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SEO | Tony Adam - Entrepreneur, Marketer
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Tony Adam

Entrepreneur, Marketer, Aspiring Polymath

SEO

Content Marketing
Holistic Content Marketing Helps All Marketing Channels
January 14, 2016 at 9:06 am 0
  
     
home-office-336378_1920 Content is king. We've been hearing this for years, and, to this day it is still the truth. But, the type of content and mediums to promote it have been different and can vary. But, while I was working with one of our clients on marketing strategy, I realized how important it can be to their business. I like to think about things holistically and how each channel helps each other. I've proven this method to work really well when put to use with clients, companies I've started, and/or advised. As an example, just creating an infographic doesn't mean it's going to drive traffic and awareness. But if you know people are searching for the information included, that bloggers want to use that content, etc. it could drive more than you even expected. Having a holistic plan and more than just a single use for your content can be a huge win for the company. There are many ways this can work. If you're an e-commerce company or retail business moving online, this can go a long way in terms of driving down your blended CPA. As an example, you could be a retail or e-commerce company that sells a variety of name brands or major brands. You might be thinking of how to educate the customer on why they should be Gucci shoes over something like Steve Madden. You might want to do something like"Why high end brands are more cost effective than cheap ones in the long run." (or something a long those lines). While putting the content together you could do some industry research about the longevity of a pair of high end shoes vs. a pair of cheap ones. Doing a full study and putting a few charts together would really help educate the customer. What this also does is creates a relatable and personal feeling for your brand to the online shopper. Writing that post tells them you're looking out for their best interest. Educating the customer here is really the goal and hopefully this post achieves that with the data and facts you've provided. Along with educating the customer, they might have needed that last tip to just convert them to a new customer. Reading the content might have made them go "okay, im sold, I'm here, where do i buy them." Another thing, assuming they aren't ready to purchase just then would be to browse the site for more content or more products, to really validate the brand. Whatever the case, you're providing a resource customers are interested in. Along with customers, bloggers and journalists could be interested in this, promoting this content could lead to multiple people writing about it citing your content. They might not only be interested in it, they might actively be search for this. For example, I might be googling "steve madden vs gucci pricing" or many long tail variations of this. I might be really concerned about spending $500 on a pair of shoes vs. $79 and not truly understand the difference in the craftsmanship and quality. After understanding this, the customer could be sold (as mentioned above). The great part is, by creating this post, you've driven organic search traffic to your site and now you might have possibly converted that customer. Okay fine, that might be a perfect world scenario, but, that isn't the only way to convert them. There are two other methods that could potentially lead to a customer buying from you in a more cost efficient manner. One of those is methods is retargeting. You just got a new user to visit your site through search traffic, them clicking a link in facebook, or a blog post that cites your content. Again, the key here is now this piece of content is already being used in many ways. But, now you've got a visitor to your site, that's being retargeted and will be reminded of your products. Converting this customer over time will be way more cost effective than paying for Adwords or Facebook ad clicks. (that's not to say we don't want you to do them, we highly recommend it as well.) Finally using this content to help email marketing efforts is just another method to help drive new conversions, as well as repeat revenue from existing customers. The first and simplistic thing you can do is have an email / newsletter sign up on your site. The person that came to the site might be so interested in the insightful piece of content you created that they might be interested in more content from you. Also, if they get to site and they find the content interesting but don't take any action, you can have a modal window (aka pop up) appear on the site that could catch their attention, a service like Picreel will achieve this for you. Here is an example of how we've used it on David Kind's Blog (p.s. they are one of my favorite companies!): picreel-signup-david-kind Now that they have signed up, you can continue to market to them over email through a welcome series, newsletter series, and continue to promote content, the brands, offers, etc. from your company. Speaking of that newsletter, the blog post you created, we're coming back to it here because you might have customers that didn't know the difference or would be interested in it. Or people who have signed up to the newsletter or welcome series that have yet to convert. You can highlight this content (or any other content you create, for that matter) within this newsletter and yet again use it to you drive a new conversion or repeat revenue from existing customers. Finally, using services like Taboola or Outbrain, you can use this content and promote it using low cost advertising on a variety of content sites that might be relevant to your brand. An example of this is companies like Harry's or Dollar Shave Club, who I see all the time when I'm reading about one of my beloved Chicago Sports teams. Here's an example of how they use the ads to drive customer awareness and also new customer acquisition: dollar-shave-club-harrys-taboola-ads With all the methods we just listed above, you just drove down your blended CPA. All of this was done with one single piece of content used across various channels and mediums. Now, I know that was a lot to cover, but, think about it. The possibilities are endless with content. So you should be mapping it out and creating an entire content strategy for your business and not just creating blog posts for the sake of creating them. Think about all the different ways you can use this content to drive new traffic, new users, new conversions, new leads, etc. Visible Factors is always here to help when you need a Content Marketing Strategy for your company. And, we'd love to hear your thoughts about content marketing below in the comments.
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Online Marketing
Quickbooks Connect: Growing Your Business Online Presentation
November 4, 2015 at 7:13 am 0
  
