If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, you probably don’t read a lot of marketing blogs or marketing books. He’s authored about a half dozen, including my personal favorite entitled “All Marketers Are Liars.” He’s spoken at Google and his blog was recently listed as the number 1 marketing blog in the world. Ok, enough with his bio; one of his recent posts greatly disappointed me, because he apparently doesn’t understand SEO. After looking deeply at his blog, I was horrified to discover some major downfalls. So I’m going to make some claims, show some evidence and put forth a logical case against his view point and I’m even going to slam his article on SEO as naïve, ill-contrived and most importantly, encouraging of a very expensive mistake for business owners. I’ve got nothing personally against him, but when someone that public publishes something so ignorant concerning a large part of my profession, it warrants a strong response.
First let’s go over his position. His post entitled “Shortcuts That Aren’t So Short” compares SEO to taking short cuts and basically makes the case you see in the following quote:
“Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags?… Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.”
Unfortunately, his position is misleading and can be potentially deadly for your business. I don’t need to use a theoretical example this time. This problem is so widespread that I’m going to give a REAL life example I worked on THIS week. That’s right THIS WEEK! It contradicts all the major purists’ statements against SEO, including Seth Godin’s. One of my weekly projects is for a financial advisor that just launched a new website and blog a month ago. The author is a former newspaper journalist; and he’s off to a prolific blogging start (he posts daily) and his articles are EXCELLENT. His current traffic level is next to 0.
The problem is his blog is designed incorrectly. It uses the same title on all the pages and none of his posts target specific keywords. Additionally, the blog doesn’t ping anywhere when new posts are added, so none of his posts are showing up on any of the blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search. There are other issues as well, but that’s a simple beginning of what I’ll be working on with his site.
Basically his blog is invisible and nothing except fixing the design problems and targeting keywords is going to change that. He could continue to write all the GREAT posts he wants, but no one will be reading them. Why? Google has only indexed his front page and is never going to rank any of his posts for anything. He has great content, but no one’s reading it. What does he need? SEO. While I don’t like using that term, it is appropriate in this instance: he needs an SEO expert to rework his blogging strategy so his posts and blog rank on Google and drive new readers and new potential customers to his site. In the next month I’ll post detailed stats so my readers can see the gigantic traffic increases that are going to result DIRECTLY from my work with his site.
Not every example has to involve new sites or even significant design changes to make profitable gains in the search engine results pages. I recently changed 5 lines in the .htaccess and robots.txt for a particular website. That’s right, just 5 lines of code. It resulted in traffic increases of 20% with the raw traffic being 200 more DAILY visitors from Google. That’s a lot of traffic from changing 5 lines. So what happened? I told Google not to index the duplicate content portions of a particular website; among other things, this resulted in more page rank flowing to the internal pages as opposed to being wasted on duplicate content sections. Yeah, all that from 5 lines!!! Here is a link to a post by Shoe Money, a famous Internet Marketer and one of the top 100 bloggers according Technorati; recanting a similar story of changing only a few lines and seeing a big difference.
Now I’ll illustrate how SEO can help another HUGE A-list bogger like Seth Godin who already has an audience. Jason Calcanis, a very popular blogger, recently blasted SEO as bullshit and was met with a challenge by Neil Patel that said he could increase the traffic to Jason’s blog by over 20% by implementing some basic changes within only a few months. Jason, who already had a popular site, readers and a large audience, took the bet. Within two months his traffic was already up 20% and most of the changes recommended by Neil haven’t even been executed yet. You can read about that more at the link above. The unfortunate thing about this story is that Jason ended up getting SEO for free.
So now I’ll give my challenge (although I doubt he’ll respond) to Seth Godin: pay for my SEO services and I’ll increase your traffic by 20% or more (probably more like 40%) in 6 months. If I fail to have gains that substantial, I’ll give Seth all his money back. With all the increased traffic and subscribers I imagine even Seth Godin would sell more books and all that by implementing SEO and design changes.
