Archive for the ‘search engine marketing’ category
The Competitive Mindset Online Versus Offline
I’m a big fan of books like Think and Grow Rich and The Science of Getting Rich. I like that mental success stuff. Regardless of how much credence you give to the idea that one’s mind can influence external events, you can’t deny that your chances of success in business are better if you have a positive, optimistic outlook.
In The Science of Getting Rich, written about a hundred years ago by Wallace Wattles, one of the main ideas is that the competitive mindset works against you. A more productive mindset is one in which you assume that demand for your products or service is unlimited, so there is no reason to be in a competitive mindset. Don’t worry about what your competitors are doing. Just run your own business, providing the very best service possible, confident that there are plenty of customers.
I like that mindset. It’s a very self-empowering approach. Rather than sitting around worrying, just keep your nose to the grind and work harder. In this lousy economy, that is absolutely the best way to think.
HOWEVER…
The world in which I conduct most of my day-to-day business is the online world, and here, unfortunately, the same rules don’t apply. Here is why:
The amount of search engine traffic that is relevant for a particular web site is limited at any given time.
For example, if you sell Nike running shoes on your web site, at any given moment, there are only so many people searching online for Nike running shoes. So, by definition, it is not a situation with unlimited demand; demand is fixed by the number of people performing those searches. So if you want that traffic, you have to FIGHT FOR IT! You are definitely in competition with all the other web sites that sell Nike running shoes. Either your web site has high search engine visibility or it doesn’t.
The online competitive mindset has to be one focused on competition. If you don’t do everything you can to position your web site to be seen by the people searching for your products, then they will see your competitors’ web sites and buy from them.
So…in the real world, demand is unlimited. Online, demand is very limited, which requires a different mindset.
Need help with your online marketing? Call me. I’m Jerry Work. My office phone # is 615-263-2811. Or you can email me at jwork@workmedia.net.
Sometimes You Just Wanna Be Anonymous
In general, our intention with online marketing is to get as much exposure as possible. However, in the course of doing that, we set ourselves up for failure. How? By being considered overly aggressive by the people who run the sites we depend on to help us spread our marketing message and generate links to our web sites. This can lead to being labeled a “spammer” and being cut off.
So when it comes to submitting content to various web sites, you really want to be anonymous to the web sites themselves.
How do you do this?
With proxy servers. A proxy server allows you to mask your IP address by doing your work under a different IP address. If your IP address changes when you submit web sites and do various other things, it becomes much more difficult to track you. As far as most web sites are concerned, when your IP address changes, you’re a different person. Strange, I know.
There are online proxy services that allow you to do your web surfing and other things through an interface that changes your IP address. And many search marketing software packages allow you to work under different IP addresses. If you are going to be really aggressive distributing content online (like we are), then this is a technology you need to utilize.
Of course, you can always just call Work Media and we’ll do the work for you.
FYI, here are a couple of sites we have set up on the subject of print on demand publishing:
http://www.freewebs.com/printondemand
http://www.zimbio.com/Print+on+Demand
New Law Firm Internet Marketing Book
We just finished our latest book, The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book, and have created a new page to buy the book on our law firm Internet marketing web site:
http://law-firm-internet-marketing.net/the-law-firm-internet-marketing-book.asp
This book is highly targeted toward the legal industry. If you are responsible for the promotion of a law firm web site, you should definitely check this book out. Currently, it is only for sale via digital download in PDF format, but in a couple of weeks it will be for sale on Amazon.com for those of you who prefer a hard copy.
Some of the topics covered by the book include:
Keyword research to identify the keywords that people are using to search for the legal services you offer.
On-page optimization to rank highly for your target keywords.
How to use blogs and the SEO content cycle to create huge amounts of content to link to your site.
Using social networking sites like Squidoo and StumbleUpon to promote your web site.
Using social bookmarking sites to improve search rankings.
Creating your own informational site to guide the search engines to links you want them to find.
How to create XML sitemaps to make sure the search engines find all of your web pages.
How to perform keyword research specifically for pay per click.
How to manage your pay per click accounts to generate the maximum number of leads for your marketing dollars.
How to write pay per click ads and landing pages that get results.
Specific pay per click strategies for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.
How all the pieces of search engine marketing fit together.
This is a book based on real-world strategies that Work Media uses to promote our clients.
Guide the Search Engine Spiders with Your Own Information Hub
You should consider building a new web site separate from your main site that functions as an information hub for your industry. You can use RSS feeds to dynamically create much of the content for the site, which will save you the effort of trying to manually updating it with new links or articles. So why would you want to take the time to do such a thing?
There are a few good reasons, but the one we are most interested in is this: to have a means to guide search engine spiders to other web sites that rank to your main site, without linking directly to them from your main site.
The reason you would want to guide search engine spiders in this way is so that you do not end up with nothing but two-way links, but you also want to make sure that other web pages that contain links to your site are found. There is certainly a good chance that Google (or whoever) will find all those links on its own, but why not make it easy and point right to them?
To really take this strategy to the next level, you should give your new site, the information hub, its own IP address so that there is nothing tying the sites together. But even if you don’t do that, it is still a good strategy because it eliminates cross-linking between other sites and your site.