     
At Quickbooks Connect I presented on all the available methods to help small business owners grow their business online. I discussed SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Facebook Ads, and Email Marketing.
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Online Marketing
SEO as a core startup marketing strategy
July 20, 2015 at 9:15 am 0
  
     

If you’ve ever started a brand new site, you’ll know that getting organic traffic is extremely difficult. Sure you can buy traffic through Adwords or various other media buys and/or you can use PR to get you spikes. The question I like to ask people is, do you have longevity? Developing a holistic marketing strategy should be your first and foremost priority because it will help guide you every step of the way. It will help you drive the decisions you make about the paid traffic, publicity, and how you use social.

SEO is the “down in the trenches” traffic stronghold you can use as a baseline for traffic efforts.

For some reason, startups (and frankly, all businesses) don’t invest enough in organic search traffic from the beginning because it’s not a priority. I get it and understand it because when I started Eventup, it wasn’t a priority for me either. The most important thing at the time was shipping product, launching the company and iterating.

It doesn’t mean we forgot about it entirely, we still built in some core principles from the SEO strategy I put together. The way we did this was adapting tactics into the product as we built it. As you’re defining the core infrastructure of your site, can you define SEO alongside that? The answer is YES.

For example, let’s look at a case study where we didn’t have the time to think of all the URL variations for getting the site up and running pre-launch. We got it up so we could start signing up venues, start seeding it, and talking about it to friends.

In December 2011 we had 74 unique keywords driving traffic. In February 2012, we updated the URL structure and our long tail traffic went up an order of magnitude (10x) literally. The thing is, we know it was not just because of the launch buzz, because it wasn’t just traffic, it was number of unique keywords driving traffic. This

Putting SEO into Practice

For someone like me, it really isn’t that difficult to get the basic SEO best practices built into the site architecture. I’ve seen the variations for startups and small businesses to high volume sites like Yahoo! Sports to Myspace.

That said, not every startup or company has someone that has spent 10+ years doing various forms of Online Marketing. I figured I would put together some of the stuff that I put together for either businesses I create or clients that I’ve worked for.

Keyword Research (and Assessment)

This should be the first step of everything you do. I know it sucks, it’s tedious, it’s time consuming, but, if you have no idea what your audience, users, or customers will be looking for, you’ll be left in the dark. Developing a solid set of keyword research is essential. Start by thinking of your topic as a whole and asking yourself, what do users search for. My favorite example of this is the automotive space, because, let’s be honest, how many times have searched for “automotive” or “automobile” — that’s right, you haven’t — because people search for “cars”.

I wrote about SEO keyword research 5 years ago and to this day it’s a good starting point for how I do keyword analysis and breakdown what my audience is looking for. Putting this definition together is the core of everything I do going forward in my SEO requirements, definitions, and guidelines for content on the site.

Bonus: For clients, I like to put together an “Assessment” or analysis as well that gives them a breakdown of not only the keywords, but the competition they will face in search (and, only search) and what steps it will take to rank for those keywords. If you have the ability to do this, it can help you make decisions going forward.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO consists of a variety of things like your page structure, the keywords you use in the content of your site, the page meta data, etc. While a lot of these tactics are debated very widely amongst folks in the “SEO Industry” I believe there is one core tenant that will always remain true: relevancy. The pages you create should be relevant to anyone and everyone, and, when a new visitor comes to your site, they should understand EXACTLY what they are looking at. Search engines work in the same way, when they look at a page and see common themes, that page then becomes relevant for that theme, or in this case, keyword or key phrase.

