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Online PR – Is there any value beyond the links?

By Jennifer Osborne in Featured

A few months ago I wrote a post comparing various online press release services. While nobody disputed their effectiveness at building links, there were questions as to how to measure the full value of Online PR.

For fun, I’m going to take a real release that we recently did and answer each of the questions that was raised.

(Full disclosure, this is a client of ours and he agreed to share these numbers)

Here’s what we did

We had recently launched a Blog for a client and decided to give it a little boost by sending out a press release. The product is very environmentally friendly so we wanted to make sure that we got additional coverage in the client’s own state plus those states that are pro environment (like California).

Of course, we followed the basic PR Optimization best practices like making sure that the title was catchy (but contained a keyword) and that the piece included a link back to the client. We used PRWeb for our distribution (we really like the $200 option).

Webstock: Good Web Design Ain’t Easy

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Jason Santa Maria is a graphic designer from New York. He currently works as Creative Director for Happy Cog Studios and Art Director for A List Apart Magazine. Ever the design obsessif, Jason is known to take drunken arguments to fisticuffs over such frivolities as kerning and white space.

Jason started his Webstock presentation by changing his subject entirely. He originally wanted to talk about how to use grids and tyopography etc but realized he had to start with storytelling – storytelling with a plan. He decided that a better title for his talk was Design for Communication. How does a design tell a story? Jason explained that we first look at images for the narrative and thread of a story because we can’t read the text. This is called graphic resonance. So the designer IS the narrator. Magazines combine the imagery with the text really well e.g. Wired magazine. Jason explains that the design differs for the story being told. Magazines set the tone for what you’re going to read with design and images. When stories are converted to an online format, things change. The tone changes. The impact changes. The meaning changes. For example, a Wired article looks really boring on the web site compared to the magazine version. Stories online are being distilled down to content.

Why isn’t the design on the web? Where is it? “Design can’t NOT communicate” said David Carson of his Helvetica design. Every line, every pixel, every absence of pixel is communicating something. Our stories are lacking, says Jason, where’s the passion? Jason made this point by showing a slide of 15 different web layouts. Speech bubble logos and web layouts are all doing the same thing, looking the same. Why are we plagued by the sameness? Most web designers aren’t designers at all, he says. Should we just design harder? We don’t have the limited typefaces we used to have. We only have constraints. So why aren’t we using our options?

We all start with a blank canvas so why don’t our designs look that good? It’s the nature of the medium that is separating the print designs from the web designs. We define good web design by our view of what makes good print design. On the metaphorical page, Jason says there is an urgent need for communication based upon precision and clarity. These aren’t new problems but old problems requiring new solutions. We should change the way we think about a page or what a page actually is.

Contraints of the web page include:

-> there are no limitations or definitions to how big a page can be
-> we can only see a small portion of a web page, unlike a book
-> everything needs to be on one page
-> we have a much shorter time to capture the audience

Online, you can change things like navigation. The user and the author can change the way they publish and read the content. Online you can’t grasp how much information there is to read or how much time it will take to grasp the content. However a newspaper or a book has a finite amount of information that you can absorb at a glance.

The golden ratio in the design field (1.6180) is found so often in nature and used as a design principal – the rule of thirds. But these don’t apply online because the web runs on a single fixed dimension (or on user defined or content defined space). You can’t look at design online through the lens of print because we are dealing with a different medium. Jason gives the example of the book of short stories No-one Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. To promote her book, Miranda created a linear web design which completely captivates the interest of the user because it is such an unusual technique.

Fray is a new type of interactive story telling site where the design/graphic of the site takes over the narrative. Jason says this is a simple, subtle and clever way to use web design. He recommends the book Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird as a source of inspiration.

Images are written with light, Jason says. Innovation makes new information available to the masses. Most stuff on the web is a bit like the first Model T Ford. You can have any color you like, provided it’s black. Well, it’s time to start looking for new colors, he says. Until now, design for the web has been driven by technology rather than by the masses. Jason thinks that the form of web design should be driven by the story you’re trying to tell and he thinks we need to separate the design from the CMS. We’re all capable of telling a story and we don’t need a design degree to do this. Find inspiration offline in magazines, books and history. Turn your web site into a story.

