Archive for the ‘internet marketing’ category
Whiteboard Planning
We’re trying something different at Work Media. It seems like every December we create a marketing plan for the coming year, only to have the plan sit around and collect dust as we get back to business as usual. For big corporations with many specialized employees, maybe the thick paper marketing plan works because there are people who actually have time to look at it and tell other people what to do to stick to the plan. But I’m not sure how well it works a lot of times for small companies like us.
So we’re trying something new. We’re whiteboarding it. I will probably still end up creating a paper plan to flesh out details (SEO, advertising, direct mail), but for the big picture, I’ve written what we want to accomplish in 2010 on a whiteboard so everyone in my office can see it. Now obviously, there is a limit to how much detail I can go into. But details are meaningless unless everyone in the office knows what the “big” goals are, what what we’re trying to get done.
So what is my on our whiteboard? At the top of the board is our revenue goal for the year. Now, your business may be different. There may be a different metric that is most important to you. But for us, being in a business with low capital requirements, I know that if we hit our revenue goal, everything else will fall into place.
Beneath our revenue goal, I’ve sketched out in very broad terms how we will hit the number: how much we have to generate in product sales, how many clients we need, etc. I’ve also created a picture of what our company structure should look like with arrows going this way and that. I like visual diagrams when trying to demonstrate something that can be complex in as simple a way as possible.
The whiteboard approach may not be effective for you. If you have a large office, with lots of employees disbursed in different places, then a whiteboard might not work because not everyone would even see it. But my point is, you should try to come up with something to keep your company’s goals for the year in front of your people’s eyes. Maybe some kind of weekly report would work for you.
Do you have your goals set for 2010? If not, that is obviously the first place to start. Set your goals, decide how you are going to accomplish them, and then make everyone in your company know what the plan is.
If you’re small enough, you might even want to whiteboard it.
Blog Comment Linking: Good or Bad?
Recently, in its Google Webmaster blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), Google posted about spam links in blog comments, and how using these links will damage your positioning. This is a strategy that Work Media sometimes employs, so we wanted to address this subject.
First off, you have to take these things with a grain of salt. Google likes to keep things secretive, and we believe it often does and says things just to create confusion about how its algorithm works. And the Web is built on links. Google uses links to find web sites and as a measure of a site’s worth in assigning it a ranking. So, in general, you still have to get links to your site if you want high search engine rankings.
For another thing, we don’t think it really makes sense to PUNISH sites for having links to it. That’s not to say Google doesn’t do it, and it seems to have done it in the past, but think about this: if Google is going to punish a web site for having links to it contained in blog comments, why wouldn’t I use this against my competitors? What is to stop me from going around to blogs and submitting spammy comments with links to my competitors’ web sites?
Google says this: “…it’s useless to think of harming your competitor’s ranking by spamming comments with their name, since it usually won’t affect their ranking if their sites are complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines.”
Ah, there’s the rub. If you do things the right way, you will be fine. Here is our approach to blog commenting:
1. Use a keyword for the name field.
2. Type a URL in the appropriate field.
3. Type out a well-written, well-thought-out comment that relates directly to the content of the blog post.
The difference between this approach and what Google is talking about is that we are making legitimate comments, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to get the link.
Here’s another thing: don’t rely solely on this or any other SEO strategy to get links. Mix it up. And be credible.
Here’s another thing that we find odd: one of Google’s suggestions is that a way to prevent this is to set comment links in your blog to no follow. However, it was recently revealed that doing that reduces the value of your own internal-pointing or other do follow links. The reason is that PageRank leaks out of your page from the no follow links, even though the pages the links point to do not get credited with the PageRank. So setting your links to no follow is now damaging to your own SEO efforts.
So what should you do? Don’t worry about it. Do your blog commenting like we suggest above and you will be fine.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Work Media will be taking a couple of days off this week for Thanksgiving, as I imagine most of you are doing. This is the time of year when things start slowing down a bit, and business people such as ourselves reflect on the year behind and start planning for the year ahead. So just for fun, I thought I would list some things we are thankful for:
- We’re still in business! We have seen so many businesses shut down this year, including our former partners who were a one-time successful Nashville ad agency. Unemployment nationwide is sky high, and people are having a hard time all over. If you have a job, or work for yourself, you are doing pretty good right now.
- Bing. Google needs some competition…bad. We are unhappy about some of the changes Google has made over the last few years, many of which it seems (to us, at least) were done just because they can. When you have no competition, you can get away with things like that.
- Dickson, Tennessee. Until a couple of months ago, we were operating out of a very nice office in downtown Nashville. For a while, it was really cool being downtown in the city. But that coolness quickly wore off and was replaced by feelings of inconvenience. Now that we have relocated to downtown Dickson, a little town a ways outside of Nashville, we can get to work much quicker and get more work done in the same number of hours.