Imagine if someone who isn’t already famous, who has to fight to get people to see their blog posts and is just building their online presence, takes Seth’s advice? They’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. Sure there are no magic shortcuts; you can’t just get a bunch of spammy links, but paying attention to keywords and using a design that encourages optimal search engine optimization has MAJOR positive effects when the other stuff is right too. It’s not a little thing, it’s huge and it can be the difference between your business website failing or being successful online.
Google is not as “smart” as people seem to think it is. It’s more like a 5 year old. You have to tell it specially what keywords and what neighborhoods to associate your site with. It WON’T do this automatically. Lots of sites with great content don’t have the rankings they deserve, and it’s usually do to SEO, design and marketing issues as opposed to content quality.
It’s also worth noting that Seth Godin’s blog is on Typepad and absolutely terribly optimized for SEO. If he didn’t have such a large pre-built audience, his blog would be mainly invisible. A few little changes would increase his traffic a ton, even with all the links and exposure he already has.
[tagsSeth Godin, bad SEO advice, search engine marketing[/tags
This seems like an almost trivial thing to write about, but lately it’s been discussed in one of the major search marketing blogs: SEO Book. If you’ve been to Starbucks lately you may have noticed that printed on each coffee cup are quotes from various people throughout history. On the bottom of the same cup is a disclaimer stating that it’s the opinion of individual author and does not necessarily represent the opinion of Starbucks. Sounds pretty basic right?
What’s interesting is that there have been numerous posts where the author actually gets angry at Starbucks for posting a disclaimer and claims that should “back up” or vogue for the opinions on their cups.
Some of the geeks are getting a little to used to conversational marketing and they’re starting to view regular brick and mortar chain stores with the same expectations of what they read and see in the blogosphere. I don’t think (at least I hope not) that attitude will spread much out of the geek sector, but I thought it was worth pointing out this shift in view. Conversational marketing is characterized by a show of genuineness and even a successful online marketer like Aaron Wall expected Starbucks to stand behind their quotes. Personally, I don’t need to feel like Starbucks is having a conversation with me, I just want my coffee in a nice setting and I’m glad that an interesting quote is there for me to look at. Further, I would assume that’s probably the majority of their customers!
I personally don’t see anything wrong with a disclaimer, and view it as standard protocol for a large corporation. One of the most recent cups had a quote about evolution vs. intelligent design. Without that disclaimer, I could just picture some group getting all up in arms and suggesting a boycott. That type of bad PR is something a big company can’t afford.
We live in a hypersensitive society with leaders just looking to use stupid examples like a quote to gain free media exposure and rally people around a cause, regardless of how ridiculous it may appear (e.g teletubies, jeopardy, barney anyone?).
On the web, it’s common for small companies with blogs to make bold statements and even stand behind controversies. The reason why is because in the online world, strong opinions and being perceived as genuine can greatly improve your online presence by attracting thousands of links from bloggers looking for stuff to talk about. Also, a small company has a lot lower risk to reward ratio, because things like boycotts and bad pr are less likely to happen.
And after all is said and done, it’s just a quote on a coffee cup.
[tagsconversational marketing, starbucks[/tags
In my last article I wrote about how search marketing is currently like a giant popularity contest. This begs the question of what’s going to come next as Google’s and the other engines’ algorithms keep evolving and take into account more and more data. What will this mean for search marketers?
Although Google is doing some of this now, as technology increases, personalized historical search data and end user behavior analytics (or which site you click on when looking at list of items and how long you stay there) will gradually become more and more important until they spark the next major shift in SEO strategy.
I predict technology will take the search market from being “the popular web” to a contest of usability combined with messaging. The stockier your site and the higher percentage of return visits, the more it meets the needs of the users who found it from the keyword searches you’re targeting, the better it will rank. I wouldn’t expect this to happen anytime soon, but it’ll definitely be interesting.
