SEO Expert, Evangelist and SEO Consulting Services - Tony Adam

This is a continuation post as a follow up to Blogging for Customers, not Dollars. I felt this was important for corporations and in-house talent to look at when writing a blog. Sometimes we tend to think about a blog as a way to push products, which is what I talked about previously. The truth is, this is o.k. to do, but ONLY as part of your blog content.
Being at a large organization, you are already at the advantage of having a following, your blog will benefit from this. You want to make sure that you are keeping your readers interested. Continuously blogging to your users only about changes to the company or new products, etc. are a way of losing readers and interest.

Swinging to a more positive note, you need to start thinking of your blog as the “Thought Leader” for an industry. There are many ways to do so and it will dramatically improve readership and reach. People expect this out of a large company that is an industry leader already, so, being that thought leader that I speak of, will really set you at the top.

Pay attention to the industry: Listen for what people are looking for. If identity theft and security on the web is a big part of your industry, then use that to your advantage. Write an article about how it applies to your company and how to prevent it, or something along those lines.

Don’t spam: As I mentioned above, do not…and I’ll say this again…DO NOT write solely on new products or what your company id doing. This is boring, tends to decrease interest, and looks to much like an advertising tool.

Write great content: By paying attention to the industry, you know what your readers are looking for. This is crucial info, now go out and apply it. Write articles about the industry, keep people informed of the industry news, etc. Then, every so often, you can write an article that is great and increase visibility.

Linkbaiticize: As apposed to publicizing, you want to write great content that leads to great link bait. Also, get to know the top evangelists, sites, etc. around your industry in the blogosphere. Hopefully they will pick up your article and maybe even submit it to digg/reddit/etc. user that could submit your story is another way to increase readership. Doing this and getting this kind of traffic is of course, one of the best ways to increase your blogs overall ROI. The amount of in-links and subscribers alone is worth the time and money invested, then you have the users that actually follow through on product specific blogs and convert into real $$.

Keep it Fresh: Don’t stop there, continue to fire away and keep content fresh. Stagnant content will lose readers…so keeping it up to date will keep people interested and looking for more.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to follow the 5 rules above about being an industry thought leader. There is definitive ROI through the amount of link popularity, subscriber-ship, and readership that is gained through Social Media. All that, plus, conversion and click-throughs to product subscriptions, etc. that could quite possibly lead real dollars.

Here are some good resources to check out for an understanding of the power of social media are:
A Visual Tour Through the Basics of Social Media Marketing by SEOMoz
SEO Book Bloggers Guide to SEO

Since going back to Los Angeles in August, I have noticed a craze in the frozen yogurt industry. To be more specific, the number of places opening up and doing “Italian Frozen Yogurt” is unbelievable. They are popping up on every corner like Starbucks in the 90’s and Sushi restaurants shortly after. This craze started in 2005 and is going quite strong.So, pinkberry opened its doors and the fludgates opened right up. People crowding in the stores, lines out the doors. My trip had me visiting the pinkberry in Pasadena, CA with my sister and was I in for a shocker. I had no clue the madness behind it all, a 30 minute wait, just for frozen yogurt?!

Truthfully, it was worth it at the time and I would probably do it again. It lived up to the hype and was actually amazing. So much so, that I started LOOKING for places similar in the San Francisco Bay Area, to which I ran across absolutely nothing. Now, it is understandable that the Los Angeles and New York area would be the ones to start the trend and have it grow like it has.

Now that we know how much people like it, there is also many new stores popping up and trying to compete in the now, ever so popular frozen yogurt market. Although Pinkberry is under much scrutiny for “not really being frozen yogurt.” Apparently a lawsuit has been filed to debunk the mystery behind the recipe and ingredients, yet they still keep it quite a secret. See Eater LA article)

And the buzz goes on, publicity is running rampant and it is being talked about on radiostations, blogs, tv, old media, new media…you name it…it’s getting buzz and attention. Since being in L.A. in August two new “italian frozen yogurt” stores have opened in my home town and I am sure TONS have opened all over Los Angeles.