- Big companies in the legal marketing industry who rip off their clients. It’s not that we really like seeing anyone get ripped off, but word is getting out about the practices of some of the big companies in this industry, and that is only going to serve to drive more business to smaller companies like Work Media that operate in a much more ethical manner.
- Print on demand. Over the last year, we have made great use of this publishing technology. We released two books, both of which went up for sale on Amazon.com things to print on demand. It has been very helpful for spreading our company’s name and establishing our credibility.
- Our health. Everybody at Work Media and our families is relatively healthy right now, which is the greatest wealth of all.
What are you thankful for?
Have a great Thanksgiving!
Don’t Be Lazy with Your Social Media Marketing
Jerry Work here. I have returned to the business of finishing our next book, on the subject of social media marketing. It has been 90% written for a couple of months; I just haven’t had the enthusiasm for the project to finish. But I’ve rededicated myself to getting it done and out to the public.
It’s funny…as I read through what I’ve written, I keep saying to myself “man, that’s a good idea…I should do that…” You see, I’ve spent a ton of time this year studying social media, experimenting with Twitter and whatnot, but then when things get too busy around the office, I tend to drop it so that I can concentrate on getting the work done.
But it can’t be that way.
You have GOT to be systematic if you are going to use social media as a marketing strategy. If you post on Twitter once a week, that is going to do absolutely nothing. If you update Facebook once a month, you might as well be invisible. These things have got to be done every day.
I have blogged quite a bit here and in my Twitter marketing blog about automating certain tasks so that your accounts stay updated even when you don’t manually update them yourself. But I’ve discovered something else about myself that I think is probably applicable to most people: once you stop doing something, it is difficult to start back up. So for the last few weeks, my Twitter account has pretty well been on auto-pilot. Sure, it is good because I have kept it going, but social networking is MUCH more effective when you involve yourself…when you read what others around you are saying…when you are part of the community.
So be better than I have been lately. Get your systems in place to automate your accounts, but make sure you set aside a little bit of time each day to log into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever you’re into, and update your account. Respond to what some other users are saying. Look for new friends.
Just do it!
Tiny URLs in Email Messages
One thing I’ve noticed in various junk marketing emails I’ve received lately is that email marketers have started using tiny URLs in their email messages. A tiny URL is basically a URL that is routed through another service that knows what the actual URL is supposed to be and directs the visitor to the right page. The reason for the service is that it can take a URL that is very long and complex and transform it into something MUCH shorter in terms of total characters.
Now, tiny URLs have value when doing something like micro-blogging, where the total number of characters you have to convey your message is very limited. For instance, if you are using Twitter, where you are limited to 140 characters, it is not practical to place a long link in your message because it will take up so much room. So you can use a tiny URL and leave yourself with many more characters.
The downside of tiny URLs is that they mask where the links actually go. In today’s dangerous Internet world, where criminal robots, spyware and viruses abound, you just can’t go around clicking on strange links when you don’t know where you might end up. So why, when character limitation is not an issue, would you HIDE where you are linking to? In my opinion, this is very suspicious. Personally, I will NEVER click on a link in an email if I can’t see where the link goes, unless it is from a very trustworthy source who I know personally. Otherwise…forget about it.
I’m probably not the only person who feels this way. So…if you are doing email marketing, my advice is to make your links transparent. Otherwise, it seems like you are trying to hide something. and I would just bet that your email marketing performance will suffer.
Google Shakeup: Just Stick to the Basics
Google has been doing some things lately with its index that have caused quite a bit of shuffling of rankings. However, what we are finding is that, in general, in a few days things get restored to something like what they were before. So if you have high rankings that have suddenly disappeared, chances are pretty good you will get them back in a few days. The main thing is: stay calm!
We have been checking a lot of our clients’ rankings in the beta version of the new Google algorithm which is to be released in the near future. We are actually seeing improvements for many of our rankings with the new release. This validates our theory that, if you stick to the basics and work it, you will be fine.
So…what does that mean exactly?
First off, make sure the copy of your web site (including page titles and headers) is optimized for specific keywords, and not all on the same page. Spread your keywords out!
Make sure you have a keyword-rich internal linking structure. For example, if you are a law firm and your number one keyword is “Huntsville injury lawyer,” then you should have lots of links throughout your site pointing back to your home page that incorporate that keyword.
Next, make sure you systematically build up a heavy catalog of external links to your site. And spread it out. If you do reciprocal linking, that is fine, but that should not be your only linking strategy. Submit articles to article directories. Add your site to general directories. Look for lots of places for your links, and add new links regularly.
Also, we have seen some evidence that Google may now be giving preference to sites that have been updated recently. So if you don’t do a blog, set one up! Stream or publish it to your blog and update it regularly. Pepper your blog with keywords, links to your own content, as well as useful content from other web sites.
