Ideas for Business

Anyone who has read my blog for very long knows that I am a strong advocate of article marketing. That is, I believe that writing articles and publishing off of your website with links back to your website is a good way to promote yourself online. The benefits are simple:

• Free one-way links
• Enhanced reputation for the author
• New targeted traffic to your website
• And that’s just a start

HubPages has done well to provide these benefits. But due to a recent Google algorithm change, which everyone has started calling Panda, HubPages has had to undergo some policy changes.

Some of these changes makes me wonder why HubPages ever accepted some articles in the first place. For instance:

Duplicated Content: While we used to allow some duplicated content (e.g. if it also existed on your blog and so long as you did not link back to the source), it is now required that all content published on HubPages be unique to the site

I’d have thought that would be a no-brainer. But I guess not.

There are other policies HubPages are incorporating that I give them credit for. Some authors may not like them, but I think they are great changes. The result will be more credibility for HubPages and for its authors. Everyone wins. How can that be bad?

About once a year or so you should go through your old content and update it. This includes your static content, blog content, and maybe even your social media content. Any piece of content that you use for marketing purposes or PR should be looked at for the following purposes:

• Make sure it still contains factual information
• Ensure it is current in terms of content, facts, and style
• Represents your current company goals, direction, mission, and vision (because these do change over time)
• To keep it focused on your customer’s needs
• Analyze it to see if you can use it for other purposes
• And to be sure you still want it working for you

Not all of your content will need to be updated. Some of it will only need minor tweaks. And still other content will need a major overhaul. Some of it you might want to dispense with altogether for one reason or another (it’s best, if you do away with old content, to redirect it to another content page you control rather than just delete altogether).

Sometimes you can turn a popular blog post into an article. Rewrite it so that it isn’t duplicate content and distribute it to a few publishers around the Web to see if someone wants it.

There are many ways to revamp and repurpose old content. Do what’s right for you and your customers, but don’t be afraid to revisit the past.

Search & Social Influence - eMarketer

Reuters posted an article yesterday entitled, “Is SEO DOA as a core marketing strategy?” and trust me, I know better than to respond and fuel attention to a writer who is either naive or trying to stir up the bee’s nest with a contrarian title. I suspect there may be a bit of both in this situation. Basically, the article makes the argument that entrepreneurs “may want to reconsider pouring money into search engine optimization (SEO) as their primary marketing strategy” based on an ill conceived post by Chris Dixon “SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups”. The reason I am posting about another “SEO is Dead” diatribe, is that with the right context, I would agree.

Before you think I’ve turned coat away from SEO, read my comment in response to the Reuters SEO is DOA post:

If you don’t want prospects, customers, investors, marketing partners, job candidates or journalists to find your content via search, then by all means – don’t even bother with SEO.

As a standalone tactic, (which is not the same thing as core) SEO is not what it was a few years ago and that is a valid point.

As others in the article state, SEO works in conjunction with other marketing, advertising and public relations tactics to achieve business goals. To work best across disciplines, SEO needs to be a core principle in online marketing since it affects discovery anywhere something can be searched on – including social networking and media sites.

If a business isn’t optimizing for improved findability, one needs to wonder what they’re hiding from?

For some reason, there’s a set of people in the biz media that like to focus on a small segment of opportunists making big claims with no skills about SEO vs. the thousands of professionals that are making a huge impact on companies’ bottom line.  The fact that there are a few misrepresenting the whole is no different than any other industry whether it’s PR, legal or car repair.  Making the effort to understand what SEO really is can help those who are not practitioners, but in a position to write about it, see the difference between the exception and the rule.

I’ve been providing SEO services since 1997 and like other industries, SEO has changed. Stand alone SEO only makes up a small percentage of our current consulting engagements. Most of what we do includes SEO as an element working in concert with social media, content marketing, email, PPC, social advertising and online PR.  Companies that want us to “just optimize” their site are met with questions about how much revenue they’d like to grow. Then we work backward from those goals and develop the appropriate strategy and mix of tactics, which often includes SEO.