Another big advantage is that the information hub gives you another opportunity to get your marketing message across. But avoid the temptation to make it just an extension of your web site for purposes of selling your services. It needs to stand on its own as a valuable source of impartial information.
Here are a couple of links with more link building strategies:
http://link-building-strategies.tumblr.com/post/56579067/link-building-strategies-that-really-work
http://www.zimbio.com/link-building-strategies/articles/2/Link+Building+Strategies+Work
Google’s New Automatic Matching Feature: Good for Google, Good for the Advertiser?
Google has a new AdWords feature that is available as a beta trial to certain advertisers. It will probably be rolled out to all users within the next few weeks. The feature is called automatic matching.
Automatic matching is intended to help you capture relevant traffic that you may have missed based on your campaign keyword lists. When it is activated, Google analyzes your account and begins showing your ads for search queries that you have not specified as keywords.
The feature is not supposed to effect any of your existing keywords. In other words, keywords you have set up in your account should not get robbed of traffic in order for the system to automatically display your ads for other keywords. The point is to display your ads for alternate keywords whenever you have budget left over.
This is obviously a good thing for Google because it keeps your ads online for more keywords, which means more clicks and more revenue for them.
But is it good for advertisers?
Maybe, maybe not. You don’t really want to relinquish control of your account to Google. That’s asking for disaster. BUT…if you have budget left over every month and would rather have your ads running than not max out your budget, then this is a way to make that happen.
If you have the feature available, and you are currently not spending all of your budget, then you may want to give it a try. BUT…
Watch your numbers, especially your cost per conversion. If your cost per conversion rises to an unacceptable level because of extra money being consumed by automatic matching ads, then you should turn the feature off immediately.
Here are a couple of web pages that contain good information about pay per click placement:
http://www.zimbio.com/placing-ppc-ads/articles/2/Pay+per+Click+Placement+Control+Yes+Follow
Useful New Google AdWords Features
Google has a couple of new features that you should check out. The first is a new keyword research tool that analyzes a supplied web site URL and seed keyword to show keywords that might be relevant for promoting that site (that are not already being used), along with traffic and bid data for each keyword. The main caveat is that you must be an existing advertiser. It’s a great way to instantly generate a list of new keywords for a particular landing page along with the data you need to make decisions regarding what keywords to use and how much to bid. It’s a great tool for advertisers, and certainly a great tool for Google since it will encourage bidding on more keywords.
The URL to try it out is: http://google.com/sktool/.
Another new feature is that Google has increased the number of unique results returned for a query report. These are reports that show you the actual search terms that are triggering your Google AdWords ads. Historically, the reports have always featured line items labeled “Other queries” that contained a large portion of the total queries. Now, there should be fewer results included in the Other queries line and more unique keyword results. This increases the knowledge that advertisers have about their Google accounts, improving their ability to make adjustments based on performance data.
Google is constantly releasing new features. The better you understand these features, the better you will be able to manage your account and maximize your AdWords performance.
Here are a couple more links to pages devoted to the topic of law firm Internet marketing:
http://lawyerwebsitemarketing.wetpaint.com/
Announcing Launch of New Web Site Devoted to Law Firms
We have been working on a new web site, www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net, that is a site devoted to information about using Internet marketing to promote law firm web sites. Law firms spend an incredible amount of money on advertising, including outdated vehicles like large Yellow Pages ads. It is our mission to inform the legal community about ways to better spend their marketing dollars – about how to use the Internet to generate more clients at a lower cost.
The site still needs a few tweaks, but it is there for the most part. It includes an articles page that will grow over time as we write new material. And the site will eventually be heavily optimized in conjunction with an off-site linking/content campaign to build a link catalog. If we can’t actively demonstrate what we do by causing our own sites to rank well, then what good are we?
We love working with law firms. Our co-founder Chris Work has an extensive background working specifically with law firms, having optimized and promoted dozens of law firm web sites. And we are sickened by the scam that is pulled every day in the industry of promoting legal web sites…and that is when a firm gets conned into signing up with a company to promote its site, while that company is also simultaneously promoting web sites for dozens of firms IN THE SAME CITY! We’re not going to name names, but if you know anything about this industry, you know who we’re talking about.
So we are taking a more proactive stance to get into this market and take market share away from the scammers.
If you are responsible for marketing and promotion at a law firm, please call us today at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. We can save you a ton of money over your traditional media, and we will ONLY work for you to reach the top of the search rankings in your city.
Search engine reputation management
We’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about search engine reputation management. This is an emerging trend in the online promotion industry that is going to take on more and more importance in the years to come. Search engine reputation management could be defined as a sub-set of reputation management, the practice of taking steps to insure that your reputation is not tarnished by disgruntled customers or clients. Search engine reputation management is the process of reducing the visibility of search engine results that portray a business negatively.
This is accomplished by purposely positioning other content above the negative content in search engine rankings. Now…this is easier said than done, because as you know, ultimately you have no control over where search engines rank web pages. However, an experienced search engine optimization firm will understand the way pages are ranked well enough to create content that has an excellent chance at ranking highly.
Search engine reputation management can save your business’ reputation and keep the cash register ringing. If somebody is spreading false rumors about you online, you should seriously looking into a search engine reputation management campaign to minimize the damage. Work Media can help you make it happen. Just call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
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.
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.