Archive for August 2009
It’s me, YouTube!
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Knock, knock.
Who’s There?
You.
You..who?
No, not the delicious chocolate drink! It’s me, YouTube!
So, that’s a joke (a very bad one, admittedly), but it’s a joke with a purpose. YouTube has exploded in popularity, from a fledgling startup to a Google funded, viral video launching, internet behemoth of epic proportions.
In fact, YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the internet, right beneath the main Google Search engine. So what gives with the jokes? Many people seem to miss out on this incredibly useful tool because they don’t take it seriously. It’s easy for serious business owners to pass off YouTube as a cesspool of kitten pictures, gag videos, and sneezing panda bears, but remember, YouTube is owned by Google, Emperor of the internet.
A couple of years ago, Google implemented something called the Universal Search. They started blending search results from a number of Google services on their Search Engine Results Page, which includes YouTube. This means that businesses of all niches and sizes can utilize YouTube to grow their internet marketing campaigns.
People seem to have a false perception that marketing on YouTube means creating the next big internet viral video phenomenon. While this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, you can easily create effective YouTube videos that are relevant to your industry without being over the top, or implementing ridiculous online guerrilla marketing techniques.
You can easily take the concept of an online marketing campaign fueled by helpful blog posts and juxtapose the concept with YouTube videos. The next time you create an industry relevant How To article for your flourishing, industry relevant blog, try taking your screenshots and making them into slideshow. You can then create a video, and either narrate it using your soothing baritones, or just add some captions underneath each image.
Create a YouTube account, and in your profile page, make sure you include a link to your website. In each individual video description, you can include a link to a certain page or corresponding blog post if you wish (build those links!).
If you really want to step it up, start a Vlog (video log), and build a web presence using informative video casts. If enough people migrate to your YouTube profile, they will eventually start linking to your profile and your business web page, increasing your traffic and search engine relevance for all the major search engines.
But, the major point is that even if you’re a little shy, or don’t want a lot of transparency into your business, you can supplement your internet marketing campaign with simple, informative YouTube videos, and by linking back to your website, you not only increase your internet relevance, but also provide useful information that will further build your image as a credible source of information for your industry.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Millions of potential quality backlinks and customers….
How are you going to answer the door this time?
SEO Link Building: Forum or Against ‘Em ?
Monday, August 24, 2009
One of the staples of smart online marketing strategies revolves around publishing helpful articles via blog. This is helpful in and of itself, but it serves a dual purpose. Not only are you offering valuable content to your online community, but you’re also getting people to link back to your blog post, and therefore building your linking power (also known as link baiting). Quality links to your website are important for a strong online presence if you’re looking to be seen by the big search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.
So why stop there? In addition to publishing useful content on your blog, you can jump start your online presence by becoming an active part of your relevant online community. You need to start posting in forums.
Let’s be a bit more specific. You need to start posting useful information in communities that are relevant to your website’s niche.
Example: You have a website for your extermination business. You can seek out two types of resources, forums specifically for exterminators to exchange information with other exterminators, and forums where people who are not involved in the industry go to seek help from exterminators.
You’ll want to read the forums rules on posting before you do anything, but after you get an idea of the environment, you can begin reading through the threads and posting opinions, advice, or anything that you think will add to the community. You’ll want to add your website link into your forum signature, so that way every time you post something, you will be adding an external link to your website.
If you find that someone has posted a particular problem or question to which you have a useful answer, try this: Write up a quick informative blog article on the subject, and instead of answering the question directly, submit your article link and tell them that you’ve added a useful tutorial on your blog. Not only will you have a grateful individual on your hand, but they might spread your websites link to other people that could find it useful.
By becoming part of useful communities, you’re serving two purposes. One, you’re building relevant backlinks to your website, and two, you’re building your reputation as a credible source of information in the industry. If you can convince other professionals in your field that you’re a source of relevant information, it will be easy to get your colleagues to give you quality backlinks, the only kind of backlinks that boost your search engine ranking.
Go look through some relevant forums and see how you can become part of the community. Go make some awesome blog posts and start linking to them. In no time, people will start to take notice, and when people start to take notice, so does Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the like. It does an online marketing strategy good.
SEO – Diversification like Mastication: Chew on this!
Monday, August 17, 2009
People often hear buzzwords like SEO, Search Engine Marketing, or Social Media Marketing, and they get excited…really, really excited, even if they don’t know specifically why.
Is it the ability to streamline marketing campaigns? Lower marketing overhead? Precise metrics for ultimate control?