Take, for example, the keyword “blue widgets.”
Currently, if you build a site on “blue widgets” and you become popular and encourage a lot of bloggers to link to your site using “blue widgets,” you may rank for that term, even if the majority of searchers finding your site from that search don’t find what they’re looking for and quickly bounce to another site. In the next wave of Search Engine marketing, if that scenario came to pass, Google would understand that your site wasn’t meeting their needs and it would start dropping it in the regular search engine results pages (maybe it would continue to rank well if you applied a filter or did a blog search), while a less popular site that really met the needs of users searching for a specific keyword may start rising for that keyword, even if it doesn’t have anywhere near the link popularity that the previous site had.
Very interesting. At this point I think the search engine marketers will split their time between analyzing and improving usability and continuing their current link building / baiting, and viral marketing strategies.
Just a thought.
[tagssearch engine marketing, SEM, web 3.0, usability[/tags
Currently, search engine marketing is best described by the phrase “popular.” This may change in the future, but right now, to rank in a competitive search term, you have to be popular; you know, like way back in high school where there was a division between the “cool kids†and everyone else.
Google uses specific metrics to rank websites. Some of them have to do with the keywords and structure of the site, and others have to do with how many links point to a site and what type and subject the sites are linking to. As soon as Google (ore the other engines, but since Google is the most important, I’ll almost always use it in my examples) starts using metric X as a guide for relevancy, a million marketers try to manipulate the hell out of metric X until it no longer works as well before. To counter this trend, the search engines have to continually add more and more metrics, or things to measure, to their algorithms.
For those of you that aren’t addicted to search engine marketing blogs the results regarding the current search engine market share have been released from a number of different sources each one using separate metrics. They been complied and analyzed by Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland here (it’s a VERY long article).
Here’s the jist. Most the sources agree Google is dominant and it’s market is increasing. Yahoo is plummeting, and MSN Live has just leveled off after severely plummeting for months. Ask is still around and holding it’s very niche market share just fine.
So basically, Google is THE search engine and Yahoo has lost much of the market share it had.
What to watch for:
There have been numerous negative rumors flying around the blogosphere about the integrity of Yahoo’s search results being comprised from paid listings and webmasters getting more of their pages indexed if they put Yahoo search on their site. That’s not good when their market share is already on such shaky ground. I predict Yahoo’s Search Engine percentage will decrease even more in the next 6 months.
Can Microsoft save MSN Live?
I don’t know. They haven’t been doing well with Vista, but I don’t think they’ll give up this easily.
How big can Google’s peace of the pie get?
I wonder how large or dominant a single company can get, before a new competitor emerges, the company splinters or something else happens.
[tagssearch engine wars, Google market share[/tags
Need more traffic for very specific niche keywords. One way to appeal to a very niche audience is to set up a separate blog apart from your main company site or blog. If you go super niche and update the blog (or pay someone else to update it regularly) you can target very niche demographics and it will be easier to attract links from other on topic sites that wouldn’t have linked to your commercial website. This is especially valuable if the marketing messages don’t entirely overlap on your commercial site and the niche blog.
By promoting a niche blog you can get very targeted traffic to flow through it and then direct an interested percentage by pre-qualifying them with an excellent CTA to either your commercial site or other commercial sections of your specialized blog (e.g. a lead capture.)
It takes a bit of strategizing, but if done correctly you can end up with a nice amount of traffic and leads that the original company site would have missed. This is because the overly commercial site might not have had the marketing required to attract on-topic niche links, which are absolutely necessary for search engine rankings.
[tagsSEO strategy, niche blogs[/tags
I setup A LOT of blogs (5 so far this week) and many times it’s difficult for customers to get or understand is that one of the key components in a successful blog search marketing campaign is shaping a blog so that it attracts links automatically from other on-topic blogs and sites.
If you fill your blog with promotional articles or mix too much commercial content with your more objective articles and personal anecdotes, you greatly reduce your ability to gain natural links.