I’ve written an article on Core On-Page SEO principles, but, at a high level, there are a few things that you’ll be building into your site anyway, that you can quick define (and if needed, iterate on) when launching your site.

  • Page Title:Arguably the most important of the on-page SEO elements this is important in defining the relevancy of your page, it’s generally one of the first pieces of content you see in your HTML documents markup and what a crawler will use to define that page. Here is a baseline template I’ve used for Football player names (variations depend on the content/industry):
<title>%Player Name% Stats, News, Highlihts | %Team Name% | %Brand Name%</title>
  • URL:Another element that you’re going to need to create a template for in some way, so, make sure this is very similar to your page title and H1 on the page to create consistent and relevant naming scheme. For URL templates, it really depends but, if we assume the above example:
http://domain.com/nfl/player/%playername-id%
  • Headings:Debated by many but still generally a good practice to have a very well structured set of headings from a semantic standpoint. I will usually have my main keyword in the H1 of the page and sub keywords in the subsequent H#’s on the page. Again, sticking with the same example in the URL and Page Title:
<h1>%Player Name%</h1>

At the end of the day if your Page Title, URL, and Headings are very relevant to one another, you have a good baseline for content. Yes, these are basic SEO principles, but, if you have a page about the “Chicago Bulls” and it is not mentioned in any of those elements, no matter how many links you get or tactics you try, you’re not going to see the traction needed because that page is not relevant.Relevancy is key.

Content Marketing

Start writing content. Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Get WordPress set up as your blog, preferably as a subfolder (e.g. tonyadam.com/blog) or as a subdomain (e.g. blog.eventup.com). Start by writing a blog post weekly. Increase it to a couple blog posts a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Before you know it, you’ll be up at writing multiple posts per week and hopefully daily.

The reason this is important is because you want to be domain relevant for the market you are working within. The more content you create, the more relevant you become for that topic. The more people read that content, the more relevant you become. The more people search for you and that topic, the more relevant you become. If you’ll notice, there is one consistent element here: Relevance. The key is becoming the most relevant around a given topic as a whole. When your domain becomes relevant around a given topic, it is that much easier to rank and drive traffic for keywords related to it.

What do you build into your marketing strategy? Is SEO at the core of it? If not, what is? Let me know on twitter
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Online Marketing
In The Last Year, I Built A Company Without Knowing It
June 10, 2015 at 8:42 am 1
  
     
A little over a year and a half ago I resigned as the CEO of Eventup, the company I founded and loved with all of my heart. I thought my career was over, and I tried to put aside my depression of not turning Eventup into an extremely successful company. I've never failed at what I do -- every situation I had gone into, I found a way to win (i.e. drive growth). This was new and it was hard to stomach for me. But the adversity I went through was a growth experience that I never realized could be so positive. Building Eventup from a concept to a reality in over 12 cities and booking hundreds of events built a lot of confidence. Leaving it was a character builder and humbling experience. I knew I would learn a lot, but, I learned way more than I could have imagined. Overall, you have to look at the positives or you could get caught dwelling in the negatives, so I fought through and remembered all of my favorite things. 1. I met a lot of amazing people. From the investors who were there for me in the process, I can’t thank them enough. Not only for the investment and taking a chance on me, knowing I would give it my all, but also for the advice throughout the process and helping me grow as an entrepreneur. 2. The Eventup team. I loved EVERY, SINGLE, PERSON, that worked at eventup. Through all the chaos in building the company, the trials and tribulations, arguments, and awkward moments, it felt like family and I am truly looking forward to the next time I am able to experience that same joy. I wish I could have done more for the team, but everyone should pat themselves on the back for all the hard work put in. 3. Learning from mistakes. Let me tell you, I made a lot of them. I tried to learn as quickly as possible, but frankly, shit happens. No matter what, know that you’re going to make mistakes and hopefully you can figure out how to correct them as quickly as possible. 4. Growing. I grew so much and learned a lot throughout the process. My ego was fairly big going into it, but I was humbled by all the people much smarter than me who I met along the way.

Moving Forward. Great Things To Come.