Maybe. But for the most part, people who don’t have much marketing experience hear buzzwords and get excited for one thing: $$$.
That’s okay. Online marketing CAN generate significant cashflow for businesses small and large, but you have to know how to use it effectively. Let’s talk about hitting your target audience via SEO campaigns.
Picking search engine keywords or keyphrases on which to base your online marketing campaign requires finesse and critical thinking. You can’t just brute force traffic to your website. You need to intricately funnel meaningful visitors to your business.
Your Internal Monologue:
Let’s see… I have a home remodeling business. I should optimize for “home remodeling”. It’s brilliant! There are 500,000 searches a day on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! The leads will practically fall into my lap and beg me to take their money!
The Reality:
Generic terms have heavy competition. If you’re hoping to get leads by optimizing for “shoes”, “food”, or “consulting”, then you’re in for a steep learning curve. Yes, these terms probably get a metric ton of traffic, but consider this:
1) Traffic quality is too generic. People could be looking for service industries, informative articles, how to’s, etc. They might not be looking for your service.
2) Competition. Large conglomerates spend millions of dollars on marketing to steal the market share of these generic search engine terms.
What you need to do:
Find your marketing niche. You can apply local terms such as state name, or city name, or even county name. You might think of qualifiers that describe desired types of services, such as “easy”, “cheap”, “fast”, etc. If there are multiple services performed within your business, don’t consolidate them all into one term or phrase. You can comprise your online marketing campaign of a number of different terms or phrases.
Example: Instead of “cleaning”, you might try a combination of “cheap austin maid services”, “commercial cleaning services (area code)”, or “(county name) janitorial services”.
The point is that you can pick a number of search terms that highlight specific facets of your business, and together they can compromise your online marketing campaign. Your SEO can highlight these terms with strong copy writing on your website. While each term might not generate significant traffic on their own, together they can provide a number of leads. This is important not only because it diversifies your online marketing campaign, but the specific nature of the terms ensures that each visitor is a quality lead for your business. If you gather useful information for how people are finding your website via online analytics, you will be able to see which terms are effective, and from there you may adjust your campaign accordingly.
Don’t Let Blackhat SEO Tricks Kill Your Website
Monday, August 10, 2009
Whitehat, blackhat…what does it all mean? No, we’re not talking about pirates. These are both terms that describe different methods of Search Engine Optimization, however, they are very different from each other.
The one similarity between the two schools of SEO implementation is that they both focus on getting your website ranked higher in search engines. However, the means by which they achieve this goal are very different.
While whitehat SEO focuses on methods that legitimately grow your online presence via online marketing in order to make your website more visible and relevant to search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, blackhat SEO focuses more on exploiting search engine algorithms. While this article will not go into technical details regarding the different blackhat SEO techniques for obvious reasons, we will list a couple for the sake of comparison.
One underhanded trick is to put up exact duplicate content of competitors websites in an attempt to get them blacklisted by search engines. Blackhat SEO also focuses on building “spam” type links wherever they can. These are not quality backlinks, but spammed messages thrown out in hopes someone will include them on their websites. These links are often on pages that are totally irrelevant to the linking site’s business. Keyword stuffing is exactly like it sounds, the practice of ignoring good internet copywriting rules and instead shoving keywords all over your website, sometimes even invisible to visitors, but still searchable by search engine spiders.
These are not online marketing strategies, but internet tricks that blackhat SEO firms use to artificially inflate search engine ranking. Many of these companies claim to get “First Page Google Results Guaranteed” or “Be the First Hit on Bing” and even “Yank your Website to Top Yahoo! Results”.
Any company that claims they can “guarantee” a first page result is either A) lying, or B) using blackhat SEO techniques. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing do not look favorably upon sites who use exploits to garner first page search engine results. The term “Guaranteed First Page Google” doesn’t even make sense. How do they know what keywords or phrases you are marketing for? How do they even know what your business is about before they make these promises?! The minute your website is caught using these techniques, you will become blacklisted by the search engines, effectively killing whatever online business you might have had.
The moral of the story is this: no one can guarantee first page Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or any Search Engine results. Search Engines were created to give people relevant results when they search for information, so when a company can boost a website selling Viagra on the first result page for “Puppies and Kittens,” then you know something wrong is going on.
The only way to guarantee online marketing success is by using time-tested, organic, and search-engine-approved methods to build your website’s online presence. You can do this by:
- Having quality, keyword rich (but not stuffed) content with search engine friendly code, SEO optimized.
