Now I know the first question that many would ask is simply why? Why would you go to that effort and not take into account search engine issues? My response is simple, don’t question the question, answer it. What would happen if you ran a link building campaign that wasn’t looking to influence the search results.

If search isn’t your aim, then there can only be one other aim, you want to earn traffic from those links. Now we’re getting somewhere. How do you gain traffic from those links? You provide good quality content in the right places. Let’s do the numbers. Imagine writing a guest post that is going to be published on a web site that receives a thousand visitors each day.  If you can get 10% of those of visitors to click through, that’s potentially an increase of 100 visitors each day ,and if you can convert that to sales at the standard rate of 5%, that’s another five sales – from one guest posting.

This won’t happen across the board all of the time. However, it does drive home my point – search engine traffic is only one source of traffic. Replicate that link building approach 100 times and you’ll be getting a lot of extra traffic. You may not even need search results to survive in business. But here’s the real rub, if you took SEO out of link building, and built links to draw traffic instead of ‘link juice’, you’d probably be building the very links that search engines want to see. Think about it!

• Do you keep a list of inbound links that you have built?
• Do you check the currency of those links?
• Do you remove, or request removal of links if they sour?
• Do you redirect links (301 permanent redirect) after deleting pages?

There is more to link management than building links. It can be frustrating building links only too see pages (or whole websites) removed. It’s even more frustrating to find that what you thought was a quality site has soured in the eyes of search engines. That’s when a link removal request could be in order.

If you are building links, then keep a record of those links. A simple spreadsheet is all that is required, then once every three or four months, go through that list to ensure they are delivering a benefit to your pages, and not dragging them down.

Top 250 Internet Retailers

Social networking for retailers makes sense right? Make your brand visible where your consumers are spending the most time. This infographic from Campalyst shares information on one of the things that helps makes retailers successful online, a social presence. Key findings include:

• Number of followers by social platform
• How success on social networks is distributed
• The most followed industries on specific social channels

Featured Team Member Story

Mike Yanke – Who Will Win the War of the Sidebars?

While Google made headlines this week with the launch of its Knowledge Graph (ie a new sidebar element designed provide facts the search giant has amassed on people, places and things), emerging force Bing made its own announcement last week with a platform relaunch, complete with a social sidebar. So what sidebar format will most engage users – a vast collection of knowledge on people, places or things you may never see – or a vast collection of facts on people, places and things you may see every day? Check out Search Engine Land for more on both Bing’s social sidebar and Google’s Knowledge Graph.

This Week in Online Marketing News

Who Invited Penguin & Panda to the Party?
Google’s new penguin update has many organizations confused, frustrated, and angry. It seems that many sites have seen a sudden drop in traffic, and are blaming “Penguin” and “Panda” for the decline. This article covers the importance of knowing which update affected your traffic as well as tips for gaining some of your traffic back. Via Yoast.

57% of Facebook users Never Click Ads
Facebook’s public offering has generated a lot of buzz and anticipation. However, the ineffectiveness of advertising and user distrust due to policy changes may stunt aggressive growth goals. Curious to know other results of this poll run by CNBC? Via MSNBC.

Is Google+ Becoming a Ghost Town?
This week Fast Company received exclusive insights into Google+. If it’s true that Google+ is the company’s “social spine” then they are in need of some serious adjustments. The picture painted by the data shows very weak user engagement, waning interest and minimal social activity. Via Fast Company.

9 Ways to Be An Expert, Without the Attitude
There is a fine line between providing valuable information, and the stigma that comes with being thought of as an expert. This article provides 9 helpful tips that you can share valuable information in an influential way without being perceived as a jerk. Via Brass Tack Thinking.

17 Steps to Becoming a Content Curator
Many people curate content without even thinking about what they are doing. Re-sharing an article from a friend or colleague, or collecting and sharing a series of blog posts on a particular topic. There are some very simple rules that you can follow to properly curate and share the information you find online. This guide from Econsultancy covers the basics to set you up for success. Via Econsultancy.

TopRank Team News

Kodi Osmond – Yahoo Debuts Big Data App Called “Genome” at Internet Week
Genome, over-simplified, refers to the biological information needed to build a living thing. If one thinks of data as capturing the behavior of a living thing, then data must be a “living thing”, too. Perhaps this was the logic used when Yahoo named its big data software, scheduled to release in July. Read more of Yahoo’s press release and what EVP of Americas Rich Riley had to say at Venture Beat.