As I took my next step, I badly wanted to start building another product, because it’s what I love doing. But, I also wanted to figure out what would make me happy over the long run and how I could be the most successful. Taking time to reflect and think through things helped a lot. As I started to tinker with product concepts and ideas, I had a lot of support, but one after another, people kept asking me to help grow their startups or work with their companies. While doing this, I realized I was founding my next company, a consulting collective called Visible Factors. And, in a little over a year our team has worked with 20+ companies. We’ve helped some amazing companies achieve some great successes. Some examples include helping Luxe launch and increase reservation volumes by over 600% and Grokker has increased their SEO traffic by 500%. Recently it’s been a new experience and total inspiration working with Children’s Hospital LA. (Take a peak at more of our clients and case studies) We started with just SEO Consulting and our team now has the capabilities to fill the top of the funnel with a variety of channels like SEM/PPC, Facebook (web and mobile installs), and content marketing. We’ve also started helping companies re-tool their on-boarding and increase conversion rates, retention rates, and returning customers with conversion optimization. I bring this all up because, just like Eventup, I never imagined how much I would learn and how quickly we could grow. And, again, thanks to an amazing team of people that works together so well, we are doing impactful work with tangible results for our clients. But, nothing clarified it more for me than a quote I saw at a charity event I attended last week: “Alone we can go fast … together we can go farther.” Those words spoke to me because it encapsulated everything I have been thinking and what I had learned over the last few years. I believe the team is the most important thing to building. I’m thankful and humbled by how smart the team at Visible Factors is because we’ve been able to do so much in such a short period of time.

Where do we go from here?

Honestly, I still yearn to build product. I want to reach more people and grow further so I’ve started tinkering again. I know there are two things I love Marketing and Marketplaces. The next logical step for me is something we have already started - building automation into our services. I believe strongly in what we are doing.  Right now, the team, the partners/clients, and everyone I work with at Visible Factors has my mind, my heart, and I could not be happier. Growing traffic, revenue, and ultimately companies, is something I love more than anything and I am having the most fun I’ve had in my life. We are all excited about the company as we move deeper into 2015 and beyond. p.s. If you have a minute, check out our new site to learn more about what we do, who the team is, and who we have helped grow. And, you can get in touch to find out how we can help your company grow too!  
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SEO
An InHouse SEO's story of feeling beaten down but always moving forward
February 8, 2011 at 1:23 am 38
  
     

always moving forward
(more…)

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Online Marketing
Why being a strategic marketer is so important
January 4, 2010 at 9:45 am 14
  
     
I've spent the last week at my parents house in a little town in Los Angeles called LaCrescenta. It's been the first time I haven't been in an office for over 1 week in 10 years (side note: this is the first time I've been at my parents for this long for almost 5 years). It has been good to take some time and reflect on things and do a little bit of looking at things from that 10 thousand foot view. Which has led me to thinking about why it is ever so important to take time, take a step back, and think more strategically.

Looking at things strategically

As it turns out, having your head down and not taking the time to create a strategic approach to things isn't always the best...well...STRATEGY. I've learned a lot about how to think more holistically and strategically over the past 4-5 years. This has created opportunities for me to truly be strategic, innovate, and lead teams, while also delivering value tactically on a daily basis. As we all know, much of marketing and creating great products is really understanding an industry, verticals within it, the overall market, and/or a customer and their needs. The creation of the new types of media, such as social media sites like Twitter, has truly shined light on how important a customer is. You can find many posts around the web talking about engaging customers, honesty, and being transparent (funny thing is, thats all some social media people talk about, but I digress). The point is, the days of shouting at people via television ads isn't really "moving the needle" the way it use to, and, as consumers really look to at different forms of consuming media, we have to understand the people we are looking to reach even more.

Being strategic provides opportunities to see what you might have missed.

We are all in "go mode" and trying to make things happen daily, trying to "provide value." There are so many days that I sit there and engage in social media, work on editorial calendars, and put together plans, etc. for the companies I am working for that I don't have the time to think strategically. This becomes a problem because a lot of things that are glaring situations or opportunities tend to pass you by. But, the question is, when you are spinning your wheels just trying to get stuff done, are you really providing value to your organization? Your Client? and even more so, the consumer? In my opinion, you are not. That is why being more strategic provides opportunities and more value in the long run. Being strategic means stopping what you are doing, analyzing a consumer, and finding out what they are actually looking for. Analyzing a journalist and finding out what they would write about, what they would link to, who they would reach out to. Even better, looking at data to understand patterns, user behavior, etc. that will truthfully provide value to a consumer. Which means you, as a strategic thinker is providing more value by obtaining more customers or actively engaging, re-engaging, and retaining more customers.

