Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

Recently, Britta Meyer of Eurekster, which makes an embeddable custom social search portal called a “Swicki”, posed a question on LinkedIn about how one would go about defining a social media marketing roadmap, and how you would prioritize each social media channel.

There is no cookie cutter approach to social media marketing. Your strategy will depend on:

1) Your goals - SEO, PR, traffic ( to drive awareness? advertising click-thus? conversions?)
2) Your audience - where does your target demo hang out?
3) Your resources - you, you plus an intern, internal team, agency?

Here are 6 steps to help you design your social media marketing roadmap.

Step 1: Understand What Social Media Is

The best way to look at social media is to view it as one of many Internet marketing channels, one that has the amazing power to go viral. In the very least, it has the awesome ability to engage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand.

The social media marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 - basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as:

• Blogs and Forums / Discussion Boards
• Consumer Review Sites
• Social Networks / Online Communities
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Social News Sites
• Social Music Sites
• Video and Photo Sharing Sites
• Wikis

Step 2: Understand What Social Media Can & Can’t Do

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits. It doesn’t convert.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI but is great for:

• Brand building
• Relationship management
• Product development
• Reputation management
• Customer interaction
• Customer feedback
• Customer support
• Community building
• Defensive SEO - Yes! Bury your bad press with positive UGC

In some cases, social media can convert - usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. But that’s like being the D&D Dungeon Master.

Step 3: Determine Where Conversations are Happening

You will need to respond to conversations that are already happening. To determine where conversations are happening about your brand, you will need to have some kind of buzz monitoring or online reputation management system in place.

Prioritize these discussions, then hop in.

Step 4: Divide…

Next, you want to expand into unchartered territory.

Before venturing out into the vast unknown, create your social media road map - a map of the social web as it pertains to your business. Gather all the sites that would be most interested in what you have to say and segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and by target audience / topical interest.

Once you’ve done that, it will be more clear to you what your campaign specific marketing strategies and tactics ought to be.

Step 5: …and Conquer

Now comes the tactical deployment. Here are some examples of different kinds of social media engagements.

Blogger outreach & engagement - this is a top down, bottom up approach. To demonstrate a significant impact, this is best handled by a team. You will need to identify the A-List blogs, cultivate a positive relationship with as many as possible, persuade them to blog about your issue, or guest blog for them. You will need a team of conversation agents to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in MEANINGFUL conversations wherever conversations about your topic is happening.

If you have a call to action, relevant product, or web resource you are trying to drive traffic to, drop html links with target anchor text for an additional SEO lift (a % of the sites you will be hitting will be do-follow)

Disclose your identity, be courteous, informed about the subject, or you will be flamed, and that will live forever on the web.

Social networking - only hit the communities relevant to your issue, product, company, topic or you will get poor quality traffic, if any.

Are you infiltrating tight-knit interest-specific online communities? If so, you will need to ingratiate yourself into the pack.

Are you starting your own community on a hosted platform, like a Ning? You can drive conversation and awareness, your revenue options are limited (ad revenue sharing).

Do you own the community? Great - you can drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed calls-to-action, promos, ads, anywhere. If you’ve designed your site with SEO in mind, your users will create the content, and you will had an advantage in the SERPS, especially for long-tail keywords.

Social news marketing - thru social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine. These sites also have a unique culture and will work for you if your news item relates topics favored by the community. Digg, for example, veers towards the geeky. Write for maximum click thrus - think “linkbait”. Popular stories here can get picked up by bloggers, which will also give you an SEO boost. Traffic can be huge and fickle like a tsunami. Don’t expect it to convert. Avoid marketing here - you will be buried.

Step 6: Trust in the Force

Finally, trust is a huge factor in social engagement. Understand that social media marketing is most effective when users in the community know you. The only way for the community to know you is if you spend a lot of time online and invest managing your social web presence across communities.