Where to Draw the Line of Pleasing The Search Engines Versus Your Clients

By Darren Dunner in Featured

I was reading a blog entry from ChrisBoggs about content for search engines versus content for clients. You would think after all these years of online business and the growing popularity to buy online, find resources or sell your own services, that we would all be instant experts on SEO and proper content placement.

Well search around the net and see how many results take you to sites that make sense versus sites that are so jumbled up with information, it leaves you wondering how they ended up in that search result. Both types of sites make it into the top rankings. It seems the controversy here is quality content version SEO content and which produces results… well, they both do. The real issue is do your potential clients care if you have a nice clean site with information that compels them to use your services versus mixed up words that make no sense. Well, I know you are thinking that quality compelling content is better, but it appears that many site owners are not aware they can have great content and results. A real basic factor to understand here is how the search engines see your keywords and content.

The search engines use algorithms to ready your content. They read your meta data and your body content. But when they read this content it is not the same as you or I reading this content, they see this as patterns and what changes these patterns are basic things like bolding, capital letters, spaces, dashes, font size, etc.

So whether you have compelling content or cluttered content, it does not determine your rankings from the search engines. What improves your rankings in regards to content is your keyword placement, your content and how much of both are used on your site. If you sell widgets and your site does not express this throughout all of your pages then you will not rank for that keyword.

Personally if you are trying to stuff your site with keywords for the sake of traffic results then take the time to make sure the content makes sense to the reader and that you use enough of the keywords throughout the site to satisfy the search engines. There is nothing worse then searching and finding sites that make absolutely no sense. Why are people going to spend their money on your site if you are filling it up with words that that don’t give a clear picture of what you are offering?

If you can’t write good quality content and you are not sure how to properly place keywords then maybe it is time to hire a ghost writer for your site.

Little Known On-Page Factors That Help To Improve Search Engine Rank

By Markus Skupeika in Featured

What can provide you the cheapest if not free targeted visitors in huge numbers to your website?

Undoubtedly the answer is ‘search engines’. And the equation is very simple – improve search engine rank and gain more visitors.

To rank high in the result pages you need to supply the search engines with your worth and at the same time you must satisfy the existing visitors in your page.

Now, how do search engine get satisfied about the worth of a website for specific keywords (you must remember that search engines are bound to offer good result to retain the existing visitors in their own page)?

Bigger search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, puts more value on content (keyword density, variables and positioning) and incoming links. Whereas, smaller search engines (general category) still emphasizes on Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. (Perhaps you know that in the earlier stages of their development all search engines checked the Meta data to confirm the relative worth of a website.)

Black Hat search engine optimizers used to write different content for search engines and visitors. One of the most common formats was to provide two layers of content. In one layer the content was stuffed with keywords (or only keywords) and was written in the same color as the background (white text on white background) – naturally the content was not visible to general visitors. At the same time they used to create natural content for visitors. They used so many other techniques to forge content in a page.

However, over the time bigger search engines became too claver to identify those pages and banned them. In fact Google took thousands steps forward and introduced LSI (latent semantic indexing – any doubt about its introduction?) to identify quality content from original sources.

Today the best way to get better search engine rankings is to stay honest or follow the age old and proven process of pretending that you are honest. What does it mean – you must go for link building and at the same time make sure those search engines do not understand that you are doing that.

Here are some tips for on-page optimization to improve your search engine ranking:

• Content – the primary solution is to have unique content in your site. To put it simply unique content means something that should not have any other similar web copy. Now you need to put your keywords strategically into the body of the content. The best way is to put keywords in sub headings (if you can break the content into different parts or sections, you can have more options to use sub headings). However, make sure that you do not follow any pattern in using key phrases. You can also make some keywords bold (bold words suggest that you are emphasizing on the text). It is always better to update your content occasionally.
• Interlinking – Link the important landing pages from different pages with targeted keywords. It not only helps search engines to understand why you created that page but also help them to crawl internal pages.
• Navigation – Use simple (html) navigation link pattern.
• Meta Documents – even though major search engines tend to ignore them, meta documents still have a lot of importance among second level search engines. And in SEO, every little bit counts.
• URL Structure – use keywords in the domain name. it is better to structure your URL like examplesite.com/targeted-keyword.html rather then using example-site.com/targeted_keyword_positioning_in_url.html
• Sitemap – with links to all the internal pages – helps search engines to easily crawl the website.
• Good Neighborhood – Link to worthy websites from your site. This will create a good neighborhood for your site and will help search engines to understand your site better.

