SEO Expert, Evangelist and SEO Consulting Services - Tony Adam

I have been inundated with communities over the last couple years and recently it has been almost the only thing I am working on lately. I have learned so much about managing volunteer groups, creating an offline community of web geeks called “San Francisco Geek Dinners,” and in consulting roles.

There are many methodologies that I have learned over the past couple years and I am even learning all different forms daily by being thrown into it. What I find extremely intriguing is how there is no two communities or groups that function in the exact same way. This can take form in the shape of an online community that deals with technology or even travel, a group of people to manage within an organization, or a community of individuals in the offline sense, like a meetup.

So, the question remains, how do you deal with this? I truly don’t have the smoking gun nor will this article answer this all for you. Rather, I think this will get you on the path of thinking about how your unique community needs to be managed and/or gain traction. All communities have a set of common practices that are apparent within them.

Define a purpose and show you care about the community

Define the reason that the community exists and show that you really care about the community. Put some effort into this by putting a lot of grass roots effort into the planning and growth of the community. This gives the members and users of the community the sense that you are vested in the welfare of the community, which you truly are. Moving forward, the next steps are to engage community members and start having conversations with them, once again, both online and offline. Make members or volunteers feel like they have an opportunity to be involved in the overall success of an online community or organization. An example of this is as simple as providing a feedback link on your website that allows members/users to provide feedback on features, updates, or bugs that they run into. Other things that you can do is send out polls or surveys on user experience or features.

Things that I have done in the past is create user polls about new interfaces or more recent internal teams for naming conventions. Within the SEO community I have seen a number of people sending out polls/surveys about details for events as well.

Building momentum and keeping it going

Momentum is also a huge factor and keeping that momentum going is very hard to do, but once you have it, do not lose it! If you get some steam behind the community or group members, there is a great chance they will ride that momentum and want to get more involved. This is easier said than done though, as I am sure you can attest to if you have run or built a community.

Creating events and meetups for your online community is a great way to get the members or users together and even invite others to the event, thus creating Customer Evangelists for your community. Something else that you can do to create momentum is to create participation and conversations, which I will get to in a second.

On the offline community side, I have to admit, I had some great momentum with the first two dinners for San Francisco Geek Dinners. But, because I have not been able to stick with it but hope I can re-energize the momentum with the group. Granted, this is not an online community that I am working on, but, it shows that if you miss a beat with a community, you can instantly lose momentum and traction.

Creating Participation and Conversations

Just like I mentioned above throwing events is a great way to build momentum, but also a great way to start getting people involved in becoming an Evangelist for you. Members, will typically bring others along and hopefully get them involved in the community as well.

Also, give people the opportunity to volunteer and get their hands on something that they will make them feel like they are contributing. This can be as small as making recommendations or bring community involvement into the overall decision making process. Create a location for users to get together and discuss issues they are facing, let them talk it out, moderate it a bit, and you have create a think tank of your own for your community.

While building an online community, you want to ensure that the participation is staying put on your domain. Polls, survey’s, events, etc. are a great way of getting the community together. Ensure that your online community has a lot of sticky features that make it easy for people to be a Customer Evangelist of your online community. Do this by giving users all the “social/viral” features that they can use to pass things on to friends, collegues and family. Many community members want to be the first in on the news, to report it, get in touch with people, etc. From an Online Reputation Management standpoint, if you give users the opportunity to talk to you or provide feedback, it will prevent them from creating flame posts or sites about your community or brand.

Bottom line, Encourage the online community to be just that, an online community that allows people to participate and have conversations with each other.

Incentivise the community

Finally, you can create participation channels, but sometimes we all need or want an incentive to make things happen. They also give people the feeling of being rewarded, and we all enjoy knowing that we are appreciated for the hard work that we do.

In an offline community, ask the members if someone wants to run the event/meetup and I can guarantee you that there will be someone that is interested in stepping up. Empowering someone to step up and leave his/her mark on the group can be priceless. Create contests that give users/members a chance to win prizes. An example of this can be creating a twitter account for your community and asking everyone to follow you and that the 100th, 200th, etc. will win a free iPod Touch, or something along those lines.

Where do we go from here?

