The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) - Pay-Per-Click Advertising(PPC) - Website Traffic and Path Analysis - Optimized Press Releases - SEO Copywriting - Blogging - Article Writing - Newsletters - Everything you need to know to be successful in your Internet marketing.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Article Spinning Software: The Value in Spinning Content

Today's featured Squidoo lens is on the subject of banner ads. There are times when advertising on search engine results pages for your industry is just too expensive, in which case you may want to turn to content network advertising. You can run text ads on content networks, but sometimes you get better results with graphical banner ads. So obviously, banner ad creation is an important part of that process. Now on today's main topic...

Article Spinning Software: Should You Use It?

Content "spinning", or article spinning, is the act of taking seed content (such as an article) and creating different versions of it by changing words, passages, and paragraphs. It is somewhat of a controversial practice because, depending on how it is used, it can result in spam. For example, if I create an article and then use article spinning software to create a thousand slightly different versions of the article for blasting around to various web sites...that would probably be considered a spamming, or "black hat", technique.

That is not the way my firm practices spinning. I believe if you create spun content that has a large degree of variation that is optimized in such a way to be easily found with different keywords, then the technique is legitimate. So content that we spin has a large amount of variation between versions. It is a time consuming process, but still faster than maintaining a one-to-one ratio between original content and content locations. It gives us leverage on our time, but does not bombard the Web with content that is essentially the same.

This concept is similar to one we have discussed many times before, which is re-purposing content. For example, taking two blog posts that are about the same subject and combining them into an article, and then distributing the article directories. Like content spinning, it gives you great leverage on your time.

Certainly, publishing a blog is a fantastic start to a content campaign. But you need to go far beyond simply publishing your blog. You need to make maximum use of every word you type, and content spinning is one technique to make that happen.

To answer the question of this post: should you use article spinning software?, the answer is "yes." But do it in an ethical manner. If you don't have serious time to put into writing your articles so that each version will be very unique, then don't do it.

For help in making the absolute best use of your writing for purposes of improving your search engine rankings, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: article marketing, article spinning, content, content creation, content distribution, content spinning, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo

Monday, September 22, 2008

Thoughts on Microsoft's New Ad Campaigns

Today's Squidoo lens is about keyword research. This lens presents eight effective keyword research strategies, along with various resources, links, videos and more to learn more about this very important topic.

Well, Microsoft is certainly trying to fight back against the market share that Apple is taking from PC machines. Its new ad campaigns are big budget productions starring the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Mr. Microsoft himself, Bill Gates. The first ad, which centered around Seinfeld and Gates in a shoe store, was a flop, in my opinion. It was fairly humorous, but not at all "hip," which I believe it was meant to be. The worst part of it is that it did not at all address the question of why someone should continue using PCs rather than Macs. It was the advertising equivalent of a box office bomb.

This weekend I saw their next attempt, which is much better. In the new ad, many interesting and cool people (scientists, explorers, athletes, celebrities) look at the camera stating "I'm a PC." This ad is more on target because it directly counters the underlying theme of Mac's very successful campaign that portrays PC users as nerds in suits. It still doesn't really address why you should use Windows, but it shows that many, many successful people use PCs.

I have to wonder about Microsoft's ROI on these ads. Maybe in this situation, ROI doesn't even matter. When a company with all the money in the world is losing market share, maybe the solution is just to spend your way back to the top. That's not the approach we take with our clients, but our clients don't have the kind of funding that Microsoft has.

If you don't have a billion dollars to spend on your marketing campaign and need to actually show a return on your marketing investment, call Work Media today! Even if TV or radio is your game, we can help you save a ton of money on your media costs. And of course, we're the guys to call for your search engine marketing needs. Call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, Microsoft, search engine marketing, search marketing, TV advertising

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Five Squidoo Lens Tips

Today's Squidoo lens is about what to look for in an internet advertising agency.

For a couple of weeks now, we've been building Squidoo lenses on a variety of topics. We hope to achieve "Giant Squid" status because that will give us better leverage of Squidoo for marketing purposes. To achieve that, you have to have 50 active lenses that people actually visit. So we're building lenses on all kinds of topics, not just Internet marketing. Anyway, following are some tips for making the most of your Squidoo lenses that we have gleaned from our own experiences so far and advice we have read from others.

1. Use your keywords in links to your main web site. This is the most basic SEO use of your Squidoo lenses. If you build a good lens, it only makes sense to place a prominent keyword link on the page that links to your site for the SEO boost.

2. Link your Squidoo lenses to each other. Help visitors find their way to your various Squidoo lenses by placing a list of links to those lenses in each one.

