Ideas for Business

I love finding new, creative ways of using social media tools. Evidently, so does Matt McGee. I really, really like how Interflora UK uses Twitter to cheer up people having a rough day. Matt says:

As far as I can tell, the company is searching Twitter for people who’ve posted messages about being sad, having a bad day, etc., and offering them flowers on the spot.

Now who do you think those people will call when they want flowers?

I’d be curious to know how you are using Twitter, Facebook, or another social media tool. Are you using them creatively?

This is the difference between social media and search engine optimization. SEO is pretty much technical. Sure, there is a little bit of creativity involved, but in large part it is simply feeding data into the search engines so that you can rank according to a pre-determined recipe, even if you don’t know exactly what that recipe is. But social media optimization is almost 100% creativity. You create a customized plan for marketing your business through the tools available. Other benefits that follow are icing on the cake.

You don’t have to offer free flowers to cheer up your social media followers, but you can use Twitter and other social media tools to find people who need your services and offer them something that will make their day. Just be a good person and your reputation will take care of itself. And so, too, will your business.

Online and offline marketing often are looked at as separate channels and in reality they are. However, they should operate together under the umbrella of integrated marketing. Frank Reed at Marketing Pilgrim makes this point quite well:

If companies are serious that revenue generation is the number one objective for e-mail marketing the idea of supporting every marketing effort, both offline and online, should be a very close second in importance.

He said this in response to a survey that revealed that 25% of respondents thought that e-mail marketing supporting offline marketing efforts not very important. I have to agree that this is head-scratching data indeed.

So what are the areas of importance for e-mail marketing? According to data provided by MarketingSherpa, in order of importance, they are:

• Increasing sales revenue
• Improving customer relations
• Increasing lead generation
• Increasing website traffic
• Building brand awareness
• Increasing size of e-mail opt-in lists
• Supporting offline marketing programs
• Engaging social media audiences

So Frank’s contention is in reconciling the most important (increasing sales revenue) with the support of offline marketing programs. If you believe that the most important thing for your e-mail marketing campaigns is to increase your revenues, then shouldn’t it stand to reason that you’d place support of your offline marketing programs in high regard? You’d think so.

Here at Small Business Mavericks, we believe that e-mail marketing should support your offline marketing programs. Your online and offline marketing channels should be mutually supportive. If they are, then you’ll meet all of the other goals that are mentioned above. You’ll have the whole shebang.

I don’t know about you, but e-mail marketing to me means integrated marketing. And that’s how we do it.

Article marketing has always been a good way of obtaining back links to a website. Well-written articles with great anchor text links can be a good source of traffic as well as links that boost SEO rankings. However, someone came up with the idea to “spin” articles and attempt to automate the process of article submissions. Unfortunately, websites that employ these techniques often are penalized for doing so.

Why is article spinning bad? Let’s look at what it does.

The first step to spinning an article is to take the original article you have written and copy/paste it into the article spinning software. Some of this software will automatically detect the keyword on which the article is based. For others, you have to manually input the keyword. You might even be allowed to re-optimize an old article by having your software search for the primary keyword then entering a new keyword for which you want that old keyword replaced. Any of these methods is bad.

The article spinning software will “rewrite” your old article according to the rules you have established. Often, the software just simply rearranges the words and sentences in the original article.

Rearranging words and sentences doesn’t work because it often makes the article read in a jumbled, haphazard way. A good article has a logical flow to it, from idea to idea. Article spinning software is not sophisticated enough to ensure that your sentences meet that logical flow after being rearranged. Secondly, those sentences are not rewritten in most cases; they are simply moved from one part of the article to another so they are copied verbatim from the original article.

After you have spun your article, you must then submit it to article directories. Most article spinners submit to the same directories over and over again. But the most reputable article directories have software that detects spun articles. They also have human editors who can spot spun articles. These two gate-keeping measures means that your article likely will never be published.

Even if you manage to get your spun article into an article directory, the search engines are adept at spotting them, therefore they will never likely be found through a Google search or receive any traffic and your links won’t count.

Article spinning is a useless activity that is a waste of time and money. If you want to engage in article marketing, and you should, then don’t use article spinning software.

First of all, please wish TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog a Happy 7th Birthday!

It was 7 years ago today that I started this blog as an experiment to document industry news and develop my writing skills. With the help of many different people, it’s turned into quite a bit more than that.

THANK YOU for reading, sharing and contributing your insights. They are all very much appreciated and help fuel the continued publishing of this blog after thousands of posts:  2,496 to be exact and I’ve had the privilege of writing 2,075 of them.

The year 2010 provided to be one of focus on Social Media and Content Marketing topics over our past emphasis on SEO and Online PR. All are great topics in the online marketing mix, but as you’ll see below, readers are eating up social media content as fast as they can get it.

