:Online Marketing

Daniel R. Sweet recently asked for some SEO Help this way:

So, there I was. Innocently driving my car, not thinking about optimizing my website/blog for traffic, when Bill Austin gave me a call.

Dan

We don’t usually explain things like that but we do often fix them.

There are very few trustworthy and authoritative links to that page and none of them use the phrase

“things to do after the interview ”

as the anchor text.

By adding one link in a blog post, using that anchor text, we were able to move the site up by two places on Yahoo for that search term.

Over time, this one post might also influence Google and MSN to increase the ranking of that post in their results, perhaps moving it from #3,593 way up to #687 in the results.

The post might even move a lot higher over time based on that one blog post.

The more links using that anchor text (within constraints discussed elsewhere) the more likely the page is to show up well in the results.

Another couple of blog posts from job and career related sites might be all it takes to move the post onto the front page of Google and MSN for that search term.

That particular phrase does not get a lot of searches and might not be worth a lot of effort to rank well for but it does serve as an excellent example of how this works and how it can be used to increase results for many other search terms that are more sought after by your audience.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are trying to give more value to sites and pages that are written for human beings. When human beings in the form of commentators who are trusted in the community indicate acceptance of the content of a page and concurrence with the nature of the content, additional credence is granted to the subject post, page, site, etc.

In times past, your reputation was all that you had. These days, you have your reputation but you also have a bit of the reputation of everyone who links to you, talks about you, forwards information or links from or about you to others, etc. Trust builds trust, Authority builds authority.

Read more about Trust and Authority here:

T & A of Internet Marketing

Bill Austin
AZhttp, Inc.

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T & A of Internet Marketing

Everybody laughs.

It is an almost universal reaction when I stand in front of a large crowd and declare that T and A are the most important elements in Internet Marketing. I didn’t understand what was so funny about that until I went to Google and entered the search term:

define:”T & A”

… Although I guess that “a Tonsillectomy and a Adenoidectomy performed at the same time” might be amusing to some, I still don’t find that particularly funny.

In the context of Internet Marketing, the term T & A stands for the absolute most important factors in online success, search engine rankings, and converting traffic to results (sales, revenues, profits, brand awareness, etc.).

T and A in the Internet context are Trust and Authority.

In the real world, people want to do business with well-known, knowledgeable (authoritative) and trustworthy people. On the Internet, search engines want to provide results that are useful and worthwhile to searchers and they have injected the elements of trust and authority into that goal. The major search engines seek to generate an estimate of the trustworthiness and authoritativeness of particular pages and web sites.

Trust and Authority can be derived from a number of factors.

Trust can be derived from elements of site design, site structure, site content, age of the domain, Top-level Domain (TLD) of the domain, and from the existence or creation of relevant links from trustworthy sites.

Authority can be derived from the existence or creation of large volumes of authoritative content as well as from the existence or creation of relevant links from authoritative sites.

Both authority and trust can be influenced by the age of links, the age of content, the quantity of links, the quantity of content, the relevance of links, the relevance of content, the context of links, the context of content, the diversity of links and the diversity of content.  It is all about links and content driving trust and authority.

The three L’s of Internet Marketing and the Five C’s of Internet Marketing serve to drive trust and authority and trust and authority influence the major search engines’ ranking algorithms and the results that they serve to the searching public.

Reputation management should be a major part of your marketing efforts.

Both online and offline – your reputation is the key to leads, referrals, sales and profits. Generating real world trust and authority and online trust and authority for your name, your company, and your brands, will go a long way toward making every other part of running your business fall into place.

Compiled into a single article here: Internet Marketing

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The 5 C’s of Internet Marketing

The State Seal of the State of Arizona depicts the 5 C’s that were the backbone of the Arizona Economy back around 1912 when Arizona became a State and for decades later.

The five C’s were what made Arizona towns and communities grow.

School children in Arizona were taught that the five C’s: Copper, Cattle, Cotton, Citrus and Climate were the driving force behind Arizona’s economy.

Likewise, on the Internet there are 5 C’s that are the driving force behind the Internet economy. These 5 C’s define the most critical component of Internet Marketing and the most important factor in creating value and building community, wealth and power in the Internet economy.

Rather than being five distinct items, as is the case with Arizona’s five C’s, the five C’s of the Internet Economy is a simple phrase that completely defines the most important element of Internet Marketing and your key to success in building up your status on the Internet.

The 5 C’s of Internet Marketing are:

Continuous
Creation (of)
Clear
Compelling
Content

Or in active voice:

Continuously
Create
Clear
Compelling
Content

Each word is important.

Continuous means that you must be doing this all the time. You can no longer build a site, throw it out there and expect it to be well regarded and able to rank well on the search engines. Search engines like fresh material that has been updated recently so if you are not putting material on your site on a regular basis, you will not be achieving the true potential of your site.

Creation means that the material you put up on the Internet must be new and unique. It cannot simply be a copy of someone else’s material. It must be new enough that the search engines will not find dozens, hundreds or millions of copies of the same item while they are visiting other sites.

Clear means that the material needs to be well written, easy to understand, grammatically correct, spelled properly, translated by experts if necessary, and as concise and to-the-point as possible.

Compelling means that your material must be important enough, useful enough and understandable enough that people decide that they want to read it or see it, want to read or see all of it, and pass it on to others to read or see. Explosively successful viral marketing comes about as a result of compelling material, as visitors share it with friends, relatives, business associates, etc.