This is why I often recommend companies co-brand their blog and separate it from the regular commercial content of their site; it’ll be easier to attract links. I’ve had a ton of success with this. If they can get some good links / traffic from social media, it’s always a great way to jump start a new website.
It’s a lot harder to get people to link to a “Buy This NOW” company blog than it is to create a catchy, co-branded blog who’s content and name are more targeted for attracting links and less stuffed with commercial content.
For ranking purposes, what keywords people use link to you are extremely important. If you co-brand your blog you can control (or more accurately encourage) what keywords other blogs and websites should use when linking to you. The more links to your blog and to the individual posts that use the exact keywords you are targeting, the more successful you’ll be. If you co-brand your blog you can actually use your target search in the name of your site, meaning instead of getting links to Company X’s Blog, you’ll get links to “Niche Industry Keyword Blog” and this will greatly propel your organic rankings.
When your blog structure encourages links with the right keywords, add some detailed objective posts and you could really gain links quickly. In less competitive industries adding an extra 100 quality links gained from a few good blog posts can make all the difference in being invisible or found on page 1.
[tagsblog seo strategy, blogging[/tags
Testimonial from TwoWayBattery.com
We were a bit skeptical at first. Our company had tried everything from PPC to organic SEO tactics in house solutions – and while we had moderate success – this success came at a very high cost by running PPC campaigns.
We decided to give Socialmediasystems.com a chance to help us optimize for a couple of our properties because they themselves ranked very well on highly competitive broad two and three word searches.
We are glad with our choice of working with Socialmediasystems.com. In a very short time, they have helped us rank on the first page of Google for our key phrase (two way batteries) and other variations of our search phrase. Thank you Socialmediasystems.com! You really do perform and we are happy to be working with you!
When you need two way radio batteries, get them online from one of the fastest growing battery retailers in the US – www.TwoWayBattery.com and when you need an internet advertising consultant, go to socialmediasystems.com: they perform!
Mike Pandey
Tel: 1-865-262-8305
Fax: 1-865-381-0622
I’m an optimist and I like to help companies and individuals be successful with their online marketing efforts. Occasionally though, I feel it’s important to look at what other people are saying about success online and off, look for deeper meaning, and warn customers of potential pitfalls regarding making money online and off.
I was recently outraged by a video blog post by Loren Feldman of 1938 Media claiming that all the sole reason some bloggers have larger audience levels was from hard work and then he goes on to rant about the reason why people make lots of money online comes from working harder than everyone else. Hard work is important, but absolutely not the sole (or even primary) reason for success (online or off) and anyone who claims it is naive at best.
Loren Feldman uses mass oversimplification to insult his audience and exaggerate the link between hard work and profitability.
Opportunity in Early Market Adaptation
First let’s talk about bloggers. Most of the popular bloggers were EARLY MARKET ADAPTERS. Meaning they were blogging when most people weren’t, so over the years they were able to build up a large audience. Note: this is why if you’re not blogging now you should start immediately; for many industries blogging is in it’s infancy and by starting now it’ll be a lot easier to gain an audience and build an online presence.
Even some of the recent most popular blogs had industry connections (like Techcrunch) before they ever started – connections many people don’t have.
You can build a new blog and get a large audience, but you’re going to need to use all your resources and it’s going to take more then just hard work. Some of the factors of online success are beyond your control, like hitting the right opportunities, having people like your writing and having a message or theme that sets your site / blog apart in a competitive marketplace. Creativity, market saturation, time available to devote to the project, competitiveness of your industry-all these and more contribute to one’s success in their chosen market.
Hard work has a smaller ROI in an over-saturated market place.
If you’re trying to compete in an over-saturated marketplace, then hard work offers much return and may not contribute to financial success at all. Take acting as an example.