Set aside time to think strategically

Taking the time out daily or weekly, gives you an opportunity to think more holistically as a marketer. Take time to think about what people want. Marketing is not about pushing a message or advertising your product. Marketing is truly understand what is important in any given marketplace. Marketing is the process of creating value in an industry that will ultimately lead to obtaining customers and retaining customers. An example of this can be a product you offer or a template that you develop for your website. Some time ago, I was putting together specifications for pages that should be built on a site. I threw them together from an SEO perspective. Title Tags, alt tags, URLs, etc...you name the technical requirement, and I had it spec'd out. The problem I didn't think through was, am I really creating value? Am I really understanding what people want out of those pages? Would customers be happy? Would the Media? Would Social Media Users? Overall, that was the problem I was not thinking through and that is an order of magnitude greater than any title tag or url in the long run. I hit this realization that I should not just try to get stuff done and should actually take some time to think through a problem. Now that I have, I have made sure that I dedicate time to actually blocking out periods of time to think more strategically on a weekly basis. During that time, I switch my surroundings and either go to a coffee shop, lock myself in a conference room at the office, or something of that sort.

Consultants can help with Strategy

There are three ways that bringing in consultants can help with the problem of thinking strategically as an organization: Consultants can provide a fresh set of eyes that are not tightly integrated with your business, along with being able to be objective about features, content, etc. because they are not vested in the design, for example. Hiring a strategic consultant also means they will not be inundated with trying to deliver on daily traffic goals, daily product meetings, etc. They will be able to work externally, analyze a business, an industry, and the consumer and make recommendations that you can implement. Hire consultants that are tacticians to help alleviate your daily support needs. Whether you are managing communities, doing something tied to SEO, managing PPC campaigns, etc. All that matters is that you are bringing someone in to alleviate the fact that you need free time to think more strategically. Many times, a business has learned so much about their industry that they have all the research necessary to think strategically and just needs to time and ability to step away from day to day processes to actually do just that, think strategically. Being a consultant now at days is no longer about specialization and more about strategy. Todd Malicoat just recently wrote about being a Business Management Consultant and I think its so important to think that way now. Just being a PPC consultant, SEO or Social Media Marketer isn't going to cut it going forward. It is the exact reason that I am happy that I have prided myself in becoming a generalist in technology and the Internet. Understanding all facets of project management, product development, ideation, marketing, etc. is so important. But, be careful, because, just like the ever so popular "Social Media Experts" that can talk about being one, but, don't really understand it. The same goes here, being a business consultant and advising businesses isn't just knowing a few things, it's being a generalist that understands all aspects deeply enough to truly provide holistic feedback to an organization about their market, their product, etc.

Overall Web Strategy is crucial

Overall, it is important to start thinking more strategically as businesses start to evolve online. Being strategic, being a leader, and understanding a market is more important now than it ever was. Being a true marketer involves understanding an industry and providing value. We should all be striving to provide more value to organizations going forward. Have you spend enough time on web strategy? Are you hoping to spend more time on it? I want to hear what people are thinking about thinking strategically overall!
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Online Marketing
Building Traction with Search and Social Media Visibility
July 15, 2009 at 12:49 am 11
  
     
Over the last few months I’ve seen an interesting cross section of startups to large brands and marketers to developers that are all running businesses. There has been one thing that ties all of these people together, and that is gaining traction and visibility to your website or business online.

If you are a large brand, you already have that visibility, but it is hard to continue to be nimble and build quickly, therefore, you are typically left behind. While startups run into a different kind of problem, they are able to create cool cutting edge products, but, does anyone see these products? Many times, they are not visible and have no traction. I’ve talked to a number of developers, product guys, and “startup dudes” that all run into that problem. The reason being:

People don’t realize that just building a great product is not going to bring you buzz, traffic, or growth, it doesn’t work without visibility.