Content means that the material must have substance … a concept similar to the concepts of “mass” and “volume” used in physics. Words are content, text is content, some other kinds of media such as video, audio, and pictures are considered content by some people and will become more like content in the future but keep in mind the famous quote that sums up what is and is not loved by search engines.

“A picture is not worth 1000 words on the Internet.  The information is in the text.”
- Bill Austin

If you create clear compelling content on a continuous basis and you build an environment that makes it easy for people to link to your site and share your site with others, you will find that The 3 L’s of Internet Marketing begin to build and as that happens you will quickly find that the third important element of Internet Marketing begins to build and create the conditions that catapult your site to the top of the search engines.

Compiled into a single article here: Internet Marketing

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The 3 L’s of Internet Marketing

In the real estate business there are three things that everyone knows are the most important three things needed to ensure success in real estate investing.

These three things are known as “The Three L’s” and are as follows:

1. Location

2. Location

3. Location

We all know that there is more involved with real estate success than simply location but if you don’t have a good location, all the rest will not matter.

Internet Marketing has a similar list of three L’s that are just as important to your online success as the 3 L’s of Real Estate are to success in real estate. The three L’s of Internet Marketing are:

1. Links

2. Links

3. Links

Links from other web sites pointing to your site are one of the most important factors in good search engine rankings. Appropriate, natural links from relevant sites within the same topic area as your site will build the value of your site in the eyes of search engines as well as sending interested visitors from the site linking to yours.

Just as in real estate, the three L’s are not all that you need but if you do not have good incoming links from valuable sites, nothing else you do will fix that problem.

Compiled into a single article here: Internet Marketing

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I just returned from the Arizona Entrepreneurs Week conference entitled ”The Revolution in Marketing” that was held Thursday March 1, 2007 in Phoenix Arizona at Grand Canyon University.

Robert Scoble was one of the keynote speakers.  He was enthusiastic, enlightening and entertaining.

The entire conference was focused on blogs and social media and their use in Marketing, Public Relations and online reputation management.  To sum it all up in a few lines:

Listen first.

Listen well.

React quickly to negative events.

This is just the beginning.

…….

As always, I sum it up in ten letters.

3 L’s

5 C’s

T and A ( or T & A )

If you have been to one of my seminars or you have heard me speak on the topic of Internet Marketing then you already know what those ten letters stand for and how important they are.

Otherwise, I will (later) write a post about each of those sets of letters, what they mean, why they are so important, and more about today’s conference after I clean up the mess that being out of my office all morning with no Internet connection has created.

Note:  April 25, 2007 -I finally finished the series and will paste them all together into a comprehensive and authoritative article on Internet Marketing as soon as I get that put together.

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Technorati Profile

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Press Releases – How do you Distribute Them?

There are a variety of ways to distribute press releases.  I know people who write them and then send them to a list of FAX numbers.  Others have a paper (snail mail) distribution list that gets a copy of each press release and a full-blown media kit for every release.  Some people have an e-mail distribution list that they maintain as a text file, in Excel, in a simple database, or in one of the readily available Contact Management System software products. 

People get their media contact lists in a variety of ways.  Some are collected painstakingly over many years in the business.  Some are collected from Internet directories that list media contacts such as this Arizona Media Directory example. In Arizona we also have a company that maintains and sells a “news media directory” called “Finder Binder” FINDERBINDER  that is a quick and easy reference to media outlets in the State of Arizona including Newspapers, Magazines, Radio and Television Stations.  This is an annually printed publication that includes monthly updates and for an additional fee, it can be accessed online.

A more comprehensive method for distributing press releases is the use of the wide variety of wire services.  There are dozens of these services and some of them are worthwhile while others are a complete waste of time and money.

These services usually allow you to publish your press release online and then distribute either the releases or a link to them to reporters who have expressed an interest in the topic of a particular release.  There are some older and highly expensive services that are often used by publicly traded companies to ensure news is distributed at the exact time required by regulations.  For non-public companies, the less expensive and free services can often provide similar or better results at a fraction of the cost.

Some of these services include:

PR Newswire
Market Wire
Business Wire
PR Web
PR Leap
Arrivenet
US Newswire

We have used all of the above services with acceptable results.  We have used a number of other services but have not been happy with the results.  Some of these services leave the press releases online forever while others may remove them within three months of date of issue.  Some of the benefits of online distribution include they are searchable and may be found in news feeds on various sites such as Google News, Yahoo News, and MSN News.  The links you include in your press releases may provide additional traffic to your web site and may help boost the authority of your site in terms of search engine ranking. 

Reporters and web sites seeking news about the topic of your release may pick up the release and distribute it on their sites as well.  One of my clients from the Pacific Northwest was giving a speech in Los Angeles and was approached by someone from the audience who said “I know you, I read about you in the Los Angeles Times this morning.”  The client bought a copy of the paper and sure enough, there was a copy of our latest press release for his company printed word for word as an article.

Please comment to let us know how you distribute press releases and why.

Thank you,

Bill and Kathee at AZhttp, Inc.

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The single most important thing I learned about public relations in the past fifteen years is that most people who are “Public Relations Professionals” have not yet learned and very likely will never learn the importance of their online presence.

These people are doing the same things, the same ways and applying the same old rules to brand new problems which they don’t even grasp the consequences of.

Every press release I read contains the same simple mistakes, the same errors, the same omissions and the same lack of interest in utilizing a systematic process of generating the kind of response, leads, brand awareness and sales that can be generated by appropriate and continuous use of online media.

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