So, will the trend continue?? Is pinkberry the hottest company of 2007 moving into 2008?? Henry Schultz, founder of Starbucks, seems to think so, as his venture capital firm invested $27.5 million according to CNN Money.

We will see where the trend goes, for now, the lines continue to be long and the yogurt, ever so good.

Many companies completely forget to include the following viral strategies or they are simply looked over. The sad truth is that these strategies are almost always EXTREMELY simple to implement.

1. Add to Favorites: One of the easiest tools and effective tools for getting people to come back to your website. There are typically pre-written scripts or scripts easy enough to implement. A must have to start with…

2. Recommend / Email to a friend: Not allowing your customer a route sending your website off to his friends or co-workers could lead to a major amount of lost opportunities. Make sure that you have some form on allowing customers to recommend, and definitely make sure it is EASY.

3. Add to Del.icio.us: Although this is not as easy as the first two, with today’s age of social media and how much it is used, it is crucial to getting recurring site traffic, almost as much so as “Add to Favorites.”

4. Share on Facebook: Customers and site user’s are spending more and more time on Facebook and giving them the ability to share stories, articles, landing page’s, etc. on their profile can get you some major traffic and conversion.

5. Social Media Madness: Other than the above listed items, social media is your friend. If you are a blog or publisher network, then add items like “digg this” or “submit to netscape” and even things like google bookmarks.

Giving your customers and/or users an opportunity to pass the word along and keep coming back to your site can only be an advantage to your overall success. Obviously you don’t want to over do it, with links ALL over the place and scattered that it would drive someone insane. Just make sure that you are giving people the opportunity to spread the word.

Really understanding the value of good links and viral marketing seems to be a common struggle for many companies. This being the case, it is very easy for these companies to lose out on a lot of opportunities for link building or even linkbait types of opportunities. Capturing links through a means of viral traffic and linkbait is critical to becoming a leader in a specific industry or even a niche within it. Also, if done correctly, this can put you in a position to rank highly or even at the top of most SERP’s.

One of the things that I have found is that organizations completely disregard that everything link-worthy is hosted on their company domain. Creating knowledge-bases or tools that your organization will be using or distributing to various partners are great sources of traffic generation, and it doesn’t end there. Not only can you direct traffic to your domain, but talk about a major viral method of increasing your link-authority.

Creating these tools, knowledge bases or anything of that sort really gives you that edge over your various competitors. It is highly critical though that you ensure a few things are in-line though:

1. First and foremost, ensure that you are creating this tool within your companies domain.  It is massively important that this traffic is being driven to your domain from not only a user perspective, but from an SEO and link building one as well.
2. Appropriate naming and Keyword Research:  You know the space that you are competing in, you know your competition and you obviously know that industry if you are creating a tool of some sort.  Now, make sure you use that knowledge to distribute those links to partners/customers/etc.
3. From a design perspective, you need to ensure that people don’t get the message that you “overly advertising” your product.  You are creating this to drive traffic and become a leader.  For example, do not use your current web templates for this and your XXL logo.  You can subtly brand the page to your company’s liking, just ensure that you are creating a RICH user experience for everyone linking to it, not just you.

Once you incorporate the previous items into the thought process of your tool or what not, you will notice tremendous results.  Many financial organizations do this well with “rate calculators” of some sort.  This can really apply to any industry with any content or tool.  Just ensure that you are doing so correctly, creating linkbait for others to pickup and virally spreading your message!!  You can even do this in a consumer directed and social media type of campaign, but make sure you follow the rules and you will watch your tools spread like wildfire and your rankings on the SERP’s increase at a rapid pace.

I really want to focus right now on how to focus blogging on not dollars, but your customers. So, to start, I want to tell you what this WILL NOT be about: Blogging to Make Money, Blogging to be an expert and Blogging for leads. The reason I am putting this out there is to really focus on how to blog to interact with customers/end users.