And get as many links as possible from relevant websites. If you follow these simple tips, it will improve search engine rank of your website.

Author:  Discover the best kept secrets by asking an SEO expert. Find out how to improve search engine rank for your website using web 2.0 strategies.

Online PR – Is there any value beyond the links?

By Jennifer Osborne in Featured

A few months ago I wrote a post comparing various online press release services. While nobody disputed their effectiveness at building links, there were questions as to how to measure the full value of Online PR.

For fun, I’m going to take a real release that we recently did and answer each of the questions that was raised.

(Full disclosure, this is a client of ours and he agreed to share these numbers)

Here’s what we did

We had recently launched a Blog for a client and decided to give it a little boost by sending out a press release. The product is very environmentally friendly so we wanted to make sure that we got additional coverage in the client’s own state plus those states that are pro environment (like California).

Of course, we followed the basic PR Optimization best practices like making sure that the title was catchy (but contained a keyword) and that the piece included a link back to the client. We used PRWeb for our distribution (we really like the $200 option).

What to Measure?

1) In the original post I used Headline Impressions as the main comparison metric.

In this example the release generated 61,468 headline impressions. Given that the release was focused across a few states, I would consider this number to be pretty good.

2) Links Built is the most obvious metric from an SEO perspective. Our press release generated 173 links.

But of course quality is more important than quantity. Many of the links generated from online press releases are of little to no value. They were from off topic, spammy scrapper sites.

But some of these links were fantastic!

The piece made it to both Google News, Yahoo News and Business.com which provided the client with tremendous additional exposure. Plus it got picked up by local news sites, environmental news sites, and industry specific sites.

So far we’re off to a good start. But as PRWeb commented (in my previous post), the metrics that are most meaningful are those from your own operations.

3) Increases in site traffic Site traffic was up 87% over the previous month. Most of this was the result of a big spike in referral traffic. This referral traffic was coming from sites that picked up the press release.

Of particular interest, this referral traffic was quality traffic. They spent an average of 4 minutes on the site, had 4.34 pages per visit and a low bounce rate.

4) Increases in Off line inquiries from both media and prospects. It’s not unusual for media releases to lead to other media opportunities.

We got in through the back door. Traditional PR companies go through the front door and “pitch” ideas to the media. With online PR you happen to be at the right place at the right time when reporters are researching a story.

This particular press release lead to an inquiry from the Governor’s office and a nomination for an Environmental Award!

5) Increase in conversions (e.g. sales). There was one sale that definitely came as a result of the press release (the visitor came from one of the referral sites that picked the release up).

Due to other marketing initiatives (both online and off line) it’s not possible to definitively measure whether the press release drove a marked increased sales. But empirical evidence (customers saying that they had seen the release on local news sites) suggests yes.

6) Increased ranking for the strategic keywords used in the release.

The release is currently showing on spots 6, 8 an 14 (through powerful sites that picked up the release) and the client’s site itself is in spot 18.

It’s been a few weeks since the release and we are searching for their keyword phrase not a branded term.

These results can be attributed entirely to the release itself

To make this a true test we picked a release that was targeting a new product. We have not otherwise targeted this keyword before with any link building or on-page optimization efforts – all of the above metrics can be entirely attributed to the release itself.

So was there any value to the online press release beyond traditional link building? The client sure thinks so!!!!

What do I think? Like anything else, it’s all about the content. Online PR created for link building purposes only will probably only build you links. Online PR that is quality content will lead to quality metrics.

