Ideas for Business

So you think you don’t have any spammy links. I would estimate that just about every website on the Internet would have at least one spammy link, even if it has been created by accident, or in the early days when you were trying to build your business.

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.

If you are looking to see how a coordinated social media marketing campaigns looks, then there is probably none better than that put together by Ikea. The famous flat pack furniture specialists have created a campaign that combines the power of e-mail marketing, the use of a specialty micro-site, Pinterest and Facebook. It’s a mix that’s made in heaven for Ikea as it channels traffic through its latest creation.

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