Shawna Kenyon – What People really Want vs. What They Share on Social Media
Social media monitoring company NetBase published a year’s worth of its own data and compared it against a Harris poll to determine the gaps between what people say in social media updates compared to what they actually want. They found that in general people are ‘emotional sharers’ but in actuality tend to be quite logical when asked a direct question. This article poses an interesting comparison between men and woman within a number of categories. Via Mashable.

Roxanne Hagberg – Google Search Just 1,000 Times Smarter
(We all know that Google’s Knowledge Graph is big news this week. Our team found this change to be very important for our readers so we have included another review from Mashable)

Google taps into a variety of knowledge databases to roll out “Knowledge Graph”, the next generation of search. Knowledge Graph allows users to quickly narrow their search to find the most relevant results. Via Mashable.

Brian Larson – Saving Time in Google Analytics
I remember the first time I really, really dug into a Google Analytics (GA) profile. I logged into GA at noon and the next time I looked up it was time to go home. There’s no doubt that there’s a tremendous amount of valuable information in GA. There’s also no doubt that it can be easy to lose time data mining in this tool. Search Engine Watch’s Eric Stiu shares ‘7 Time Saving Google Analytics Custom Reports’. Via Search Engine Watch.

Time to Weigh In: Wow, this was a big week in SEO and social news. Google “Penguin” as well as their new “Knowledge Graph” are on the minds of many organizations. Has your company seen any significant decreases in traffic since this release? Do you believe that Google+ is a truly effective mechanism for engaging customers and clients socially? What updates would you recommend Google+ make to increase usability and engagement?

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

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Online Marketing News: Top Internet Retailers, Google Penguin & Panda Party Crash, Users Distrust Facebook | http://www.toprankblog.com

Of course, “build inbound links” has long been the call of the SEO wild. In recent times, that has changed somewhat to include building outbound links. The whole link building scene has changed once more with Google now treating some links with disdain – in fact, they are treating some links as poison and many a site has experienced a sudden overnight crash in traffic numbers. If links are the issue, what type of links now draw Google’s disfavor?

• Paid links – if a link looks like it has been paid for, then you’re going to get nailed by Google. Obvious paid links include those in footers and those in sidebars.  The best links are those found within content, that relate to the content, and that link to related content on your site. In the past, it was those accepting payment for links that took the hit – now it’s the link destination that takes a hit.
• Social bookmarking – if you have a long list of poor quality social bookmarking sites that you send every post to – stop. Social bookmarking really only counts if the site is a quality bookmarking site, and if it’s your visitors who are doing the bookmarking.
• Directories – quality is again the issue when it comes to directories. There are thousands of directories online now, and most are poor quality. Ironically, higher quality directories that charge for a listing have escaped Google’s attention. If you want to pay for links, then look at some of those high quality directories.
• Article marketing - like every other link issue, quality is again the problem. Write an article, spin it to death and send it to a couple of hundred directories and you’re asking for trouble. Write a single article and have it guest posted on a quality site, or saved to a quality article directory and you may be okay. From what we have seen in the last Google updates, some supposedly quality sites and directories suddenly fell out of favor.
• Blog comments – quality, content related, and preferably interactive – that should be your aim when it comes to blog commenting. Write a good comment on a blog post that relates to your niche and you won’t have a problem. Leave a dud comment on an unrelated blog post and Google will consider it spam.
• Forums – like blog comments, only write to forum posts that are related to your content. Steer clear of low quality forums – you can tell a low quality forum fairly quickly – there are un-moderated totally unrelated posts everywhere linking to weight loss and similar products. Look for heavily moderated forums that don’t tolerate spam.
• Self – one area that many website owners don’t consider is their own internal linking strategies, and the links they may send from any other web properties they own. You can link from every website you own, however, the expectation is that it’s going to be in some form of blogroll, not within unrelated content. The same is true for your own content – keep the internal link strategies to related content.

Inbound links are, in theory, supposed to take readers to more content on the same subject (not the same content either). If your links don’t achieve that goal, then somewhere along the line you’re going to get a Google slap down.

Photo Credit: Geoff Livingston - Flickr

[Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I'm happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.]

One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize. We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience.

We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline.

Consider the customer experience. They weave between traditional broadcast and print media into online seamlessly. For example, someone could ride their local train or subway, see ads, surf the Internet on their mobile phone, read a magazine (on their tablet or not), or a host of other activities.

You get the point. Customer media use supersedes tactical practices. That’s true for both B2B and B2C, though as Lee points out in his book, these sales cycles are very different.

Multichannel marketing applies to traditional print, broadcast, mail and PR approaches, too. They should all be optimized for search, too, with messaging and keywords that will invoke familiarity with stakeholders regardless of which media form they are seen.