Social media builds awareness and drives conversation. It’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer. Always remember, selling is a secondary or tertiary benefit of social media.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media marketing, seo, social networks, blogging, roi, lorna li

This is a great video y Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing on how to use Google Analytics to interpret data from your search engine marketing campaigns. The three most important pieces of information you will want to understand from your traffic statistics are:

1. Keyword data: Which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site?
2. Keyword value: Which keywords account for the most engagement in your site? Which keywords drive the most conversions?
3. Page context: Which pages receive the most search traffic? What keywords are associated with those pages?

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, keywords, sem, analytics, google analytics, seo analytics, search marketing analytics, lorna li

Google advance search operators are useful search queries that can help you determine your competitive environment and assess the level and degree of work that an SEO campaign requires. Here are the Google search operators most commonly used by SEOs:

1. site:

Site:www.website.com will show you the number of pages in your website that are indexed by Google.

If you find a large discrepancy (> 20%) between the number of web pages indexed and the number of pages you have published, you will need to identify and resolve the technical issues that may be blocking web crawlers.

2. allinurl

For a quick way to see if a specific page is indexed, you can use the allinurl:www.webpage.com query. Google will return the page in its results page if it is indexed or show no results if it isn’t.

3. link:

Link:www.webpage.com will display all sites linking to this particular webpage. Since link popularity is an important search engine ranking factor, it’s important to determine how many links you have, and how many you need. You should definitely use this search query on your competitors.

It’s important to note that Google link operator has taken a huge beating from the SEO community for its lack of accuracy. Many SEOs use Yahoo Site Explorer for more accurate link analysis.

4. allinanchor:

Allinanchor:keyword returns all the pages/sites that have links from other pages that contain those specific keywords in link anchor text.

5 allintitle:

Allintitle:keyword returns a list of websites that contain the keyword in its title tag.

6. allintext:

Allintext:keyword tells Google to display webpages that contain that particular keyword in the body of the page.

It tends to give prominence to documents that contain the keyword at the beginning of the body text.

7. cache:

Cache:www.webpage.com will show you the last time the Google crawled your web page and what version of the page it has in its cache.

Cache:www.webpage.com keyword will show you the keyword or key phrases highlighted within the cached content.

8. info:

Info:www.webpage.com shows a variety of data about that web page, such as the latest cache date, other similar web pages, web pages that link to your site, web pages within your site and web pages containing the your domain name.

You can use Google advanced search operators them to keep track of your SEO efforts and keep an eye on your competition. However, understand that the data these operators really just provide a ball-park estimation.

According to Michael Martinez, using Google’s advanced search query operators has its pros and cons:
From www.seo-theory.com:

Search engine results analysis has to focus on the most important factors for optimization. You need to know:

1. Which pages in your site are indexed
2. How often your page data is recached
3. How many of your pages pass value through their links
4. How many of your pages are receiving value from other pages

In some cases you can (and should) combine query operators to refine your analysis. If rank-checks and backlink profiles are all you’re doing, you’re running slower than the leaders in the field and they are way out ahead of you. You can’t understand a Web site’s performance simply by looking at a handful of targeted queries and running backlink reports on Yahoo!

The search engines look at hundreds of signals to determine how to crawl, index, and rank sites. You should be looking at hundreds of signals, too.

What’s Code Got to Do With It?

Face it, while linklove is sexy, in SEO, code ain’t no second hand emotion.

SEO is a multi-faceted discipline, where keyword research, SEO copy-writing, linkbuilding, and code optimization work as a team in an attempt to address a variety of search engine ranking factors. Programming your website in a way that allows engine spiders to access, categorize, and index the content on your site so will ensure your other SEO tactics go the full mile. As an SEO best practice, you will want to make sure your code is as error-free as possible, from a W3C validation standpoint, and that you follow guidelines for semantically correct markup. Testing shows that good, clean, semantically correct code not only allows your site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows for faster indexing by the search engines.

W3C Compliance and SEO

There is a great deal of debate as to whether W3C compliancy will enhance search engine rankings. According to Michael Gray:
From www.wolf-howl.com:

From my experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble. If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble. Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a bot to crawl your website. However if you can get it down to handful of errors, it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.