Author:  Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

10 Simple Ways to Generate Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Part 4

By Andy MacDonald in Featured

All of this week, we have been looking at the different methods of creating Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Marketing, and doing it right! In our first edition we looked at Buzz & Word-of-Mouth marketing, then we examined Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Success Stories, & in our last post, we looked at ways to Actively Work to Promote Buzz. Today in our final addition to the series, we hit the streets, figure out where to find our big mouths, and creating a business blog. Lets jump straight in…

Hitting the streets

Another way to promote buzz is to take your product or service literally to the streets: to pound pavements where people are out and about, walking and driving. This method isn’t the same as outdoor advertising on billboards, signposts and car livery; instead, it’s more about meeting and greeting potential customers.

For example, we recommend doing such simple and low-budget advertising as putting stickers on every lamppost to build awareness of your brand. When The New York Times started its online service, it hired a small ad agency that gave out paper spoons with the company’s Web site on them, and when those people logged on, they could print out a coupon for a cheap but yummy meal at Daily Soup, a popular café in midtown New York City. That strategy generated buzz about the Web site.

Figuring out where to find your big mouths

In addition to finding the right type of big mouth, you need to know where best to reach him. Finding your market maven requires creative thinking on your part, because you know best (or at least you should!) where your customers are most readily found.

For example: A nurse in San Diego wanted to make more black women aware of and knowledgeable about diabetes and breast cancer. She began in what she thought was the right place, by targeting black churches, but she found that the women who stayed after services were already knowledgeable, and the rest of the congregations just wanted to get home.

So she thought about finding a place where black women would have more time and be more relaxed and therefore be more open to receiving information, and she realized that the best place for her to generate word of mouth was at the beauty salon. So she taught hairdressers to be her mavens, her big mouths, and she generated the buzz she wanted in order to educate women about these diseases and to encourage them to get mammograms and find out even more about how they can protect themselves.

Creating a blog about your business

WOMMA (See Getting the Terminology Straight) also offers a Womnibus (another great name) that posts useful information on the WOMMA Web site for people interested in word-of-mouth marketing trends. WOMMA touts the Womnibus as the primary resource for advertisers wanting to get involved with word-of-mouth strategies. One Womnibus described a study conducted by the Pew research organization about the prevalence of blogs (short for Web logs) as of mid-2007. Among the key findings:

• Eight percent of consumers (12 million U.S. adults) keep a blog, up from 7 percent in 2006.
• Thirty-nine percent of consumers (57 million U.S. adults) read blogs, an increase from 27 percent in 2006.

Pew concludes that blogs have become one of the key media for word of mouth marketing. Maybe this strategy is something that could work for your business, if your target market spends a lot of time on the Internet. If you plan to start a weblog to encourage buzz and word of mouth marketing, i would suggest Darren at ProBlogger would be a good place to find out exactly what is involved in starting a weblog, and the various different ways in which you can market your blog.

Conclusion

As you can see from this series, there is still a lot of buzz about buzz marketing & word-of-mouth marketing, and it is still an essential part of any marketing campaign you run for your product or service. Whether it be utilizing a big mouth to talk your product or service, hiring beautiful people to promote your company, or just . All will go a long way to increasing the buzz around your product or service, and when you have good buzz, you have word-of-mouth too. Perhaps you have a particular method of creating buzz, or good word-of-mouth marketing? Id be delighted to hear your thoughts, so leave me a comment with your suggestion or questions. Ill always do my best answer all comments or emails i receive.

Author:  Andy MacDonald, CEO of Swift Media UK, a website design & search marketing company. For daily tips on Blogging, Marketing, SEO & Making Money Online, Checkout our SEO & Marketing Tips for Webmasters blog or Subscribe by RSS.

5 Steps to Planning Your Podcast

By Sarah Rourke in Featured

Podcasting can be time consuming and often frustrating, especially when you are under-prepared and ill-equipped for what you are setting out to achieve. In order to smooth out the bumps in the ride, it’s always a good idea to be as prepared as you possibly can before you sit down to create your podcast. If you’re too eager to get your voice recorded before you’ve laid the groundwork you can often get into a pickle and the show you had in mind just doesn’t come off as planned.