3. Spend some time on your lenses. This one seems obvious, but you may be tempted to throw up a bunch of half-constructed lenses. For a Squidoo strategy to work, your lenses really do need to be high quality. Fortunately, using the Squidoo modules, it is very easy to build a lens that updates itself. You just have to take the time to set up the modules properly.

4. Help search engines find your lenses. Link to your lenses in your blog posts or your main web site.

5. Tag your lenses. Do your keyword research (we suggest using Google's external keyword tool) and use a combination of high traffic and long-tail keywords for your Squidoo lens tags.

Follow these tips and you will be on your way to building a series of strong Squidoo lenses that will help your search engine marketing campaign. If you could use some help with these types of advanced link building strategies, contact Work Media at www.workmedia.net or 888-299-4837.

Labels: internet marketing, link building, linking, linking campaign, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, squidoo

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Guiding the Search Engines

Today's Squidoo lens is about advertising copywriting. Strong copywriting can make a profound impact on your business performance. The advertising / copywriting Squidoo lens reveals the top five copywriters whose work you should study to learn how to write powerful advertising copy.

We recently published a new article on our site about a concept called "PageRank reflection," which, in a nutshell, is the process of linking to high PageRank sites that have links back to your site in order to help search engine spiders find the link back to your site. It is similar in concept to link swapping, only rather than having a link placed on the other site via a link swap, you take advantage of social networking or bookmarking sites that let you have control over the link placement. The example we hit on in the article was using Squidoo. To read more about the details of using Squidoo to accomodate PageRank reflection, read the article (no reason to re-write it here).

The general idea is to guide search engine spiders to pages you want them to find so that they will find the links back to your site. This concept applies to any web site where you have a link back to your site. It applies not only to social networking type sites but directories, blogs, and any other kind of web site. If there are blog posts where you have a link
(via a comment or whatever), you should link to the blog in order to let search engine spiders find that link back to your site.

One strategy you might consider is creating a web page specifically for the purpose of displaying links back to your site. There should naturally be some kind of common theme to those links (for example, most links to our site are located on other web sites that deal with Internet marketing), so it will resemble sort-of a mini-directory, which is a perfectly legitimate purpose for a web site. If you create such a site, register a new domain name for it and link to it from your main site. This will allow search engine spiders to easily find your links directory and begin following those links. Those links will all link to pages that link back to your main site. It's all just one big circle.

This process does take some time, but it is time well spent. Eventually, the search engines will probably find most of your links anyway, but the faster and easier you make it, the quicker you will climb the search engine rankings.

Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net for help with your link building campaign. We can take over the burden of building a broad, well-constructed catalog of links to your site, so you can focus on managing the leads that come through.

Labels: internet marketing, link building, link campaign, linking, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo

Friday, September 12, 2008

Call a Search Engine Marketing Company Before You Buy TV Airtime!

Today's Squidoo lens is about landing page design.

Look, I know when you think about search engine marketing companies, you are not thinking about airtime for TV commercials. But the fact is, working with Google account reps, a well-qualified search engine marketing can save you THOUSANDS on what it would cost you to purchase it directly through television stations or networks. We are finding ourselves talking to more and more people these days who have already spent a bundle buying TV airtime, when if they had come to us first, we could have used Google's TV ad space platform to buy the airtime at a fraction of the cost.

The same goes for radio ads. Working with Google account reps, we can put together a radio promotion campaign at a much lower cost than you could do yourself.

Yes, using Google, it is generally excess airtime you are purchasing, and you have less control over when your ads air. So there may be times when using Google to manage your TV or radio spend is not appropriate. But if you are on a somewhat limited budget, then you should absolutely use Google and a search engine marketing company to purchase airtime and manage your campaigns.

So if you are thinking about investing in TV or radio ads, PLEASE call us first! We can absolutely save you a ton of money and frustration. Work Media also has a partner that is a full-service ad agency that can produce professional quality commercials for you. And while you're at it, since we're saving you so much money on the cost to run your ads, you might want to have us do some search engine promotion for your web site. Put those marketing dollars to use!

Call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: cable TV, google, Google radio, Google radio ads, internet marketing, scientific search engine marketing, TV advertising

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Link Building

Squidoo lens of the day: http://www.squidoo.com/linkbuildingseo

We are playing around with some software that may be of use to anyone looking to build their inbound link catalog. It's called Fast Blog Finder, and it's purpose is to locate blogs about particular subjects that allow "dofollow" links in their comments. Dofollow links are links that search engine spiders can follow. So these are the kinds of links that help to improve search engine rankings. All links, by default, are dofollow links. The Web exists today as we know it because of the ability of search engine spiders to follow links and build indexes of web sites.