Even if you can’t enforce strict compliance, be familiar with Google Webmaster guidelines and search engine bot indexing behavior, and code your site accordingly.

Understanding Semantic XHTML Markup

Semantic markup (or Semantic coding) is the art of programming your website so that the code used is descriptive and representative of the information it contains…and more meaningful to search engine bots. Standardized markup tags define the content on a page better than generic elements like <div> or <span> tags.

For example, if you were creating a page heading, use this code:

<h1>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup</h1>

Instead of this code:

<div id=”page-title”>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup </div>

Semantic Coding Guidelines

Here are some great semantic coding guidelines, courtesy of Barry Wise:

• <h1> tags should only be used once on a page, to define the title and/or purpose of the page. It should be very close in meaning to the <title> tag of your page.
• <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> header tags should be used for subheadings, in order of descending importance. Try not to skip.
• Don’t use <br> to separate list items. Instead use the <ol> tag with <li> elements for ordered lists, and <ul> and <li> should be used for unordered lists.
• For bold or emphasized text, use <strong> or <em>, instead of the less descriptive <b> and <i> tags.
• Wrap paragraphs in <p> tags, and never use <p> or <br> tags just for spacing. Use the margin and/or padding attributes of the <p> tag in your CSS code to add visual spacing.

List of Semantic Code Elements

• ABBR and ACRONYM: For Abbreviations and Acronyms. They have an accompanying title tag which you can use to describe the actual meaning of the abbreviated word or acronym.
• CITE: Citation, used to cite a source of information.
• CODE: Computer or Programming code.
• DEL: Deleted word or phrase.
• DFN: Definition.
• DL: Definition List. Similar to UL and OL, but uses DT (Definition term) and DD (definition description) to show terms and definitions.
• EM: Emphasis, displayed as italicized text.
• INS: Insert, used to display text you have inserted due to an edit at a later date.
• KBD: Keyboard instructions.
• OL: Ordered List.
• SAMP: Sample output, used to show sample output from programming code.
• STRONG: Strong, or bold, emphasis on a word or phrase.
• UL: Unordered List.
• VAR: Variable, used to represent a variable in programming code.

Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme fails a simple test for truly semantic XHTML markup. One of the most common errors is that the blog title / logo is served within <H1> tags. Serving your post titles in <h1> tags is far better.

For a great info on how to correct your blog XHTML, visit master WordPress developer Cris Pearson’s blog post The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs.
For non-code related tactics on blogging SEO, check out my summary of the Blogger’s Guide to SEO meetup, hosted by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Freedom from Code Bloat

Code bloat occurs when the amount of code on a page greatly exceeds the amount of text on the page. Excessive code can get in the way of search engine spiders indexing your content, especially if your content is placed deep within your code structure. It’s harder for search engine spiders to crawl the content of the page and determine its relevancy of the page if there’s extraneous code in the way. Furthermore, code bloat can create longer than normal download time, which can impact how search engines rank your site, and cause visitors to navigate away from your webpage.

There are four types of code bloat to be aware of:

• On-page styling
• On-page JavaScripts
• Excessive table usage
• Poor HTML formatting

According to technical SEO consultants HiRank, you can reduce code bloat by moving as much javascript and CSS to external files. This enables your users to cache those files on first load, that way, search engines don’t have to download these files all the time. To fix these four common types of code bloat, visit Stoney deGeyter’s post on how to fix the Javascript and CSS that is jacking up your SEO.

Good web development involves minimizing code bloat and programming your website with a low code to text ratio in mind. While there is no agreement on an ideal code to text ratio, the lower the ratio, the faster the load time, and the easier for search engine spiders to determine the relevancy of your content.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, blogging, blog seo, xhtml, semantic markup, code to text, w3c compliance, code bloat

There’s a lot of resources that list all the on-page and off-page ranking factors that are important to search engine optimization. There’s only one list out there that is worth paying attention to: SEOmoz’s Search Ranking Factors V2.

Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account approximately 200+ attributes when determining the position of websites in search engine results pages (SERPs). In April 2007, SEOmoz published Search Ranking Factors V2, a survey of 37 leaders in organic search engine optimization on the most important factors in Google rankings. Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz CEO maintains that 90-95% of what you need to know about the Google algorithm is contained in the study. While a year old, most of this information is still valid.

Search Ranking Factors evaluates both positive and negative search engine ranking attributes on a scale of 1-5 (5 is “Exceptional Importance), and also indicates the degree of consensus between SEO respondents. Comments from the respondents also yield nuggets of juicy information that can help you refine your SEO and help you avoid landing in Google’s supplemental hell (index).

If you have a limited amount of time for SEO, be sure to focus on the factors that are given the greatest weight by Google’s algorithm. Below is a summary of the top 10 factors that influence Google search engine rankings:

Google’s Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag (4.9)
Exceptional Importance and High Consensus

Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.

If you only have time one SEO action on your site, make sure to create a good, description title tag that starts with your target keyword.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link (4.4)
Exceptional Importance and High Consensus

Inbound links that contain your target keyword in the anchor text will give you a strong boost in ranking for that keyword. While keyword rich anchor text is hugely important, the text adjacent to the link plays a role, as well. A wide array of naturally occurring inbound anchor text is the best scenario - inbound links that are close to identical could invite penalties. So if you’re dropping links…be sure to mix up your anchor text a little!

3. Global Link Popularity of Site (4.4)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

This refers to the overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity). I like Lucas Ng’s description, because it refers to Amazon tribes!

“Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.”

4. Age of Site (4.1)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

Age refers to the date indexable content was first seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership), NOT the date of original registration of the domain.

Age is a huge factor, which is the reason why a lot of crappy, old, barely relevant sites are hard to knock out of SERPs. According to Todd Malicoat, “The older the berry the sweeter the link juice.”

5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure (4)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page. While somewhat masturbatory, internal link juice is a strongly weighted factor and, most importantly, one that you can control, especially with regards to the choice of anchor text.

According to Scott Smith, a.k.a Caveman, “Factors considered by Google include: Number of inbound links, importance (placement) of the inbound links within the linking pages, anchor text patterns, nav versus text links, and the content of linking pages.”

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site (3.9)
High Importance and Average Agreement

This refers to the subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword. Highly relevant links, from trusted, topically related sites carry more weight.

7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community (3.9)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world. Link love from the popular kids in the hood helps. A few links from authority sites can help a niche site rank above the authorities for niche-related keywords.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text (3.7)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.

Target keywords in the title need to be included in the page, especially in starting and ending paragraphs. Focus more on semantic variations than keyword density - repeating the same keywords over and over again, can result in ranking suppression.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site (3.6)
High Importance, But Highly Disputed

In general, a links from popular sites are better, but it’s hard to get an accurate read on how valuable this is.

10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page (3.5)
High Importance and Average Agreement

While all links help, links from topically related sites help more, though it’s hard to measure exactly by how much.

Other Important Search Engine Ranking Factors

11. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages (3.5)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages? According to Aaron Wall http://seobook.com, “Your outbound links help define what community your site belongs in.”

Benefit can be derived through anchor text tunneling, that is, when Site A links to site B with the keyword “widgets”, and site B links to site C the keyword “widgets”.

12. Age of Document (3.4)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporally relevant. An older document on an older, more trusted site will rank better than one on a newer site.

Says Aaron Wall, “Older documents may be trusted more, especially if they are well cited and do not have many broken links in them. For blogs and news sites new documents may tend to have high PageRank values due to internal site structure. New documents may also be given a freshness boost.”

13. Keyword Use in H1 Tag (3.3)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase

14. Amount of Indexable Text Content (3.2)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page. Sheer volume of content isn’t that important, but it is good to have some indexable content as opposed to all flash and images. Chris Boggs http://chrisboggs.blogspot.com thinks that content of 75-100 words can be effective in scoring points with Google. However, absence of indexable content can be mitigated by other factors, such as quality inbound links, quality outbound links, and intelligent keyword deployment across title, meta, hx, etc.