Think about it. Customers search when they are looking to find something. If you optimize online ads, content, social and SEO so that search indexes your company’s name first, then you absolutely need your print ads, direct mail, press documents, white papers and broadcast ads to use the same keywords.

A customer may not even realize it, but they are mentally associating these words — message components — with your brand. When they search, they will use the keywords, and your optimized content will naturally come up in the top results. More importantly, it will already be familiar to your customer.

Take it a step further and add your creative, ads and content to the web site in a the modern press room. Transcribe the broadcast media so the keywords are searchable. Make them shareable. and start real discussions on them. Even ask for feedback on the ads. All of your traditional content can be repurposed, optimized and indexed for social and search.

That’s why all marketing disciplines should be integrated and operate together as a collective whole. Marketing in the Round discusses selecting traditional tactics and newer disciplines like social, online and mobile. It’s about how to weave them together to achieve the common objective.

Geoff Livingston is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication ?rm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

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

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich | http://www.toprankblog.com

What’s After The Social Media Craze?

If you didn’t hear already, GM announced that they will no longer be advertising in Facebook.  That may not mean a lot to you, but for a company that has almost a 2 billion dollar annual ad budget, it starts to make you think.

Actually, I’m not shocked.  In fact, I was wondering when a large company like GM would stand up and say “Not anymore.”  Why?  The very fact that their brand is in the social network creates demand for the network and not necessarily the brand itself.  In addition, Facebook and most social media sites for that matter don’t protect your intellectual property, but instead leverage it to attract more users and social engagement.  In lemans terms that means that your brand (especially large ones) create demand on social media sites because of their global brand equity.  So that begs a great question…why should you advertise on a social network that:

• Takes advantage of your brand’s intellectual property
• Doesn’t really care about the personal privacy of its users
• Makes data mining impossible, which to make matters worse, businesses are actually paying the social network for in terms of advertising

When you really think about it, I think we are starting to see some of the real fundamental challenges social media networks are going to face in the near term.  In a nutshell, a business of any size participating in social media really doesn’t own anything.  So why should you spend your advertising budget in making the social media network more popular or attracting users that you don’t really own?

Like magic tricks, if you really want to know the secret, you have to ask yourself…”What would have made that better?”  I have been asking myself that question for quite some time now and think I have the beginning of something that I call social media 2.0.  So what would that look like you ask?  Here are some of the attributes that I would expect to see:

• Decentralized information of a hub like format (aka- the social hub would not be the owner of the content)
• Users of the network would be able to control and keep track of their users (not to say it couldn’t connect to a hub, but the database would be kept locally on a host or your computer)
• Your intellectual property is protected and your advertising spend to increase your social engagement is actually yours

I’m not at all advocating that social media is dead, however I am suggesting that we are going to see shift in how social networks are utilized and what they will look like.  Will Facebook be the leader 5 years from now?  You might be saying “Yeah they have over 900 million users….”, but then again we saw the fall of MySpace and the recent popularity growth of Pinterest.  If I were to sincerely wage my bets, I would doubt that we have seen the Facebook killer to date, however could be around the corner if the technological issues of social media 2.0 could be worked out and enough resources were devoted to make it work.

Here’s how it works. Ikea has sent e-mails to its loyalty list announcing the brands latest products. The e-mail links to the micro-site which basically acts a teaser and encourages readers to view the full range of products on Pinterest. Readers are encouraged to “re-pin” products they like, and to share those products on Facebook.

This should prove to be effective in a number of areas. Pinterest itself will send visitors to Ikea’s main website, and Ikea will hope they decide to sign up for future newsletters and special offers. Facebook will also attract readers, and they too will be sent to Ikea’s main website, again, to view products and hopefully sign up for newsletters.

The end result is more brand awareness; awareness of Ikea’s latest products (inspired by the culture in India); and an enlarged e-mail list. Of course, the real prize will be in the number of sales that Ikea can make from readers who like these products and visit their stores.

What is interesting is that anyone can duplicate this marketing plan for a new product launch. The four channels (e-mail, micro-site, Pinterest and Facebook) can be used together very effectively and the flow of traffic can be quite large if your content is written in a manner that engages readers.  As a small business marketing plan, it’s simple, it’s clean, and it’s very doable.

BrandRepublic has more information on Ikea’s marketing strategy here if you’re interested.

At TopRank Online Marketing, we are fortunate to provide consulting to quite a few innovative B2B companies that serve other marketers. A great example of that is PRWeb and parent company, Vocus, both long standing clients.

In late 2011 Vocus welcomed Jason Jue as Chief Marketing Officer. As Vocus & PRWeb’s Account Manager at TopRank, I was keenly interested in getting to know Jason better and learning his plans for the future – and what better way than through an interview for all readers of Online Marketing Blog to see?