- Building as many quality outbound and inbound links to RELEVANT web sites that rank highly for your desired keywords of phrases.
- Using Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other number of analytics programs that will allow you to choose which online marketing campaigns are working, and which aren’t.
When it comes to blackhat SEO techniques, search engines definitely live by the adage “Cheaters never win.” Build your online presence intelligently and correctly, and if you don’t know how…hire a professional.
How to Have “The Talk” with a Website Owner
Friday, August 7, 2009
Whether you’re an SEO guru, a Search Engine Marketing strategic planner, a web design fan, or even just an average Joe, at some point in your life we’ve all been in this scenario:
Person 1: Hey, how goes it?
You: Oh, pretty good, you?
Person 1: Great! So, I read that my small business marketing can benefit greatly from a killer website and SEO campaign, and I made this website in Microsoft Word, check it out!
And that’s when you see it, as if it were a throwback to the very pioneers of web design. Scattered color scheme, horrible graphics, gaudy Flash elements, animated GIFs, etc. Your stomach turns as you struggle to keep your lunch down. You open your mouth to express your displeasure, but you see the person’s enthusiastic smile, awaiting your approval, and you lose the heart to tell them.
After all, they’re on the right track. A website is a necessity for small business marketing, but the website looks terrible. How do you convey this without curbing their enthusiasm? Try this:
“Well, when a business owner and an idea love each other very much, they sometimes have something we call a website. You may have seen a lot of other people deciding to have a website as well, but a website is something to be taken seriously. A website comes with a lot of responsibility, you know. You have to consider things like safe coding for SEO, managing monthly Search Engine Marketing campaigns, usability research, pay-per-clicks, and that’s just the beginning. Don’t get me wrong, a website can be a very beautiful thing between an idea and a business owner, but it has to be done correctly. An irresponsibly created website can lead to poorly transmitted ideas, unwanted visitors, and a bad reputation for your business.”
…okay, well, maybe not that exactly. But, the point is there, and it draws parallels to similar conversations. It’s never an easy thing to tell someone that their website is horrible, or even lackluster, but it’s necessary if they’re ever to improve their website.
A well designed website is a boon to any business. It can provide a starting point for effective SEO, Search Engine Marketing campaigns, Customer Relationship Management, and provide crucial online marketing feedback that can grow your business. A poorly designed website will utterly defame your image and hurt your sales. Not only is it visually displeasing, but it conveys ignorance on the business owner’s part.
The bottom line is that you need to let the people know if their online presence is lacking. The easiest way to do this? Tell them that a business owner knows that it’s a smart idea to hire a professional web designer. It won’t make the talk any more comfortable, but at least you won’t have to do it!
How to Win Links and Influence Google
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
To be perfectly honest with you…
people just don’t want to listen to what you have to say.
Most online marketing is the electronic equivalent of people handing out fliers on the sidewalk. You take it, you smile and nod, throw a half-hearted glance over the material, and then you toss it into the nearest trash can.
Why is this the case, and how can you work around this?
Online marketing is the business of spreading information, but on the information superhighway, it is an abundant and saturated resource. How do you grab anyone’s attention? You offer solutions to their problems. You offer knowledge to thwart their ignorance. You give them something they want.
Yes, brand recognition has its place in online marketing, just like search engine optimization and smart copywriting do, but if you want your information to set the internet ablaze, you have to set the fire with something volatile.
Example:
A well established pharmaceutical company launches a killer online marketing campaign, a full on social media barrage, complete with a hip Facebook page, a suave looking blog, and a Twitter profile to make Perez Hilton jealous. They make a press release announcing a new LOLcat created in their name. Everybody is now within electronic earshot of this company, and they post often via different social networking media regarding discounts and products of their company.
Here comes a newly started pharmaceutical business. With their modest budget, they implement a toned down online marketing strategy. They only have a small website, but it has a blog, and it’s all designed with SEO in mind. They release one, and only one blog article, titled “How We Cured The Common Cold”.
Both companies will receive great brand recognition as a result of their efforts. The large company will build its brand one post, one inbound link at a time, with all their effort going into their killer online marketing strategy. The newer company will simply post their killer content, and let the online community market it for them.
Granted, not everyone can have content as important as a cure for the cold, but everyone can offer solutions relevant to their business. Come up with tutorials, explanations, informative articles for anything important to your industry, market your articles online, and if it is well-written, you can bet people will link to it.
Using an online marketing strategy to offer discounts and build brand recognition is smart, but using an online marketing strategy to establish your presence as an authority in your industry is pure genius.