15. Age of In-Bound Link (3.2)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Age matters

16. Topical Relationship of Linking Site (3.1)
High Importance and Average Agreement

It helps

17. Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query (3.1)
High Importance, But Highly Disputed

The topical relationships between the full content of a website and a user’s given query. References to the Google’s neutering of the Google bomb effect, caused by complaints from miserable failures in high places, indicate a belief that this factor is more important now than before. However, the dominance of Wikipedia in SERPs is a powerful counter-example.

18. Keyword Use in Domain Name (3)
Moderate Importance and Average Agreement

Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com. Having your keyword in your domain name has little bearing on its own. The benefit comes from its propensity to attract inbound links with your keyword in the anchor text. You can use hyphens to separate works, but your url will look yucky, and it kills your branding.

Technorati Tags: search engine ranking factors, google, seo, search engine optimization, search marketing, serp, lorna li

by Lorna Li

Search engine marketers, bloggers, and social media fanatics wore their favorite hats at Search Marketing Salon’s “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Launch party at the chic and intimate Otis Lounge in San Francisco. Tips were swapped, secrets were traded, and product ideas were bounced around that would take search marketing to the next level.

Forest Kolb, Sharon Lin, and Julie Blaustein.

“We need a Google Adwords Editor that also includes Yahoo and MSN on a single UI,” stated Clay Schulenburg, Interactive Marketing Manager for Healthline. “This will take search to a whole new level.”

F*ck the Yahoo bulk upload, is what I say to that!

Hear that, web entrepreneurs? That’s big bucks for you!

Jacob Morgan, Search Marketing Alchemist and Nicolette Toussaint

Search-obsessed bloggers that dropped by included Michael Brito, who writes a fantastic blog about Social Media & Conversation Marketing, Lisa Whelan social media queen on Vox, Jim Yu on how to be a Search Marketing and SEO Maven, and Andy Kaufman, the real estate blogger and Twitter king.

William Gauthier, Alicia Lin, Damon White, and Lorna Li.

e-Storm’s William Gauthier, Lisa McGuire, and Daniel Riveong

Leon Krishayana and lovely lady in black beret

Leon Krishnayana of iSpionage, offers a technology platform that helps search engine marketers track competitors’ PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ads daily. It allows you to see the ad copy, keywords, and average rank on the major search engines side by side. Very handy indeed.

Vera Belenky and Alex Gamburg

Other attendees included Mark Fiske, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Gap, Pete Park of web advertising agency Vectorhaus, Yan Rozovsky VP of LeadClick Media, Jason Hart of the search-focused Online Marketing agency Domain Methods, Jeff Rohrs, VP of search marketing agency ExactTarget, Leo Haryono, Head of Natural Search of Shopping.com, Josh Pierry and Clay Shulenburg of Healthline, Biren Talati, of Sandalstore.com, Peter Koontz, Founder and CTO of Sprenzy, Vera Belenky of Walmart.com, Alex Gamburg Search Marketing Director of Trulia, specializing in real estate search, Gabriel Carrejo, the original sinner, Forest Kolb of BizzFlip who has cracked the secret of the Digg first page, Sharon Lin, Online Marketer for Web 2.0 companies, Irina Greenman, and Danny Cheung, who is about to revolutionize the world of WordPress publishing the Good Magazine way.

More pictures can be viewed on the Search Marketing Salon Flickr album.

Join Search Marketing Salon on Facebook!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: searchmarketing salon, e-Storm, iSpionage, Domain Methods, Good Magazine, Sandalstore.com, Michael Brito, Andy Kaufman, Jim Yu, Lisa Whelan, Sharon Lin, Josh Pierry, Clay Shulenburg, Peter Koontz, Jeff Rohrs, Biren Talati, Jason Hart, Gabriel Carrejo, Pete Park, Mark Fiske, Yan Rozovsky, Leo Haryono, Leon Krishnayana, Vera Belenky, Nicolette Toussaint, Lorna Li, Jacob Morgan

It’s time to wear your favorite hat, because Search Marketing Salon launches this Thursday. White hats, grey hats, and black hats are welcome - we do not discriminate.