Get into the habit of following the 5 steps below so that there’ll be less time spent pulling your hair out and more time spent getting a great business podcast out into cyberspace.

Step 1 – Email participants and permission requests in advance.

You’ve had a great idea for a show where you’re going to interview some successful business owners and use a clip of one who podcasts himself. If you plan to record your show on Thursday afternoon, don’t expect you can get away with requesting interviews and permissions on Wednesday and still record your show, as planned, the next day.

People are busy and their time is precious. Always be one step ahead of yourself in thinking about who you’d like on your show and ask for permissions way in advance of recording. Always have back-up ideas too, just in case you just can’t get to people in time.

Step 2 – Choose clips and interviewees before writing the scripts/planning your links.

If you intend to take extracts from the interviews to add in between links or even extracts from other people’s shows, it’s a good idea to know which clips you’d like to use before you go ahead and write the script. This means you can then write the script in a way that introduces what participants are going to say or you could comment on what they’ve said at the end of the clip.

Step 3 – Have a script.

Lots of would-be podcasters feel 100% confident that they know what they’re going to say and intend to have a slick, fluff-free delivery. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men? It’s a really good idea to have a script of some description so that your points follow a rational and well thought out process and your listeners get maximum value out of your podcast. You don’t have to write a detailed script and then reel it off word for word if you think this will make you sound wooden (most non-professional broadcasters would have difficulty making it sound otherwise), it’s more about knowing what you’re going to say, knowing how your points are going to pan out and, if you have guests, having a few notes about them and the kind of questions you could ask them.

Imagine introducing your guest and their name goes completely out of your head. A set of notes or a script will stop this from happening and make you feel more comfortable, much in the way crib notes help you stay relaxed when giving a presentation.

Step 4 – Prepare yourself.

This may sound like an obvious preparation step but it’s one that many neglect. Imagine getting up in the morning and everyone is out of the house; there’s nobody to talk to. You go into your office or studio and switch your mic on, ready to record your podcast. You clear your throat a little and then start. How do you sound ? A bit like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead? So, what to do instead? Talk out loud or sing to loosen up the vocal chords, do some stretches and breathing to loosen up the body. Have a warm drink (but avoid milk as it clogs up the sinuses) and, last but not least, put a dab of lip balm on your lips (yes, it’s so that they move smoothly over one another when you speak, reducing any unwanted noises).

Step 4 – Prepare your environment.

An essential element in making sure your podcast runs smoothly is to prepare your environment as well as you can. Turn off any phones that might disturb you, ‘dampen’ your room as much as you can (I know of someone who records under the desk with a blanket draped over it), make sure you have everything you need.

If possible, try not to time your recording to coincide your with the time the cats need feeding or your spouse will be home. Take care to ensure you will have as much peace as possible.

Following these 5 steps will go a long way to ensuring you get your voice into the heads of your target audience as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

Author:  For help with creating podcasts and other audio resources go to http://www.AudioPodArtist.com Audio Pod Artist – get your voice into their heads.

Link Building – Building Fresh Links to Pages with Established Trust Rank!

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

It may not always seem like you against the world, when it comes to promoting your website, but on one level, it is simply a fact. So, how can you breathe new life into old pages and get the most wear from your content? The answer, aged pages and fresh links.

Aged pages have passed the most important factor for present-tense search engine optimization, they have earned a degree of trust and trust rank which can provide tremendous leverage in the SERPs.

What is the first sign? Usually a promotion from the gray bar to some page rank. Although page rank is not indicative of any inherent ranking factor alone, it is a popularity factor that indicates when your content been indexed, that it is connected to your main navigation or that it is in fact, getting a boost from links (either internally from your site or externally from other sites).

The next stage is, you start to see modest rankings as certain elements and keywords on that page acquire a relative position (nothing phenomenal, but in the 40-50’s in search engines), this is a tell tale sign that your page in question just needs a bit of a boost and is where the next portion of the equation comes into play.