That market is over-saturated. Lots of a lots of people want to be actors, but there aren’t many job opportunities comparatively in this field. You can be a GREAT actor and work 60+ hours week (I know many actors who do) and never make it, while other, less talented, less hard working individuals may make more money than you and be more famous. Why? Success in that industry is dependent on a lot of factors other than hard work and talent. Because the market is full of competition, hard work and talent by themselves don’t set you apart. The same holds true FOR MANY INDUSTRIES.
The “fate” or “right time and right place†factor
People devote their lives to buying and selling stocks. The stock market is a chaotic system; this means no person or computer can accurately predict what it’s going to do for any major length of time ( if you have an aptitude for math take chaos theory sometime, it’s fascinating!). I could take $10,000, invest it tomorrow, and by just picking a stock that “looks good” to me, potentially make 10,000 times my investment in 5 years. In fact, this scenario has to happen to so many people every 5 years, because some stocks grow that much.
Now say that someone was me. Does that mean I worked harder at the stock market then everyone else? Does that mean I have more stock-picking talent then all the professional stock brokers? Of course not! It would mean I picked the right stock at the right time and made a lot of money; you can’t read more into it then that.
Real World Success
The real world is almost (potentially is we’re not sure yet) infinitely more complex than the stock market, which in itself can’t be mathematically predicted and jumps all over the place. So don’t think success is easily summed up in such a complicated environment. Life is complicated and making it on top is dependent on a LARGE number of variables with only one of them being hard work; that’s reality, not the stuff Loren Feldman is slinging. Thanks for listening to my rant. I wish you all online success.
[tagssuccess, blogs, blogging, Loren Feldman, 1938 Media[/tags
The readers here may want to visit my six months old website that I built myself (I am a hacker, not a designer) using our original SEO blog theme that Solomon (our CIO) created for maximum SEO. While it is not nearly as beautifull as this (our latest) theme, it is equally effective for organic search engine placement when coupled with our other methodology. It is very easy to find: it is the number one advertising consultant blog in the world according to Google, untill this 60 days old one catches up!
Yes, that is correct: we do the same thing for our clients, like twowaybattery.com and cutratebatteries.com, and we can do it for you also, every time, on purpose, for way less than you would expect!
Enjoy reading about some of our past successes at my old blog, then contact us for a free consultation: WE PERFORM!
[tagsblog themes,blog SEO,search engine placement[/tags
Social targeting is quickly becoming a benchmark with advertisers and publishers… not because it is a key to the golden gates of marketing 101, but because online consumers are adopting search behaviors to understand where they will find like-minded people. This adoption curve is creating thriving and multiplying
One of the top search marketing bloggers “Michael Grey” recently made a video cast telling new SEO bloggers to “step away from the keyboard.” Going on to rant on about if you can’t add something unique or different to the conversation then why bother. Well for one even if your blog doesn’t have a lot of subscribers it can be extremely valuable for your customers, yourself, and search engine rankings (Google loves fresh content and so should you).
Blog are exploding online and A-listers are taking notice (positively and negatively). For awhile now, a select few controlled the linking structure of the internet. These were the geeks, the techno nerds, the avid content producers online. In a funny post at seomoz, rand (one of the authors) refers to them as the linkarati. It’s a funny title, but it’s true. Blogs and the explosion of content production aims to change all that. You have a say in the sites that rank and the sites you consider relevant. Your links matter and you can promote the articles, sites, content or whatever else you want yourself, without any permission. It’s a great way to get your voice heard and connect with an audience, which could include your peers, future customers or anybody else.
More importantly, blogging is a form self expression; just because some people may not have the ability to reach a large audience and contribute some amazingly new information doesn’t mean they should stop blogging (as Michael Grey suggested).
I think they should blog more.
Writing, organizing your thoughts and becoming more effective at broadcasting your passion takes a lot of practice. Many of the people that are “natural†bloggers spent years in other writing related professions / hobbies. Honing a distinct voice and building up an audience base does not happen overnight. Blogging is in its infancy (for most professions). A new blog or site can get traffic almost immediately and as you blog more and add more information you can build and grow your online presence, your audience, your influence, and your pocket book.