If you are obsessed about search engine rankings, gaga about the SEO benefits of social media, and have a tale or two to tell about how you dominated the SERPs, have a drink with us!

When:

Thursday March 27 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Where:

Otis Lounge

25 Maiden Lane (b/w Grant & Kearny )

San Francisco, CA 94108

Join Us!

RSVP via Eventbrite for Search Marketing Salon’s Wear Your Favorite Hat Launch Party.

To become an official member of Search Marketing Salon, join Search Marketing Salon on LinkedIn.

You can also connect with Search Marketing Salon on Facebook.

Technorati Tags: search marketing salon, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, seo, ppc, social seo, web 2.0 marketing

presented by Giovanna & Aaron Wall

Tuesday night I went to one of the first SF Blogger Meetups to gather after a long hiatus and it was well worth the wait.

The group practically took over Amici’s pizzeria on Lombard and, with the exception of my bub.blicio.us buddy Victor Karamalis, included no one I recognized from the Web 2.0 circuit.

But it did include a treat - I got to meet, sit next to, and pick the brains of Aaron Wall and his wife Giovanna. Yes, THE Aaron Wall, of SEO Book and one of the most well known SEOs of our time. In fact, the couple is so successful with building monetizing blogs that they now occupy the ranks of the New Rich - a term coined by Tim Ferris of the 4-Hour Work Week. Both Aaron and Giovanna are seasoned veterans of blog monetization - they’ve optimized and monetized websites so that several of them bring in over six figures in income. Sharing their blogging secrets, as well as picking up the tab for 40+ attendees, was their way of giving back to the community.

They also threw in a free resource The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Alas, if only I could spend an ENTIRE DAY learning from Aaron or Giovanna!

The Blogger Meetup was largely made up of novice bloggers, and folks unfamiliar with the term SEO. Most of what the Walls shared was pretty general knowledge, seasoned with nuggets of valuable insider wisdom, some of which they urged, to keep to ourselves.

Topics covered were:

1. How to Generate and Grow Traffic

Content is King

Write good content that caters to your target audience - ideally content that is so good that it redefines the industry. Be sure to create a unique angle the reflects your personality. Mention and link out to other blogs - the owners will notice the incoming link, and often they too will share some link love.

A good tip from Aaron on scrapers stealing your unique site content is to create links to older articles in your blog post. That way, if scrapers pick up your content, at least they are providing links back to your site

Community Participation

Start online friendships by in conversations on blogs, forums and social networks related to your topic. Try to have a popular blogger mention you and link to you - this can bring considerable traffic to your site. You can also offer to write for other well-known bloggers.

Create a community project related to your topic and ask web-savvy experts to give their opinion about it. If your project is buzzworthy, all of the sudden you will have organic citations from thought leaders in the field pointing to your site from around the Web.

Pay Per Click

Use PPC to build traffic. My take on PPC is that it’s worthwhile if you have a product to sell that would at least enable you to generate some kind of ROI, otherwise buying this kind of traffic can get very expensive very quickly.

However, Aaron and Giovanna maintained that even if you’re not selling anything, buying traffic through PPC can be powerful, because, if your content is good, it can go viral. And niche keywords can actually be very cheap - around 5 or 10 cents a click, so if you have a small budget to play with, PPC traffic can be relatively inexpensive and worthwhile.

StumbleUpon Ads

For a nickel a visitor, StumbleUpon, a social search application, can drive considerable traffic to your site. StumbleUpon allows users to discover Web sites, people, videos, online communities, product information and more in a manner very much like channel-surfing, but for the Web. You can use StumbleUpon as a social media marketing tool for free - join a Stumble group for maximum impact - or as an advertiser. Other Stumblers vote your content up or down - the more positive votes you get, the more the StumbleUpon recommends your site to other Stumblers.

Paid Reviews

Solicit paid reviews from other bloggers through ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com.

2. Building a Large Subscription Base

RSS

Encourage RSS subscriptions by promoting RSS buttons aggressively. Create a page that explains what RSS is.