So, what do you do to solve this problem? There are a few things that you can do if you are a startup or your just a humble guy trying to make a living off a website that you own.

Search Visibility

SEO seemed like such a 4 letter word a few years ago. And, lately I’ve had interesting conversations around getting traffic in general, where I’ve been the SEO Evangelist, talking about how targeted and the high ROI of Search Traffic. It’s been exciting talking people and businesses that understand or are beginning to understand the importance for Search Visibility.

Creating Search Visibility is created by building Search Friendly websites that are authoritative to a given Search Engine.

How do I know what people are looking for?

A lot of people jump into SEO and try to build sites and throw popular phrases into h1’s, titles, etc. It’s important to understand the industry you are in and do the research that is required to know what it is people are searching for, this is called keyword research. For example, the knowing that people search for “cars” rather than “automobile.” (yes, I know that’s a crude example, but, you get the point!). SEOBook has a Free Keyword Research Tool to do this for you.

What is a Search Friendly Website?

A search friendly website is a website that is built so that a Search Engine will index and crawl their content, while adding importance, relevance, and authority to that sites content. Many times organizations will make mistakes by building a flash site or an Ajax site that is entirely unable to be indexed or crawled by a “search engine spider.” There are tips and tricks on on how to build Ajax SEO Friendly websites out there.

Creating authority is the key to visibility!

At the end of the day, no matter how much you’ve researched the keywords and how great you’ve built out your site so it is search friendly, you need external links. Without links to your site from external resources, you will not rank nor get search traffic, bottom line. Getting links isn’t an easy job either, it is the crux of the SEO problem. (i.e. It’s why we get paid the big bucks!)

Building links is an interesting mix of many different cross-functional skills. Whether it is the sales pitch to websites asking for links, the biz dev angle of partnering with other sites or buying links (while, I would NEVER condone that, wink wink!), or the art of building buzz around your content, product, or service through the Social Web.

Social Media Visibility

Ah, Social Media, the buzzword amongst all buzzwords across the web now at days, it’s amazing how much it is talked about. Amazingly enough, Social Media has become a part of the general web presence and we are moving away from it being a piece of the business, so to speak, but rather, the a fully conversational and connected Social Web.

Okay okay, I’ll get to the point: Getting visibility via the Social Web is done by being conversational, engaging, and invoking emotions.

Social Media news sites like Digg

Creating content that creates a conversation around a particular topic, whether it is hilarious, sad, resourceful, etc. Creating content like this is all about invoking the emotions. You want to create content that a user is going to want to Digg. You want to have a page that is going to make someone stop while “stumbling” through your site. But, it doesn’t stop there is still another really important factor of gaining visibility:

If influencers within the Social Media space do not know about your content, then guess what, it is not going to be made visible. People and the masses follow the influencers (and I’m not just talking about twitter) by watching them and seeing what they are talking about, they create the “water cooler conversations.” It is similar to Search in that you need to build a site that the search engines can not only see, but is authoritative.

Create conversations and engagement about your brand

Remember those conversations that I talked about, well, pay attention, because the conversations are happening all across the Social Web. But, you can do things to create those conversations and create engagement that is tied to your brand or your site.

Be insightful, engaging, and provocative when creating a conversation

Don’t be a feed, creating a twitter account and throwing your RSS feed is not participating in the Social Web, it’s a feed and nothing else. You want to create a conversation, think of ways that you can create conversations about your brand. If you are a sports site, talk about upcoming events, like the NBA Draft. If you are a political opinions site, then you might want to ask questions on the Social Web about legislation and elections.

When you create conversations and people are engaging with you and your brand, then you are essentially creating visibility.

The Visibility of Trends

Since moving more into the Publishing and Media side of the business from E-Commerce and Product Centric websites, I’ve learned a ton around insights around trends. Understanding trends gives you insight into the topics that are “buzzing” around a certain category or vertical. You can use a tool like Google Insights to give you that knowledge.

So, you’re sitting there going, “great, who cares what is buzzing!?”...fine , you probably aren’t. That said, this is extremely important to understand, because, creating content around these trends can create the Search and Social Media Visibility needed to grow your business.

Don’t be good, be GREAT!