The feedback and interactive conversations that blogs spark are valuable to almost anyone. Blogging is also a great way to develop strong argumentative and debating skills.
Michael Grey’s stunt sparked an interesting war in the blogosphere and two creative ways of getting use out of the current conversation popped up that are worth noting. Marketing Pilgrim (another search marketing blogger syndicated by Webpronews) asked for any search marketing blogger to leave their feed in his comments with a promise that he’d subscribe for at least two weeks and then continue on if you had something valuable to say. Very cool, nice way to promote blogging and capitalize on a current blogosphere conversation (hey he got a link from me; see how simple this is?)
The other was a cool videocast response by search Anyway Keep Blogging — Why Michael Gray is Wrong
So keep on blogging !
[tagsblogs, blogging, a list blogs, blog marketing[/tags
I recently posted a giant ranting comment on one of the most popular SEO blogs (seomoz). It was in a response to a post outlining a fictitious plan for how a catering company in Seattle could crush their competition in the Search Engine Results Pages. Their advice, although creative and well written, illustrates one of the biggest failings of large search engine optimization firms, especially ones targeting small and medium sized companies.
The list of items reads like a map to create the coolest catering website possible complete with forums, food photography, sexy graphic design, recipe guides – it goes on and on and I’m not even to the marketing part of it yet.
Here is the problem, what spurred my ranting comment and why I’m writing this article. The post attempts to boil down search engine ranking successes to creative ideas that involve very detailed and expensive web development projects. It makes it seem like it’s some kind of amazing creativity or resourcefulness that makes the difference between a site that ranks and a site that doesn’t. It’s not true. Ideas are great, they’re also online for free, millions of them spreading like viruses at this very moment.
If you look at that article it’s full of 40 ideas for improving a caterer’s website, but of course I wouldn’t expect most of them to pop up anytime soon. Why? Because it’s not about the idea or trying to be extra creative, that’s what may appear to be why a site ranks, but it’s really about the execution. That part is hard and rarely done well.
So why aren’t Seattle catering websites already equipped with such a dream lists of features and marketing? Because they’re stupid? No, because they’re busy doing business and don’t have the means to execute those plans effectively (or don’t think they do with their current SEO / Web contacts). It’s the execution that’s the valuable part now and although many SEO consultants talk about grandiose ideas and plans, it’s apparent from their broken sites and blogs they like to talk more then do.
I don’t like to be self-promotional in my blog posts, but for this one I’m making an exception. I and the rest of the social media system team try to focus on the execution. We are constantly asking ourselves what we can accomplish with a realistic budget and within the resources of our clients. We spend more of our time doing and less talking about what we’d like to do or in being too detailed (and thus wasting time and money) in our initial plan or overly detailed research. We call it performance based marketing and that’s why we bundle web development with search marketing to help us execute plans more effectively, so our customers see the fastest ROI. We treat it as a series of steps, with each one designed to make you money and improve your online presence and visibility instead of one grandiose dreamlike plan that costs a fortune initially and requires such a deep commitment before you see any results.
[tagsseomoz, seo plan, search engine optimization plan, search engine marketing plan[/tags
Can you believe a professional search marketing company called the Scoreboard Media Group actually posted a claim that the first question you should ask an SEO consultant is:
" If you can rank a site in lucrative markets, why would you do it for clients instead of for yourself? "
And he’s not talking search marketing companies ranking their own company sites (which they should be able to do), he’s actually referring to why would you choose to solely provide that service to clients when you could make more money from that skill set on your own private ventures?
What he really means is why are search marketing consultants spending all their time helping other sites rank when they could devote a large port of their time / energy to ranking their own middle man or affiliate sites and make more money off that.