Create Brand Evangelists

Make your email accessible or use a contact form. Aggressively solicit comments and answer every real comment.

Encourage Registration

Encourage registration if you want to build a community and offer bonuses for registering.

3. Monetization Strategies

Adsense

The easiest way to monetize is Adsense, which is good for setting a baseline. Aaron recommended staying ad-free in the beginning and to avoid putting ads on your homepage unless you are very well trusted.

Affiliate Offers

Make sure that they are selective and relevant to your topic - and put the offers section on another part of your site.

Create or Sell a Product

Create or sell a product that is relevant to your topic; this works best if you are a recognized expert in your niche. You can also try to sell information-based products created from your intellectual capital, such as e-books, videos, or DVDs, or consulting services and speaking gigs.

Do not pollute your blog with advertising - it becomes a roadblock.

4. Technology

Aaron and Giovanna’s recommended blog platform of choice was WordPress, Drupal if you want to start a community. They also recommended Google Analytics or HaveAMint.com for site stats.

5. Other Takeaways

Trendspotting

One of the key takeaways from the Meetup was the value of spotting trends. According to Giovanna, “The best way to make $ out of blogging is to spot trends and be an early adopter.”

Here’s how to do it:

1. Research trends

Tools you can use to spot upcoming trends include Google Trends, trendwatching.com, ebay’s Marketplace Research Pro, which for $20/month gives you access to what people are searching for on eBay.

2. Keyword Research

Once you’ve zeroed in on a new trend, research the keywords around those trends, buy a domain name with those relevant keywords. Remember:

• Make sure the keyword is in the url
• Hyphens are branding suicide
• It doesn’t matter if your domain is a .biz, .org, or .net

3. Launch a blog about it.

Now all you have to worry about is creating a continuous stream of compelling content. Good luck!

As a blogger, creating quality content is probably the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of blogging, and not all of us have budgets to hire writers.

But according to Aaron, if you have a niche site optimized for niche keywords you can still receive a healthy stream of organic search traffic without the need to aggressively create content. The need for fresh content depends, a great deal, on the market.

Aaron, “I would never start a blog about SEO now - it’s too saturated a field.”

Giovanna, “If you are starting a blog about mortgages now - good luck!”

Given that the blogosphere only seems to be expanding exponentially, like a rogue galaxy hurtling out into space, it seems nearly impossible to gain any traction at all on anything, let alone monetize it.

Following these tips from Aaron and Giovanna Wall, you too, can earn money from your blogs. May the force be with you.

Technorati Tags: sf blogger meetup, blogging, blog monetization, blog seo, seo, search engine optimization, aaron wall, giovanna wall

“Buzz marketing” is a hot buzzword I hear a lot of these days. Being an analytical type, I want to really understand what it means, before I sling it around like corned beef hash.

Buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing (WOMM), guerrilla marketing and viral marketing are often used interchangeably to describe marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness through self-replicating viral processes.

While Seth Godin, author of Unleashing the IdeaVirus, states that viral marketing is, technically, not the same as word of mouth:
From sethgodin.typepad.com:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.

most marketers will not debate the difference.

Buzz marketing can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. In this series of posts, we are going to focus on the viral effects of a buzz marketing campaign that leverages social media networks, as opposed to viral advertising strategies and tactics.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Buzz marketing that leverages the network and conversation effects of the social web is often referred to as social media marketing.

According to a great series of posts on Do It Yourself Social Media Marketing by Stepforth Web Marketing:
From www.stepforth.com:

Social media marketing (SMM) or social media optimization (SMO) is a method of promoting your brand (be it yourself, a product, a service, or a company) by strategically making your presence known across various social media networks (such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, MySpace)

Do not expect your social media marketing campaign to immediately drive business – it’s best used for branding or online reputation management, that will indirectly convert your target audience into fans, and your fans into customers.

Why do Social Media Marketing?

Every day, someone out there, somewhere is discussing something important to your business. They could be discussing your brand, your company executives, your competitors, or your industry.

Either they are hyping up your company and generating positive buzz about your products, or they are criticizing your service and sowing the dissention over the value you bring to your industry, and humanity in general.