Masterful SEO practitioners possess a unique set of skills ranging from technical to creative. As technology and consumer behaviors online have changed, so have SEO best practices.

Search as a means of discovery is massively popular. Google sites alone handle over 88 billion queries per month. The sheer volume of content being produced can possibly be filtered in a qualitative way by personal recommendations on social networks. Search plays an essential role for people that need to find answers whether it’s on a standard search engine like Google or Bing, the internal search engine on Facebook or YouTube, or on mobile devices.  In fact, search engines are the most popular destinations on smart phones, not social networks.

For many businesses, SEO is absolutely the most viable core marketing strategy.  And that strategy often includes working in concert with other marketing tactics such as PPC, content, display and email. SEO and nothing else is a disadvantage compared to SEO that is amplified by a robust social media and content marketing program.

As long as there are consumers in need of search engines, there will be a demand for expertise that helps brands surface their relevant content where people are looking.  If a company’s target audience is prone to use search for information discovery, then building a website with search in mind is absolutely a best practice. As I mentioned in the Reuter’s comment above, if a website isn’t optimizing content so prospects and customers can find easily find their content, what are they hiding? What’s the point of having a website?

If you’re a client side SEO practitioner or if you work at an agency as an SEO, what is your mix of stand alone SEO projects vs. SEO working in concert with other marketing?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Response: Is SEO DOA As a Core Marketing Strategy? | http://www.toprankblog.com

Yesterday, the Internet’s largest has been – Yahoo! – sold Delicious. But unless you’ve heard the news, you might not guess who the buyers were. Do the names Chad Hurley and Steve Chen mean anything? No? How about YouTube?

Mssrs. Hurley and Chen are co-founders of YouTube, which they sold to Google awhile back. So I suppose they had the money to buy the struggling social bookmarking website.

Delicious is one of the early forerunners of social bookmarking. You would think that it would have a lot more clout today because of its early start status. And it might have had it not been purchased by Yahoo! a long, long time ago.

The question is, can these two successful entrepreneurs take Delicious and turn it into a superstar? They’ve already been a big part of two other Internet companies that achieved superstar status – PayPal and YouTube. That at least gives me a little bit of confidence in the future of Delicious. I was afraid that it might get shut down.

Yahoo! sent out an e-mail to Delicious members asking for their permission to transfer bookmarks to AVOS, Mssrs. Hurley’s and Chen’s new venture. Users of Delicious have until July 2011 to accept AVOSs terms of service and to transfer their bookmarks. Its current life will expire at that time and the new Delicious will be born. Are you as excited about this news as I am?

Ever wonder how you can use online sources for off-line marketing? There actually is a website that is perfect for this and that was created specifically for that purpose. It’s called Meetup.

Meetup allows you to create groups on any topic. You pick a location, start a group, and start congregating. Really simple, right?

Yes, sort of. But there’s more to it than that. Just like any group you start in the real world, there’s ongoing work involved. But Meetup does allow you to promote your group in a very affordable way. Because Meetup is a popular website, many people use it to find groups that meet around their interests.

Let’s say you want to start a group that meets weekly to discuss the best ways to use sneakers. This makes sense since you own a retail shoe shop. You decide you want your group to meet in the back room of your store so you start a Meetup group and advertise that your group will meet at your store location (provide the address please) on Tuesday evening at 7 p.m. when your store closes.

As an incentive for getting people to show up at your sneaker group, you could offer an after hours shopping special to anyone who becomes a member and has attended at least six meetings in the last four months. That’s good incentivized advertising.

All Meetup does is give you a platform. You do everything else. But because it’s a popular platform, you can use it to promote your off-line meetings and use your off-line meetings to promote your website and your business.

Meetup isn’t free for meeting organizers. There is a nominal fee, however, you can charge your members a fee for attending your meetings (but you should think about it before you decide to do that) and you can take sponsors for your group to allay the costs of your Meetup group (some groups even turn a profit). Any way you look at it, Meetup is a great way to use the Internet for your off-line marketing efforts.