In other words…if you want to maintain or improve your search engine rankings, stick to the basics! It would also be an excellent idea to mix in some social media marketing, but that is another discussion.
Updating Twitter with TweetLater and TwitterFeed
The deeper we dig into the Twitter world, the more different ways we are finding to take advantage of it. I (this is Jerry) have to admit that I am much more intrigued by Twitter than I am with Facebook. I have yet to really realize the benefit of Facebook, although admittedly part of it is that I just haven’t put that much effort into it. Part of it is time. I do all of our social media work, and after taking care of our clients, I have fairly limited time for self-promotion. But it is also that I just don’t “get” Facebook like I get Twitter. Twitter is an incredibly simple concept, yet remarkably powerful in the things you can do with it.
I think the best way for a business to manage a Twitter account is with a combination of automation and manual posting. For automation, my number one tool hands down is Tweet Later. I really can’t do Twitter without it now (the pro version, not the free version which is much more limited in what it can do). However, one issue with using Tweet Later to automate your account is that you pre-program your messages, so the tweets that originate from Tweet Later are not really tied to events actually happening.
That’s why I have started combining Tweet Later automation with automatic posts from TwitterFeed. The purpose of TwitterFeed is to let you stream your own blog to your Twitter account. That is a nice feature, but what I have started doing is creating an RSS feed based on Google alerts, and then feeding that into TwitterFeed to in turn update my Twitter account with news items. So now, my account is automatically updated with a combination of pre-programmed messages about my industry, along with Google news results. And of course I do a fair amount of manual posting as well.
If you are active with Twitter, it can keep your name in front of a lot of people. And if some of those people like what you have to say and start retweeting your messages, then there is a powerful viral effect.
I have devoted many hours the last few weeks to a study of Twitter. If you would like to learn along with me, I invite you to check out my blog devoted to the subject, The Twitter Marketing Blog, at www.thetwittermarketingblog.com.
Don’t Be Fooled by this Old SEO Trick
Here is a trick of the SEO trade:
To demonstrate your skill in SEO by achieving a very high search engine ranking for a very low competition keyword.
Look, if your site ranks well for a keyword that noone ever uses, have you really accomplished anything? No! My partner relays an interesting story about an SEO “expert” coming in and demonstrating how she could take a particular keyword and very quickly get it ranked number one on Google. Fantastic! Only…the web page she optimized was the ONLY result brought back by Google for that keyword. In other words, there was not a single other web page competing against her page for that keyword.
It is easy to be number one when you have ZERO competition!
So don’t be fooled by this trick. SEO is not easy. It’s not quick. And it’s not cheap. If you want your web site to rank for keywords with no competition and no traffic, you don’t need an SEO firm. You can easily make that happen yourself. But if you want to rank highly for competitive keywords that may actually drive targeted traffic to your web site, then you need to be prepared for war.
Social Media: Walking Down a Hallway with Lots of Doors
There is a classic business metaphor that associates being in business with walking down a hallway with lots of doors. Just walking down the hallway (the state of conducting some kind of business) will reveal opportunities that you could not see until you walked down the hall. In other words, moving forward with some kind of business plan will cause you to meet people and come upon situations that may change the course of your business. That is fine, however, because it means that you are recognizing opportunities that you would not have seen if you had not taken action.
The concept of using social media to promote your business falls very nicely in line with this idea. Sites like Facebook and Twitter will allow you to make a social (sort-of) connection with many people you would not have otherwise known. And that is where opportunities come from. The more involved you are with these sites, the better your chance of using them as a tool for opportunity creation.
However, your chance of creating opportunity is better if you focus your friend/follower generating activities on those with some type of connection to your industry for geographic market. For instance, a bankruptcy lawyer in Memphis would be well served to follow and be followed by residents and business owners in Memphis. When one of those people needs help with a bankruptcy issue, they will know who to contact.
It is also necessary to keep your eyes open. If you operate your account in such a way as to get as many friends or followers as you can but you never read what those people have to say, you will not be aware when the possibility arrives to offer assistance or propose business alliances. If the number of people you follow is small, then you might be fine just using the default twitter interface. However, as your accounts grow, it can quickly become difficult to keep up with what is going on. Therefore, it is highly advisable to use a software solution to help you manage your social media accounts.
There are several on the market, and I have spent time finding a solution that works well for me. It would be a good idea for you to do the same. The one I like the best is TweetLater (http://trytweetlater.com), which automates many functions of managing a Twitter campaign, such as posting tweets, sending direct messages, and searching for new relevant users to follow. A good application for just keeping up with what people are saying is TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com), which lets you view your Facebook friend updates and Twitter follower updates in the same interface.