What kind of a question is that? Doesn’t he understand that SEO involves marketing empowered by various technologies? Most business don’t exist as a one man shop or solely as a website. Marketing is a separate skill from running an entire company and I think most of the websites that are directly profitable from just content creation and SEO related tasks (e.g. opposed to a physical business with employees, bookkeepers, inventory, professional services) are not particularly worthwhile. It’s surprising the author doesn’t get this, considering he claims to have “consulted and trained many of the top global brands in nearly every major vertical market.â€. Some examples of site profitable from just SEO and content creation include: affiliate sales, PPC arbitrage, lead generation sites etc.
To answer his question I think devoting half of my time to growing one affiliate site or something similar would not only be very boring, but also not particularly valuable to the world. I don’t want to spend my life trying to get the most people to click on some crappy ads or buy stuff they don’t need. I realize there is some of this in regular search marketing as well, but it’s not only that. I spend a large portion of my day designing blogs, promoting sites online and helping small and medium sizes businesses understand and use the internet to be more effective and meet their customers’ needs.
[tagsScoreboard Media Group, SEO consultant[/tags
Authoring a blog and producing content is not just the flavor of the week. As the internet matures more and more people and companies are authoring extensive volumes of information and putting it online for free. All this great information is creating a powerful link and information structure. Google (and the other search engines) favor content producers increasingly each day. If you don’t start producing content relatively soon, there is a good chance your business will become almost completely marginalized until new algorithms start favoring something else (but don’t expect this for long time).
I can honestly say that right now almost any company with only a brochure site, needs to either start producing content, pay someone else to produce content for them, or give up any chance at competitive rankings. If you’re lucky you might be able to do well using some grey hat link buying techniques and link ninjaing, but for how long?
How long will that work when thousands of companies are racing to put better more attractive content then you are, for free. All the knowledge and info online is becoming commoditized. Web 2.0 brought user- generated content, so content production is flourishing, but it’s slow to move over to the non-tech industries. Any individual or business that gets started producing content now will be much better off then if they wait until they’re marginalized and it becomes harder. With a new blog every second, the time to start is now.
There are some exceptions, like if they had some potential to go completely viral (maybe a tool or reference of some sort), but the reality is the space on the web reserved for the brochure site / cookie cutter shopping cart is dying.
[tagssearch marketing, content producer, user generated content[/tags
The expo is at the Moscone West in San Francisco from April 15 – 18. Whatever your definition of Web 2.0 is, looking at some of the high profile exhibitors from Adobe and AOL to Zoho and everyone else in between, It is worth taking note of. The expo is co-sponsored by O’Reilly Media and CMP Technololgy.
Considering there is no solid agreed upon definition of what Web 2.0 is there are companies large and small, old and new signing up to find out how to take advantage. The expo will include internet industry leaders offering examples of business models, development paradigms and design strategies to help mainstream businesses and new companies in various industries take advantage of these new opportunities.
The expo is an addition to the Web 2.0 Summit, previously the Web 2.0 conference, which is the first to address Web 2.0 opportunities and applications specifically. The summit will highlight experts, leaders and under-the-radar innovators. And in the spirit of Web 2.0 there will be ample time for attendees and exhibitors to contribute, collaborate and connect.
Another interesting aspect is the Web 2.Open Sessions which are free to anyone attending the expo or summit, and also free for anyone else who wants to attend (they just ask that you wear a badge). You can find a free code to use to enter this portion of the conference on this page. You can find out more information and up-to-date topic proposals at the Web 2.Open wiki.
Additional Resources:
Web 2.0 Official Expo Site
Web 2.0 Summit Blog
Web 2.Open Site (sponsored by Social Text)
Web 2.0 Speakers (along with bios)
[tagsweb 2.0 expo, web 2.0 summit, web 2.0[/tags
This article is the first in a follow up series on a popular article I wrote last week making the case for the need to market your blog’s content and how I believe the reason good blogs often go unread is do to poor marketing.