I think it is very apparent and we all know that we have already moved into an era of the online culture. But, that does not mean that we cannot build or leverage an offline community to help the online community or vice versa. Yes, that sounds a bit confusing, but there are commonalities between the two that can be important in building your online community like creating conversation, participation, etc. Overall, you want the community to be sticky and get members and users to become Customer Evangelists for your community.

Evangelism about SEO in an organization and spreading the word in a “grass-roots” sort of way is something that is very hard to do. I always think about it and get excited over the fact that I can make a difference and become a “thought leader” for an organization. The truth is, the evangelism of SEO within a traditional organization or small business can be painful.

I’ve been faced with this a couple times at organizations and while sometimes it is great and can lead to tremendous success, other times, it ends up just being a painful battle without any change.

So, basically I wanted to run through some of the things that I have done to try to get people excited about SEO and Search Marketing. I would call it by “Top 5 tips for SEO Evangelism,” but I don’t want to seem to cliche. (Oh darn, I already did!)

TALK TO PEOPLE! - This is by far, the most important rule that I have given myself. Get people in the know about SEO. (excuse my cliche sounding rhyme’s!…lol). Bring up topics going on in search, throw out numbers about how search is growing in popularity. SEOMoz does this well by putting quotes from well known articles on their homepage, these are things that you can total mention to people within your organization and hopefully build buzz. The main goal and hopefully you can get this going is to have people talking about SEO/SEM to each other.

Baby Steps - On the marketing and creative side we tend to see a lot of “ownership” around pages. They don’t want major changes to be made. So start with small things like meta tag, title tag and page naming changes in that could help certain keywords without changing your messaging or content.

Web Standards - Work closely with your web development teams to get better at coding. WATCH OUT THOUGH, YOU BETTER KNOW YOUR STUFF! Do not attempt to make it an attack. Evangelize it, that is what this is all about, spreading thoughts, knowledge and wisdom to other teams for the overall good (sounds like i am trying to save the world a bit??). Anyway, to get to the point, you basically want to get people thinking they should be standards compliant, ensuring the design elements are CSS based and that your HTML is read like a document. This allows for better site crawlability and your HTML will be read better by spiders.

Make Suggestions - Take a risk and go out on a limb by putting in thoughtful input whenever possible. Some things I have done with this is made statements in meetings about the amount of searches there are for a certain keyword or phrase that we could be capitalizing on.

Use Analytics to your advantage - This will help put everything together. Give you an unbelievable amount of data to take back to your colleagues and counterparts. Oh and guess what else this gives you?! We all know that the “Big Wigs” like seeing the numbers quickly and to the point, so this is a great way to evangelize your successes, no matter how BIG your “big wig” is.

Now that you have my secret and effective list of evangelism for SEO, you better put it to good use!! Spreading the word and starting a movement of sorts around will definitely help spread the word about SEO, building better sites, with a better user experience and great content.

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.

Todd Friesen for Search Engine Land wrote an article on this and it was, in my opinion, a great article. Many people like to “de-value” SEO and talk about how its a world full of lies and people like Jason Calacanis making all these accusations.

This article is a great depiction of the hard 5% of SEO:
SEO Is Easy? Let’s Look At The Hard 5 Percent

Yesterday night I had a conversation with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in a long time and it has inspired me to write a post about networking. I have found that over the last couple years and as I get older, how powerful and valuble networking really is.

I have attended conferences and networking events since around 2002 and never really found value in this until around 2004. Granted, I was just barely learning the ropes and very “green” at the time, but I had no idea the value of networking almost 5 years ago. I was sent to many vendor related events, many conferences and such, my focus was to try to solicit business for my company at the time. What I didn’t realize is how important it was to build my network of people that I knew and stay in touch with them.

Fast forward to now and the last year or so. I have been trying to attend conferences, networking events, meet-ups, meet and greets, and even inter-company related events. I have goals of attending these events, sometimes its for knowledge and almost always it is to expand my network.

Okay, so it is question time…Why are these events are so useful?!

Answer: Expanding your network is absolutely critical to your future successes, no matter what they be.

Chatting with my friend last night I really stressed the importance in this. Building your networking and laying a foundation for your own personal brand is extremely empowering, at least, in my eyes it is. Obviously, if you are young and shy, that is absolutely normal, but give it a go and try it out.