The Value of Teamwork

Just like the buddy system, by teaming your older aged content with freshly created content (with purpose) your site has the ability to punch holes in the inertia and generate an upward velocity that can pull both pages into the top 10.

Fresh content has the ability to bypass many of the formalities and in a way has VIP access to the top 10 if your content is (a) honed & specific (b) has a great title that plays into the main keywords and (c) is interlinked to other pages with authority in the website (pages that rank for more competitive keywords).

Now just like the duo of the wonder twins, each page armed with what the other lacks and united by a common theme can leave your competition reeling as your pages fly by them like a bad episode of the road runner and coyote as you blaze a trail to the top 10.

The formula:

For seasoned types tools are not necessary, almost like being able to interpret code from the matrix, a good SEO can skim and consolidate key factors with ease. For those who may need a bit of guidance, you can use this free tool from Google Rankings to determine the keyword density.

Then after getting the highest ranking phrases sorted on the old / aged page, now is the time to make some last minute adjustments by weeding out any verbose language and adding another instance of the keyword in question. They say two heads are better than one, whereas in this instance two pages are better than one when a keyword conquest is underway.

Then write a new page of fresh content on the subject matter, drop a link to the old page to give it some link juice, do the same by reciprocating the linking between the old page to the new (using the new pages root keywords in the link). This creates a miniature dynamo between the pages that serves to propel both pages (the page with trust & the fresh page with fresh links) to the top of their respective category. The key here is to have a common denominator between the two with some portion of the title, this will create the double listing you see so often in search engines.

This method works particularly well for blogs that are hosted in a sub folder of the main domain name and the other pages are static and aged. There are advantages to being able to mold the flow of authority in your pages using static pages which are off the grid from internal / dynamically linked pages from a content management system like a blog for example.

The combination is a fantastic duo that you can invoke frequently to catapult content that is deserving of praise into the mainstream. In this instance you can give an entire segment of a site a boost by consolidating the two pages towards a less competitive keyword (like low hanging fruit) or team up to chip away at a more competitive keyword. The main asset to observe is that the first page has been indexed and pulling it’s own weight in the search index. Then it is merely a matter of leverage, some creative content and the use of an inherently aging page with trust.

Author:  Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

10 Simple Ways to Generate Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Part 3

By Andy MacDonald in Featured

As i mentioned in the last article, Word-of-Mouth Success, you don’t have to just sit around and pray for good word of mouth or great buzz — you can actively work to promote it. Check out my suggestions on generating buzz for you, your product, or your service, in the following sections.

Coining a great new phrase

One way to get people talking is to come up with a new expression associated with your business. People love to be in the know and ahead of the curve, and many people love things just because they’re new — and that includes language. In fact, many great ad campaigns were successful because they (often unwittingly) created a new expression that people started using in everyday life and conversation. Think of the saying “Where’s the beef?” This expression was first used in a Wendy’s commercial, where a gruff little old lady was literally looking for the meat in her hamburger, but the expression came to be used in any situation where the substance of something was missing.

Tip: One way to coin a new phrase is to turn your business’s or product’s name into a verb. For example, think of the example of Google.com, an Internet search engine you’re probably familiar with. People now talk about “I Googled it to find out more about it. . . .” So now, when someone needs to look something up on the Internet, Google.com is probably one of the first search engines to come to mind.

Companies used to hate this appropriation of their names. For example, Kleenex and Xerox fought to prevent their brand names from becoming synonymous with the product itself (in this case, face tissue and photocopying). Now, however, many companies are delighted to have that “problem,” because it means that consumers view their names as the brand readers. If your company or brand name becomes part of the popular lexicon, that’s a great way to advertise your business!

Hiring beautiful people to promote your product

Another way to get people talking is to give them something interesting to talk about. If your product or business isn’t already fabulous, try to attach it to something that is. And if your business is already exciting, associate it with something even more intriguing!

For example, Vespas are little known in the United States, though these little scooters are everywhere in Italy. Vespa helped make inroads (pun intended) into the U.S. market by hiring gorgeous models to ride around Los Angeles, stop in at various cafes and have a coffee while chatting with other customers about their cool mini-motorbikes. The models weren’t famous, but they were beautiful, and they attracted attention to themselves first but then to the product they were promoting, and the whole stunt generated buzz — in a city where that’s tough to do!