In this interview Jason talks about the undeniable convergence of PR and marketing, what social media metric is most undervalued by many PR and marketing professionals, where marketers should invest for 2013 and his vision for Vocus.

Tell us a little bit about your background and what excites you most about joining Vocus? 

Prior to Vocus, I was Vice President of Marketing at Rackspace and had several executive positions at Dell in the US and Asia, marketing to businesses. Vocus offers cloud marketing and PR software to businesses in every market sectors and size that want to reach and influence buyers

I’m excited about sharing with businesses how easily our products work wonders for our current customers. Some of the leading marketing consultants such as Sirius Decisions and MarketingSherpa use our products to maximize their online publicity.

For some people, Vocus is synonymous with Public Relations software. Can you speak to how and when Vocus first expanded to offering marketing solutions?

We have always believed PR to be a core part of “promoting a product or service” or marketing. Many customers who buy our PR software have a marketing title, and we’ve recently seen faster growth in this group. These customers use our social media and PRWeb news release features of our PR software. For them, we created a cloud marketing suite which integrates search, publicity, and social media marketing. Our cloud marketing suite was the most successful product launch in Vocus history, and will be even better when it includes email later this year.

Do you see PR and marketing professionals as two separate audiences? Or are they converging disciplines?

In marketing teams that have PR and marketing professionals, we continue to see them as two audiences with different product needs, although their roles are converging, especially around social media. PR professionals are using social media for brand positioning. Marketing professionals use social media for lead gen. Meanwhile, for the millions of businesses who have few, if any marketers at all, the marketing functions blend together.

Use your crystal ball and give us a glimpse into the future. How will the Vocus offering change over the next 2 years? Where do you see the most opportunity for growth?

The future of marketing is simple and powerful integrated campaigns. Every marketing team realizes that when working together on unified and integrated campaigns, lead generation and brand perception results are much better than working alone.

I know that sounds like a pipe dream as marketing complexity has increased to address the everywhere all the time customer. Today’s customers are constantly switching back and forth from website, news, social, search, email, and mobile. To add confusion, each specialty has their marketing tools resulting in silos and disjointed communication.

In the near future, marketers will be able to buy cloud marketing software to easily manage integrated campaigns. It will incorporate the trendy with the tried-and-true tactics of marketing The essential elements will work together for better results in lead generation and brand perception. And, it will recommend how and when to engage with prospects and customers.

Seem unbelievable? I think it’s unbelievable that it hasn’t already happened. In the past 15 years, every corporate function, from marketing to sales to HR, has seen a proliferation of technology tools. Marketing is the only function without a major product suite. IBM is doing it for large enterprise marketing. We are integrating all the important marketing tools into a cloud marketing suite so every business, large and small, can easily achieve big results .

Staying on social for a moment, what is one social metric that you think may be most overlooked by PR and marketing professionals alike? On the flip side, any stat that you view as overvalued?

The most important social media metric is how many people actively recommend your product or service. I think the most overvalued metrics are fans, followers, and likes.

As 2012 is well underway, what is one investment you think marketers must make in order to succeed the rest of the year and into 2013? (i.e. invest in mobile marketing)

Focus on marketing fundamentals that will dramatically accelerate growth. Who is your target customer? What product or service should you develop for them? How should you promote to them? Why should they buy from you?

Then, find the best product for you that simplifies all the marketing tactics and trends. This product will then let you focus on the marketing fundamentals.

Thanks, Jason!

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

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue | http://www.toprankblog.com

What’s often hidden in these statistics is how a business comes by their e-mail marketing list. Search marketing and social media marketing both play a big role in helping businesses build their e-mail lists. Potential customers have to find your site somehow, they don’t just magically appear in an e-mail list. Just as importantly, your business reputation, prices, and your web site in general all help to convince visitors to then sign up for your e-mails.

Having a well planned coordinated marketing approach will pay dividends. Rating well in search results (both organic and paid), and having an effective social media marketing plan will help to deliver potential customers to your door. You then need to sell them on the idea of signing up for a regular newsletter. Your newsletter (or marketing material), then needs to be designed to engage readers and to bring them back to your website (or shopfront) to spend their money.

The mistake many businesses make is to target sales and nothing else. Often, visitors to your site are still in the ‘looking’ stage of a purchase. Rather than targeting a sale all of the time, consider changing some of your marketing activities to building an e-mail marketing list. That list will reward you many times over, and keep your customers coming back for more. If you can’t sell, don’t lose them, convert them to readers of your e-mail marketing material – more people spend from an e-mail than they do from either search or social.