You might say to yourself, “well, I am still in school” or “I am just starting out.” The truth is, typically people are very understanding and you never know the value you might have until you actually talk to people. I use to be this guy until 2004. I attended multiple events in which I didn’t have a card, I didn’t save the cards and I didn’t keep in touch with those I met. To this day, I think of the relationships I could have maintained and wish I would have.

Of course, being the geek that I am, I will bring in “LinkedIn” and the social media aspects of it into play. Finding a place to stay in touch with people, use it as a “next-gen rolodex” and keep people updated of what’s going on in your world is highly crucial. It all goes back to building your personal brand.

LinkedIn has been a lifesaver to me because I am able to maintain a contact list that is literally in real time keeping me updated with the happenings of the people in my network. Also, not that I am advocating buying a business account, but, business users are able to expand their network through features like introductions, in-mail, etc. Being able to connect with people outside your everyday network or someone that you would never really meet is just one more touch-point in your personal growth.

Truthfully, in the end, it’s all about the relationships you make and maintain, bottom line.

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.”

SEO has lately been a plethora of information about Linkbait, tricking engines, social marketing and such and I wanted to post something in my mind that really takes me back to what got me into SEO, using my creative side and copywriting for the search engines.  After all, I still believe content truly is king.

These may or may not impact your overall SEO performance intentionally, but it will increase conversion and possibly indirectly affect your rankings in the SERP’s.  Here are a few factors that I have found to be HIGHLY important when writing good content or copy:

1.  Talking to your customer:  This really has the least desired significance from an SEO perspective, but is still highly critical.  Your copy should really put your customer or reader in a situation where they feel like you are talking directly to them in a “1 on 1″ style conversation.

2.  Be Consistent:  Maintaining a level of consistency with your page copy is going to lead you in the right direction.  Maintain a consistent theme, ensure your crucial keywords and key phrases are being called out and stand out.  You can throw a bold/italics/underline tag in there to make it stand out to the user and even the search engines.

3. Markup, Markup, Markup: As mentioned above, throw some tags in there to mix it up and have content that sticks out.  Use custom CSS to create sexy header text and give the search engine’s more visibility into key phrases.  Be creative in the way that you do things, but, DO NOT SPAM!  If you spam, you won’t gain conversion, which goes back to being consistent and talking to your customer.

4. I said I wasn’t going to talk about links, I can’t help it!:  Another way that you can be creative with your markup is not just by marking up your phrases, but also, linking to internal pages within your site.  This will really give you an opportunity to really get some attention with SE’s.

5.  Having a Call to Action & Being Persuasive:  So, you’ve talked to your customer, you’ve maintained consistency, you’ve got the SEO stuff out of the way, now how do I sell?!  Well, maintaining all of the above will get you part way there, but having a really persuasive call to action will really help you convert customers and readers.  Overall, that is your main goal, conversion, so ensure that you are really taking control here and throwing all your creative juices in this basket.

Some of this must be quite obvious to the seasoned folks, and even to myself, but it is very nice sometimes to remind yourself and bring yourself back to the basics.  Especially since in my mind, when it comes to good marketing at all, Content is always king.

I was going through my recent newsletters and blogs today when I came across an article about the battle between the two.  Personally, I do not think there is a debate and it is almost irrelevant to compare the two.  It is like comparing apples and oranges.  I mean, truthfully in the end one can aid the other, and depending on the funding that your organization has for marketing and advertising purposes, you should be doing both.

Granted, there are some points that you can use to determine which option that you should spend more time on when first starting out and what not.  Generally though, I find there is no good reason to use one without the other.

An example of how to use SEO and PPC together is by using PPC in order to ramp up your SEO traffic though brand awareness.  So, what do i mean by that and what does that mean in general?  I have heard from customers and other contacts’ customers using both PPC and SEO say they used the site because they saw them in both sponsored and “regular” (obviously organic in our eyes) results.  Basically, this is just adding validity to your company.  E.G. you are ranked highly for “home loans” in both sponsored and organic listings in the SERP results, people think of your brand as “The Home Loan Guys.”  Yes, this is a very casual approach no doubt, but still very true in many ways.

Finally, i’ve also witnessed high PPC listings as a way to help you start boosting and ramping up your SEO efforts through both link building, page views, etc.  It is a trial and error process that does work for some and not for others, but there is no sense in putting no effort into it, you never know what you are missing out on until you give it a shot.