Remember, your product or content will not survive on it’s sheer awesomeness (even though I’m sure it is!). Make sure that you are considering the visibility of your product and content: ONLY THEN, can your Product and Content be truly considered GREAT!

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SEO
Online Reputation Management DOES matter
April 23, 2009 at 8:24 am 32
  
     
So, I wake up this morning and see a post written by Darren Slatten completely dismissing the importance of Online Reputation Management. And, I found the post a little comedic at best, so, I'll give him a little bit of credit for that, but, one thing I won't give him credit for is researching the topic. Now, I am not going to attack Darren personally or professionally, because I haven't worked with him, nor do I know his abilities, and, it's just not my place to do so. This is just a post telling you why Online Reputation Management is EXTREMELY important.

Why Online Reputation Management is important

For companies and individuals alike, there is a major need for reputation management. It's the reason that conferences have panels specifically on the topic. That reason is that individuals and businesses alike can be affected by negative reputation. This isn't just an issue of popularity either, it's an issue of brand perception, an individuals brand perception, or even the ability to be hired/fired from a job. Having Online Reputation Management concerns can cause revenue losses and/or income. I really want to state that if you have not dealt with this or have no experience in understanding the Reputation Management space, then please, do not write about why it is not important.

Who are these people?!

Rather than continuing to tell you why ORM is so important, I'll answer the question you might ask: "who are the people or companies that care about online reputation management?" Lets run through a few of these right here to provide a better understanding of why ORM is important:

CEOs

An organization with a CEO that has negative perceptions in the press or social atmosphere can lead to the organization or the brand of that organization having negative sentiments or perceptions. I'm not just talking about the SERPs here, but, in terms of Social Mentions in blogs, microblogs, and/or news results that surround that individual. Did you know 87% of people believe a CEO's reputation reflects on the overall company's reputation?

Political Figures

Think about the number of times have you seen a political figure that gets tons of bad press and has led to the downfall of his/her campaign or election/re-election to office. Social Media is now playing a part in the political climate and because of that we saw now President Obama reach millions of people. But, to take this to the next level, lets look at an example that deals with President Obama. How many of you can say you know that he is a smoker? (Now, I am not judging him on this, but using it as a point of reference). This was downplayed a ton during the elections again because of the fact that his team did not want to create a negative perception of the candidate during the elections. This becoming an issue could have, hypothetically, led to the loss of many votes, especially from anti-cigarette and anti-smoking groups.

Companies and Brands

Companies and the brands of those companies alike experience the most pain when it comes to reputation management. Something that is a hard fact: Companies and Brands with negative search results tied to brand related queries will see a drop in revenue because a user/customer is likely to switch products/services based on that negative result. Even more interesting is that queries relative to corporate figures will also lead to a dip in revenue/sales. It's estimated that 58% of searchers will visit a competing website after seeing negative search results. An example of this is tied to PayPal and my experience working there. PayPal saw 4 of it's top 10 search results tied to the brand query "paypal" go to flame sites. Working internally, there was an estimated figure in net revenue losses per negative search result. That is where that 58% number above comes in...because of this negative reputation caused by search results, users were switching.

Celebrities

Celebrities make the news all the time for the stupid things that they do. Whether it is someone driving drunk or who's sleeping with who, it is all things that affect their personal brand. And, in this case, their personal brand is like that of a business, their personal brand is the most important thing to their livelihood. Because I am all about examples, lets continue down that path and look at the sports figure that we all know I can't stand: Kobe Bryant. He was accused of raping a girl in a hotel room back in 2003/2004. Luckily for Bryant this was during a time when Social Media was not as prominent, but, unluckily for Bryant it still effected him financially. He lost endorsement deals from companies like Nike because of the negative press and negative reputation.

The Job Market

The economic climate is horrible at the moment. Unemployment is at astonishing highs and it's tough to find a job right now. Now, to add to that, recruiters and HR teams are getting saavier and understanding Search and Social Media extremely well. What does that mean for you? It means that Online Reputation Management is important to your personal brand. Because, not only are they looking, but 78% of recruiters research a candidate online and 35% actually reject a candidate based on this. Andy Beal even wrote a post on why your Google Reputation can hurt your career. Creating a personal brand is even more important as researchers and experts in the job market reference this all the time. I can't tell you how many times I'm watching CNN, (and let me tell you, I caught a lot of it while I only had a few channels the last couple months!), and these experts mention Facebook, Google, search, and your personal brand being EXTREMELY important, not just now during economic uncertainty, but, forever.