Here are the top 10 posts from Online Marketing Blog published in 2010:
(according to visits)

1. 10 Ways to Create a More Engaging Facebook Page – Facebook marketing is hot in 2010 and with close to 600 million users, it’s only going to get hotter in 2011. These basic tips are a great starting point for companies that want to increase their reach and customer engagement on Facebook.
2. 22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools – With 1,495 retweets and nearly 200 Facebook shares, this post about social media was very popular. Due to the meteoric rise of publishing and sharing tools, the social web can be overwhelming for marketers. These tools are part of growing category of software that help marketers, advertisers and public relations professionals manage their brands’ social participation.
3. 11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization - You can’t scale social media marketing or search engine optimization without tools and the intersection of social media and SEO offers a tremendous competitive advantage. These tools offer a range of benefits for creating and measuring search friendly social media content.
4. 5 B2B Social Media Winners - Social media isn’t just for consumer products and services. Content marketing and relationship building are key to longer sales cycles common to B2B marketing and social media offers an exceptional platform for engaging prospects with content and social media. These examples show how successful B2B companies are implementing social media into their marketing mix.
5. 25 Women That Rock Social Media - Let’s hear it for the women of social media. A response to a listing of (mostly men) top social media pundits on ClickZ by Erik Qualmann, this post lists 25 women who are rocking the social media world.
6. 5 Examples of Social Media in Healthcare Marketing - In line with our editorial plan that offers a matrix of tactical marketing tips intersecting with vertical markets, this post resonated with marketers part of the huge Healthcare industry looking for examples of social media in action.
7. Social Media Strategy – A Definitive Guide – Tapping into the amazing network I’ve been fortunate to develop of the past 10 years or so, this list of social media strategy advice comes from a range of industry luminaries. It also offers contrasting views between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan on social media strategy vs. tactics.
8. Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media? - This was another post about social media that did well socially, with 1,159 Retweets and 300 Facebook shares.  While numbered tips posts do quite well, personal observation posts like this one seem to connect with other marketers (and consultants) experiencing the stumbling of many companies and their efforts to make sense of the social web.
9. 5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix - LinkedIn is on the rise with over 90 million users and every Fortune 500 company represented. A plethora of new features and integration with other social channels has made LinkedIn a place worth spending time on outside of recruiting.
10. 5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy - Sometimes the best blog posts come from answering people’s questions via email. That’s the genesis of this post on practical and first hand advice on building a successful Twitter marketing strategy.

Overall, the most visited pages for this blog included our famous BIGLIST of SEO Blogs and the best list of Blog and RSS directories.  Based on social signals, search referring traffic and other KPIs, numbered lists continue to dominate the format that gains greatest exposure for content we post here. I’ll continue to provide those kinds of insights in 2011 and also welcome your feedback

If you’re a regular reader, what were some of your favorite posts over the past year? What would you like to see more of? Would you like to see more posts form other TopRank Marketing staff? Industry news? Videos (besides my travel videos of course), interviews, conference liveblogging?

After 7 years of blogging the focus of this agency blog is still to document what TopRank Marketing considers as topics worth discussing with an emphasis on Content, Search and Social.  Advertising, PR and Email will also enter the mix a bit more as well as some new faces from the TopRank Marketing team.  On top of that, your feedback is especially welcome.

Thanks again for reading and Happy New Year to you!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Top Online Marketing Posts for 2010 & 7 Year Blogging Birthday | http://www.toprankblog.com

Anchor text is a certain phrase that linkers, SEOs, and other Net citizens use to link from one page to another on the Internet. In other words, in this sentence, small business Internet marketing is the anchor text.

Why is anchor text important? Because search engine algorithms are based in part on them. Web pages that employ effective, non-spammy anchor text can rank higher for the targeted key phrase. As a website owner and a small business owner doing business online, you’ll need to learn how to employ effective anchor text.

Many SEOs claim that “white hat” SEO cannot produce good anchor text. For that, you need to engage in some “black hat” or “gray hat” practices. Those terms are in reference to what search engines consider viable ways to earn links. The “white hat” variety are approved by search engines as acceptable. “Black hat” techniques can get your website banned or de-listed from the search engines.

The following 5 methods of obtaining strong anchor text links are all white hat SEO techniques. They work and I highly encourage you to use them.

1. Press releases – Submit a press release to a PR directory and make sure you use effective anchor text to promote the pages you want to promote. Those press releases will often be used exactly as submitted, with anchor text intact.
2. Embeddable Content – Widgets, badges, and videos are three common types of embeddable content. You can create these with anchor text within the embedded content and if it isn’t spammy in nature, the search engines will honor those links.
3. Directed Anchor Text – If you license or give away your content for use by others, you can require that links use specific anchor text. Place your own requirements and restrictions on content you license or give away.
4. Biographical Text - If you do speaking engagements, guest posts, engage in social media, or participate in activities that provide you opportunities to have a bio published, use a standard bio that contains link anchor text. It’s a good way to earn hundreds or thousands of anchor text links.
5. Be A Guest Writer – A popular new way to build links now is to guest blog or guest write for another website. You can often link to your own website with the anchor text of your choice.

Anchor text is not hard to earn. You do have to go about it in a smart way, but the principles are embedded in the nature of the Web.