The problem is that any time there is free and open ability to post material with dofollow links, there are some who try to exploit the situation. In my opinion, for ethical, legitimate Internet marketers, it is okay to post comments on others' blogs, with links back to your site, if they are posting something legitimate that relates to the subject of the blog post. But there are those who would post thousands of blatantly commercial messages on blog posts simply to get the links back to their site. And so most blogs today do not allow dofollow links in their comments. The few have ruined it for the many.

However, there are still blogs that allow dofollow links. Generally comments on these blogs are monitored closely, so that even if a blatantly non-relevant commercial message is posted it will not stay on the blog for long. So it is still necessary to make legitimate comments based on the subject of the blog post.

Fast Blog Finder looks for blog posts based on a seed keyword, and it examines the comments on the blog posts to see if they allow dofollow links. It then reports the results back to you and highlights the blogs that do allow the correct type of link. You can save blogs you like in particular into a favorites list. This is useful because there is a good chance that if there is one post in a blog relevant to your business, there are more. So if you have the blog saved, you can return to it in the future and make more comments on other posts in the blog.

If there are no existing comments, the software is unable to determine if the blog allows dofollow links. That is the major weakness of the software, because we have found that a very large percentage (probably around 40%) of the blog results brought back do not report the link type allowed. Despite this weakness, the software still saves you a ton of time, and at a cost of about $50, it's still a bargain.

Regardless of how you go about it, making periodic comments on blog posts that allow dofollow links back to your site is a very good technique to combine with your other link building strategies. You want to have links from as many different types of sites as possible, and one way links from relevant blogs can be quite valuable.

If you could use some help managing a linking building campaign for your site, call Work Media today at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, link building, linking campaign, paid links, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo

Monday, September 08, 2008

Goofy, Low Budget Videos: Anti-Corporate Marketing

We spent a good bit of time Thursday and Friday working on a promotional video for Work Media. We've done a few instructional type videos and have added them to many video directories, but this is our first attempt to do anything with much in the way of entertainment value. We noticed that one of our local competitors (although a company for whom search engine marketing is a side business) has released a slick, professional looking commercial video that is featured on its web site. We decided to go the opposite route - our video is low budget, goofy, and definitely has an unprofessional feel to it. But this is not something that will be going on TV - just on our site and distributed to video sites for people hopefully to pass around.

So...for our purposes, what video type would likely work the best? Slick, professional, and straight up...or low budget and comical? We think the comical route has a better chance of doing anything for us. It's sort-of anti-corporate marketing. The video shows enough to make it very clear that we are a real company with a number of people working here, and that was really all we wanted to accomplish. Beyond that, we just wanted to do something that might stick in someone's mind a bit, or at least entertain him long enough to watch the whole thing. If someone needs proof that we are knowledgeable and skilled in our field, then there is all kinds of proof of that on our site - information, articles, blog posts, case studies...we've got lots of proof. A boring video about the details of what we do just didn't seem like the right approach.

We'll let you know how it goes.

We have been submitting articles to SEM Skinny, and noticed that because of that we currently have a nice front page article on a site called TalentZoo.com: http://www.talentzoo.com/news.php?articleID=843.

Our latest book, Scientific Search Engine Marketing, is slowly beginning to sell on Amazon.com. This whole book selling business is new to us, but it's definitely an interesting learning experience. Hopefully we will learn many things that we can share with you. We are already heavy into the writing of our next book, which is an expanded version of the Scientific Search Engine Marketing book aimed specifically at law firms. If you haven't checked it out, you can learn more here: http://workmedia.net/scientific-search-engine-marketing/

Here is another Squidoo lens to check out. This one provides a lot of valuable information about SEO linking campaign strategies: http://www.squidoo.com/linkcampaign.

That's all for today. We've slacked off hard on our blog the last few weeks but are recommitting ourselves to making quality posts three times per week. If you could use some help with your company's search engine marketing, call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, scientific search engine marketing, search engine marketing, squidoo, video

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Squidoo, Video and More

We have noticed quite a few natural search listings for links to our client videos. You probably think video is too difficult, but it definitely is not. Combine static images with some kind of soundtrack and BAM! - you have video.

Here is another Squidoo page to check out:

http://www.squidoo.com/search-engine-positioning

We are building a ton of these things related to all different aspects of Internet marketing. We eventually want to string them together into a series of lenses. But first we have to get them all built.

And be sure to check out our new search engine marketing book on Amazon.com!

Hope everybody had a great holiday weekend!

Labels: internet marketing, scientific search engine marketing, squidoo, video