In the interest of who does a good job of this, we can look at a couple companies that do a great job of doing this. Microsoft does this with channel 9 and Google does this constantly with their plethora of product blogs.

Really customers need to be kept in the loop of what products and services you are offering and how to make your customer feel like you care (granted, you truly should care, but thats a whole other post!). By doing this, you are connecting with those out there and giving them value.

Another real major item of interest is allowing users/customers to really take part in the planning and discovery of great product features. Keep your users/customers really involved in your planning, product and company or organization. This will leave them feeling like they have some sort of stake in the company and feel as if they are truly apart of the company.

Finally, in closing, make sure that you are ensuring involvement from the community. Your users, your customers, and even complainers will give you a ton of feedback through through blog comments or emails after blogs are posted. Allowing them to get involved will definitely resonate well with them and you will have REAL hard data from customers that now feel like they have a PERSONAL stake in the organization.

After receiving a book about Creating Customer Evangelists, I was inspired to re-visit a post I had written a while back on the new generation of Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM), Viral Marketing and Evangelism.

Currently we live in a very technological and extremely different world than even as little as a 2-3 years ago, let alone a decade. It seems as though the traditional marketing years are losing their dominance rather quickly. Although, it is true, the traditional marketing strategies will never go away. The question we really need to ask ourselves is difficult as we are individuals from all sorts of groups, such as marketers, advertisers, search marketers, SEO experts, evangelists, etc. etc. So, what is this difficult question that I speak so highly of?

Where is marketing going?…and..Who are the real evangelists?

This question has really to deal with a couple major techniques and I will explain this. But, really, we are talking about Word of Mouth Marketing, Viral Marketing and Customer/User Evangelism at it’s best.

I’ll start with an example. Let’s look at digg.com. The site is a breeding ground for open source evangelists that are really technologists at heart. This is a prime example of viral marketing strategies that are really driven by the customer. Well, in this case open source software, it would really be the user.

Another example with digg.com, is Apple. Apple’s customer base is really expanding at a dramatic pace. Yes, they do have those extremely comedic commercials on TV and traditional marketing techniques, this much we know. What I want to delve into is the number of evangelists they have developed around the world that continuously tell others about their products. I’ll even give you a personal example, anyone that asks me whether to buy a Mac or PC, I recommend the Mac. This is an example or word of mouth marketing and customer evangelism at its best.

So, why is this important to the rest of us and why is this important to marketers?

Well, the answers to these questions are quite simple. We need to learn as marketers and brand marketers to really build around our customer base. Create an outlet to ensure that our customers are becoming evangelists for our organization. Just like the traditional marketing tactics, we will not see an end to internal company evangelism roles, this is in-escapable. There is though a great opportunity, now, more than ever, our customers, employees and clients are becoming evangelists and marketers on our behalf. Thus, we are enlisting volunteers to speak highly about your company’s products and services without any internal campaigns or effort.

So, we have address the what’s, the who’s, the why’s. But, really, how do we get this done and how do we execute on this.

Truthfully, the answer is right at your fingertips. As I mentioned above about Apple and digg.com. Find out where your users/customers are going and doing and really ensure that they have an avenue to speak highly of you. Creating catchy and sticky products and campaigns will also give your customers an opportunity to spread the word. Learn your social media sites and how you can use them to your advantage.

From a search engine optimization and/or marketing standpoint, you can use blogging to increase rankings and readers. Most people really relate blogging to blogging for dollars, but in this case, blog for your brand. Ensuring that your blogging is very well optimized for word of mouth and viral techniques, like email this, digg this, share on facebook, etc. is highly critical. Gives your brand a massive growth opportunity without you even lifting a finger. Make this all highly accessible and let your customers spread the word for you, because, like the saying goes, “If you build it, they will come.”