Taking advantage of celebrity endorsements

If you can get the attention of a celebrity — either purposely or serendipitously, you should leverage that attention as much as possible.

Okay, you can’t solicit spontaneous celebrity mentions, but you can leverage them if they happen on their own. For example, Sandra Bullock became a one-woman marketing machine for Listerine PocketPaks (those little tab-sized breath strips that were introduced in 2005) when she talked about them nonstop at the Oscars in 2002.

Similarly, Rush Limbaugh created buzz for The Millionaire Next Door, a very interesting book that was little known until Limbaugh mentioned it on his radio show, which has an enormous listening audience. The book has since sold more than 2 million copies, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list for 3 years.

If I were working to promote either of the above products, you can bet your last dollar I would do everything possible to maximize that exposure. For example, I would have copies of the Oscar footage where Sandra Bullock talked about the Listerine PocketPaks, and I’d send that video and quote her in all future marketing for that product. And I’d get in touch with her to find out whether she’d be willing to go further and become a spokeswoman for the brand or whether I could use her endorsement in future ad campaigns. Regarding Mr. Limbaugh, if I had been the publisher of that book, I’d have immediately contacted him to get a written endorsement of the book, which I would then feature on every future copy and edition of the book and all subsequent marketing, advertising, and sales materials. You should look for the same opportunities.

So how do you maximize on celebrity exposure? Here are a few things that I would do:

• Get a copy of what the celebrity said about your product or business, or request a written endorsement.
• Obtain permission from that celebrity (in writing, of course) to use his comments in your future ad campaigns.
• Consider asking that celebrity to be your spokesperson.

Throwing a party

Generating buzz by throwing a big bash is considered a publicity party, and publicity isn’t advertising, of course, but parties can generate word of mouth as well as publicity in newspapers, magazines, and other media. The party itself probably won’t be free (unless you can get friends and fans to provide the space and the food and drink, and send out the invitations, which you quite possibly can!). But even if you do have to incur some costs to throw a party, it can be money very well spent because of the word of mouth it can generate.

You can throw a party to announce a grand opening of your store, to introduce a new product or invention, or to celebrate an anniversary, such as the tenth anniversary of your being in business — or anything else that’s new with your business. Of course, you should invite news people, from all the local newspapers (your major city paper as well as smaller neighborhood papers, and freebies around town), local magazines, and local TV and radio personalities, but you also want to invite everyone you know who you think can talk about your product or business in an interesting, exciting way. If they have a great time at your party, they’re more likely to tell all their friends, colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances about it — especially if you’ve done something unique at the party or given away something fabulous.

For example, one publicity party I attended for a book about a very successful black entrepreneur generated lots of word of mouth. Why? Because the hostess invited Coretta Scott King — and she came, with one of her sons! That was exciting: She and her late husband, the Reverend Martin Luther King, are legends in the world of civil rights, and many people at the party welcomed this unique opportunity to meet her. Mrs. King’s presence at the party got people talking, and it helped the book become a business bestseller and sell more than 100,000 copies, which is terrific for a business book.

Tune in next time, when we look at how you generate buzz by taking your product or service to the streets, blogs have become one of the key media for word of mouth – find out how to utilize them to best effect, and figuring out where to find your big mouths! (see the last article)

Author:  Andy MacDonald, CEO of Swift Media UK, a website design & search marketing company. For daily tips on Blogging, Marketing, SEO & Making Money Online, Checkout our SEO & Marketing Tips for Webmasters blog or Subscribe by RSS.

Sam’s Club Wants to Be Your Search Engine Optimization Company � Should You Let It?

By Scott Buresh in Featured

If the buzz is to be believed, Sam’s Club is now a search engine optimization company that is targeting the local search market aggressively. The fact is, this isn’t something new; it’s just recently come to the forefront. Sam’s Club has partnered with a company called Innuity to offer a program that is primarily targeted at small businesses looking to get noticed in the local search results.

