keep that ratio in line to grow your follower base much past 2000.
Getting Started with Spanish SEO
The market for your products or services among those who speak Spanish is potentially massive. And chances are very good that you are completely missing out on that market. This is somewhat of a complex subject, but I am going to give you a bare-bones strategy for promoting your business to the Hispanic market.
1. It goes without saying, but if you are going to promote your business in Spanish, you need to be prepared to speak to someone in that language. So you are going to need someone on your staff who can do that.
2. Use Google’s external keyword research tool to perform keyword research, but set the language preference to Spanish. The seed keywords should also be in Spanish:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
3. Create content for your web site, or create a new web site altogether, written in Spanish and optimized for the keywords from step 2. However, you should avoid any kind of automated translation software or web site. You need to hire a real human being to do the translation work. If you’re going to do it, do it right.
4. Generate keyword links to your Spanish language pages just like you would your English pages.
That’s it! Easy, right?…
Well, not really. English language SEO is time consuming and has many moving parts. But doing it in a language that you are not familiar with adds a whole ‘nother level of difficulty. If you are already fluent in Spanish, then you’ve got a big advantage over the rest of us.
Another consideration is whether you are promoting to a broad, global Spanish-speaking market or to markets in particular countries or to specific groups of people. There are many variations of the Spanish language, and what works and is acceptable language to one group may not be understood or considered rude by another group. In general, the best strategy is probably to take a high level, global perspective and try to avoid using language that is specific to any particular group.
So preparing yourself to do business with Spanish-speaking people will require some effort and resources, but it will open you up to a whole new market.
Google Search Options You Should Try Out
There are many things about Google that I dislike. I dislike many of the things about the Google AdWords program, such as the change recently preventing advertisers from split-testing different domain names in their ads within an ad group. I dislike the way Google constantly throws out new technology, and then provides little in the way of support for it (for example, sometimes Blogger will publish to an external web server, and sometimes it won’t, yet Google has shown very little interest in dealing with the problem or providing any guidance).
But the fact is, despite the many things I dislike about Google, I pound on the Google search ,engine non-stop. It is a fantastic research tool. There are a couple of Google search options that I recently started using that aid in the research process. If you write articles or use Google as a marketing tool (and you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t), then you should try these out.
To start, do any search in Google. The search I am using as an example while I type this out is “law firm internet marketing.” Hey, there’s my law firm internet marketing site at number six, and the Amazon.com page for our book on the subject at number nine. Neat. Anyway, now click the Show options link next to the plus sign at the top left above where the search results start.
Now you should see lots of links along the left-hand side of the screen. Some of them let you focus in on specific types of search results, such as images or blogs or whatever. But the two that I want to discuss here are Related searches and Wonder wheel.
Clicking the Related searches link shows a number of other searches that are, obviously, related to your first search. I think it is safe to assume that these are search queries that people have actually used because some of them are way too specific to just be synonyms or whatever. Clicking on one of those related search query links brings up a new page of search results, just as if you had types that keyword into the search box. Doing this process repeatedly will expose you to all kinds of search terms that you may not have thought of that might be applicable to your business. If you are purely engaging in the process for research purposes, it may lead you to some web sites or resources you would not have found by using your own search terms.
The Wonder wheel option is similar to related terms but more dynamic. Clicking that option displays a circle (or “wheel”) with your keyword in the middle and spokes coming out that point at related search terms. Clicking on one of the outside search terms draws another wheel with the second search term with a long spoke that connects to the first wheel, as well as its own set of spokes pointing to a new set of keywords. Really, this tool does the same thing that the Related searches link does, but it presents the information in a “mind mapping” kind of way and lets you see the path you followed to arrive at a search term.
Gain an edge on your competition by putting these tools to use today in your research and online marketing activities.