Don't be silly, Online Reputation Management does matter:

Again, this is another situation where we have someone that is creating a post that is possibly baiting for reactions or what not. Or, we have another person in the industry that is writing something without actually researching the topic. But, please please please people, if you have no experience or expertise on a topic, then stay away from writing it, it just makes you look like you haven't done your research. And, if you look at the stats above, then it's pretty obvious that ORM does matter. **Credit for ORM stats goes to Marketing Pilgrim and Oilman.
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Analytics
Measuring success in SEO and Social Media by determining ROI, Analytics, Metrics up front
February 4, 2009 at 11:43 am 11
  
     
When you are working at an organization that doesn't have the right analytics, its painful. This also goes for working with clients that don't have the money to buy an analytics package like Omniture or WebTrends. I've been through this on both sides of the organizational and the client side as well. (A couple times it was even my fault! Ooops, my bad! :P ). It is important to understand that not providing metrics and/or reporting or being able to measure certain aspects of your job and/or client work is going to have a negative effect on your overall performance. Before starting any project you're going to be working, whether it's on the In-House or Client side of things, you need to know goals. The most important thing that you can do for yourself and for your "client" is going to be figuring out the goals of any project you are working on. Is it ranking for a certain number of keywords? working on Brand or Reputation Management type things, or increasing traffic by a certain percentage? Once you have determined those goals, start by figuring out what types of analytics and metrics you will need to measure to be successful in your campaigns. Here is a list of the items necessary. Analytics: There is absolutely no excuse now at days for not having any sort of analytics packages to use. There are free solutions like Google Analytics that has everything all the way through Advanced Segmentation, etc. to Omniture with tons of click funnel reporting and more. Important Metrics: Now that you have analytics setup, you need to define the common metrics that you will be reporting on. If you're goal is to drive traffic to a specific part of the site, then you should have a saved query or report that you can click on and get to quickly to perform that task. Also, define other important metrics or metrics that you find valuable to the current role/climit - Time spent on site (per LP) - Click thru Rate - Bounce Rate - Keyword by Landing PAge - etc. Dashboards: If possible, you should setup dashboards that give you an overview of the quick and dirty statistics that you need for the week/month/year. If these are also a click away or triggered by email, then you are golden. This is really not a "crucial" element, but a nice to have. Subscriptions: RSS and Email subscription can be important numbers that you are looking at, especially if one of your many goals is to increase engagement. Feedburner does a good job of tracking RSS subscriptions and you can use other web services or email providers to track email subscription. Social, Brand, and Reputation Monitoring: If you are doing any Social Media or Brand Marketing and/or Reputation Management type work, you are going to want to setup the right type of alerts to monitor the brand and or key terms around your brand. Three tools that I use consistently are Google Alerts, TweetBeep, and Trackur. Trending Metrics: When doing any news related work you are going to want to monitor and measure the trends in the industry. You can do this by monitoring and reporting on Google Insights data for high trafficked terms around a particular event, date, etc. Also, if you are doing something that is going to "create buzz" or a "trending topic" then you are going to want to monitor that carefuly and report on this by showing the ability to create something that went "hot." Reporting: You and your client or group have definied success metrics as I mentioned above at this point. Also, you should have great metrics and dashboards that measure that data. Now that you have all of that, use it to your advantage by creating reports using charts and graphs that show off the progress and/or lack of progress. Create a reporting template and provide analysis: You should start by creating a template for tracking this data and provide some sort of analysis. Sometimes having the data/charts in Excel and only rolling the charts into a powerpoint are a great way to provide analysis and value to just a chart, graph, or list of numbers in a table. I've learned had tons of experience of looking like an idiot or losing income by not having the appropriate metrics and reporting in place for clients and internally at a company. But, I can tell you that there are also organizations out there that flat out don't have this in place or won't be able to put this into place, and, well, you'll just have to deal with it. But, when that situation arises, make sure that you are upfront and straight forward about that and the situation it will cause. If you have done that, it will usually ready the client for the type of things that you will use to measure success.
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