I called it a secret for added sensationalism, but also to SPECIFICALLY market it to people that are looking for some secret, some quick fix, some blog marketing trick , because this article may be or contain the information they actually need without all the snake oil.
The most important aspect of blog marketing is crafting the message your blog as whole (the blog title, the individual post title, the graphics, the name, the READERS ASSUMPTIONS OF WHAT SHOULD BE THERE) tell a first time visitor, before they even read past the first line.
The world is changing at a faster rate then ever, and the computer is to blame. All forms of media have moved to the internet; TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, movies, photos; it’s overwhelming.
The way we conduct business today is different too. Everything is faster, smaller, and more complex. The learning curve is getting steeper and harder to climb; and most of us are scared. Scared of uncertainty; scared of change.
But don’t feel left behind because the industry of internet marketing has appeared almost overnight. If you think about it in terms of the bigger picture, the way we conduct business on the internet itself is brand spankin’ new.
Due to the giant learning curve involved with such high technology, meaning the computer and the internet, there are very few companies that know how to harness the awesome power of the internet. In all fairness, how does one company learn and understand all the new technologies that appear daily? How can one person possibly keep up with such an endless task, constantly adapting to the pushing and pulling tides of this shift?
Answer: you can’t. You need help.
We’re all trying to do the same exact thing; fish. Fish for new customers, fish for new business in the world wide ocean called the internet. The ironic part is we are all caught in a net; some are the fisherman, and the others, the fish; some the hunters, others the hunted.
It may already be apparent that your business’ livelihood will soon come to depend increasingly on the business that comes from the internet than any other place.
Think about it. When was the last time you used the Yellow Pages? What about the newspaper, or magazines? When will be the day when these media aren’t printed anymore?
To the younger generations it makes sense because we’re familiar with and grew up in the age of the Internet. Need an answer to a question? Google it! Need to find directions? Google it! In a rush and need to find the closest gas station? Google it from your phone!
The main point is that the internet is an extremely powerful marketing tool and should be used to propel your existing marketing efforts, not replace it. Don’t be scared; welcome technology and the internet with open arms.
Everyone should have an updated website, satisfying content, a genuine message, a call to action and a way for visitors to leave their contact information so you can follow up. If someone comes to your website but doesn’t buy, that’s the time to spend the money and effort on direct mail, email campaigns, phone solicitations, etc.
It’s not about new V.S. old; it’s about the best of both worlds. It’s about the added strength that comes when two proven methods are forged together to form a new stronger product, method, or business. It’s about riding the wave and not getting lost in the ocean.
[tagsinternet marketing advice [/tags
The web designer wants you to just trust him, and not to listen to the sales department. The sales department is sure that the Geek who runs the back end is a communist. The website is invisible because someone thought a no-cache tag would be a cute way to avoid outdated content, and none of the pages are cached. The owner is pissed off at everyone because there is no amount he can spend to get results. The advertising department is going crazy, because there is no conversion – it is definitely the webmaster’s fault according to them. The webmaster is going crazy because the owner’s favorite site is ugly, and he hates the idea of anything modern. The salespeople are starving and quitting.
If you were just getting used to the word blog (short for web log) and you still do not know exactly what social media means, you need to catch up quickly! The next big shift on the internet is well underway and it will leave you behind, lost in oblivion!
That website that you have: you know, the one with no way for a visitor to interact with the site, with you, or with the other visitors is already dead: it probably never produced much anyway!
If you are paying per-lead or per-click it is very likely that you are competing with lead aggregators: middlemen who need not make money at what you do, because they are buying your market, then selling it back to you (less the profit!).
When you get tired of trying to be your own lawyer in this unholy, largely unregulated courtroom, this stock market with no SEC, it will already be too late to dominate the first page of the major search engines organic results for your industry and-or location: because my clients will already be there, and they will be so far ahead you will never catch up.
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