Many people are screaming that this is a “worthless” service – but I disagree. It’s not worthless, but it also isn’t close to the service a comprehensive search engine optimization company can offer. Let’s take a closer look – with the caveat that I am assuming that the service listed on the Innuity page for LeadConnect (http://leadconnect.innuity.com/) is the same service being offered through Sam’s Club (also called LeadConnect).

What They’re Offering

For $25 a month for Sam’s Club members (and $39.95 a month for non-members), you can sign up for the LeadConnect service from Innuity. You’ll get access to a dashboard that you can update with all of the necessary details about your business – name, address, phone number, types of products you offer, and so on. Once you’ve completed your dashboard, Innuity will submit your site to various local search engines such as Yahoo! Local, YellowPages, Pricegrabber, Google Local, and more. Then, if you update your dashboard at any time, Innuity will update your information at all of those local search sites, just like any search engine optimization company being paid a retainer fee might.

Innuity also claims on its website that this program includes having them submit your website to the major search engines (not to be confused with the local ones). This part is largely window dressing, as any good search engine optimization company knows. The major engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) all find sites on their own, and “submitting” sites won’t do anything to influence rankings.

My Opinion

If you don’t have the time to do it manually and you don’t have the budget to hire a search engine optimization company, paying $25 a month for a company to handle the submission to the local search sites isn’t a terrible deal. The ongoing fee also makes sense if your business changes frequently, as again it will save you time from needing to update your listing on each local search engine each time you make a change.

The big question is what happens when you disengage from the service. Will your results remain on the local sites after you stop paying the monthly fee? Or will they be dropped the day you stop paying? In my opinion, it would be somewhat unethical for them to actively remove you from local search sites if you disengage, and I’m betting that they don’t. I tried to reach them directly to ask but was unsuccessful (well, I called twice and was put on hold for an inordinate time in each instance without ever reaching a human being – you can draw your own conclusions from that).

Why This Is Good for the SEO Industry

Having a large, recognizable chain like Sam’s Club acting as a “search engine optimization company” and offering this type of service has several benefits for the SEO industry. People in the SEO industry often forget that most people do not even know what SEO is, so this initiative is bringing awareness of the industry as a whole, even if it is focused on local search.

Additionally, the Sam’s Club name gives SEO a bit of respectability. Search engine optimization has long been considered some voodoo science or, at best, a fringe discipline – but with this offering by a household name, it’s now something that the average person might want to investigate. This may help the mainstream accept the idea of hiring a search engine optimization company in general.

Why This Could Be Problematic for the SEO Industry

The problem with this offering is that it is rather limited in scope, focused only on local search initiatives for local businesses. Because it is more common for people to use the general search engines over the local search engines, this may not bring in a large volume of new business. Yet at the same time, it is advertised in such a way as to seem to the average person as full-service search engine optimization. Nothing in the description online or in any of the literature I’ve gotten my hands on indicates that Innuity is letting people know that local search is just a part of a larger, more disciplined approach that another search engine optimization company might provide.

As a result, businesses that use LeadConnect rather than a search engine optimization company may find the results are not what they were hoping for. And they then may dismiss SEO in general because they don’t understand that the LeadConnect service is limited. Local search is important, but there are many other ways to target a local market online that this service is not tapping into.

In addition, to see really great results from a local search initiative, your business must appear in the top few results in the local search engine – because those are the ones that will also appear on the main search results page. Any result beyond the top several will be more difficult for the average searcher to come by, whereas a first or second-page result on a main engine, which a full-service search engine optimization company might be able to garner, can be of great benefit to increasing exposure.

Conclusion

What Sam’s Club is offering cannot directly compete with the services provided by a search engine optimization company – and it’s not supposed to. This program is reasonable for a company with a small budget looking to boost its local exposure. Plus, it can bring the SEO concept to the masses. Unfortunately, it could also give people a false sense of what SEO is and what it can do for them.  And it remains to be seen if people really want to buy an SEO package from the same vendor that sells them giant jars of mayo and bulk toilet paper.

Author:  Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld.  Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.  Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.