According to internet marketing expert Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim:
From www.marketingpilgrim.com:

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious.

It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.

A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.

It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.

A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.

It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.

This is happening whether you like it or not, so why not join in on the discussion? By participating in online conversations you can contribute your valuable expertise, quell misconceptions and doubts about your company, product, or industry and grab some more valuable web real estate in the process.

What are the SEO Benefits of Buzz Marketing through Social Networks?

When users search on your company name or targeted keyword phrases, search engine results pages (SERPs) will frequently display threaded discussions on social networking sites like Ning, forums like Webmaster World, and user review sites like Yelp. If there’s a lot of activity on these threads and, thus, continuous, freshly updated user-generated content, these threads will often rise to the top of SERPs.

These discussions can often include positive as well as negative opinions about your company or organization. Therefore, defensively, you want to be sure that you are doing your best to manage your online reputation, and diffuse or bury any negative publicity that could appear on this valuable SERP real estate.

Pro-actively, you should absolutely capitalize on the positive buzz, establish yourself as a thought leader or industry expert and generate as much brand awareness as possible. All the while, you can scatter valuable target keyword phrases and links to important web resources, especially your own, all over the social web and blogosphere. This can drive a great deal of traffic back to your website or other online locations where your product is sold.

If you have not included buzz marketing into your online marketing strategy, then you should. Otherwise, you are missing out on a great opportunity to generate a brand awareness and search engine optimization benefits for a fraction of the cost that online and traditional advertising requires.

Technorati Tags: social media marketing, SMM, social media optimization, SMO, buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing, WOMM, viral marketing, search engine marketing, SEM, search engine optimization, SEO, search engine results pages, SERP, seth godin, andy beal, lorna li, lornali

I was reading Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion and came accross his article “The Geek Marketer“.

I realized his blog post totally described trajectory I’m currently on and it put into perspective some of the challenges and triumphs that come with this hybrid role.

What I observe most frequently in my job are the tensions that arise between my company’s Marketing Department and our Internet Group. At the heart of the matter is the fact that these departments speak different languages, and the ensuing head-butting is “all very Mars and Venus” indeed.

According to Steve:
From www.micropersuasion.com:

With CEOs demanding accountability and time spent online climbing, chief marketing officers are on a push to embed technology into every facet of their strategy. But marketers and technologists are not exactly two peas in a pod. They speak different languages. Marketers like GRPs (gross ratings points). Geeks like APIs (application protocol interfaces). Dilbert mercifully pokes at these differences. It’s all very Mars and Venus.

Enter Geek Marketers. These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.

Geek Marketers create competitive advantage through rapid-fire testing and learning. The people I know in this role are shepherding the development, testing and measurement of all kinds of groundbreaking marketing programs. Their pilots span from the simple, such as building RSS feeds, to the complex, creating multifaceted community programs. Often they are paired with people like me, who are in a similar role on the agency side.

What Kind of Skills or Knowledge Sets do Geek Marketers Possess?

I ruminated on this question, came up with a list, and then posted the question on LinkedIn. I have to bow out to Marshall Clark Director of Search at FirstRanked for coming up with a far better list than mine.

Here’s the list that includes Marshall’s 8 year expertise and my “getting there” experience - it’s by no means cumulative. Feel free to add any additional skills you feel should be included.

Geek Marketer Marketing Skills:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Marketing (PPC)
• Viral Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Guerilla Marketing
• Internet Strategy & Development
• Interactive Market Research
• Website Analytics
• ROI Tracking & Analysis
• Website Conversion Optimization
• Affiliate Marketing
• Community Development
• Online Reputation Management
• Website Development
• Blogging
• Web 2.0 Syndication
• Podcast/Videocast Production

Geek Marketer Technical Skills:

• HTML
• CSS
• PHP
• JavaScript/AJAX
• MySQL
• Apache Server Administration
• Java Administration

What Do Geek Marketers Read?

Gosh, the list of geek-centric internet marketing blogs out there seems endless, but here are some top picks:

• eWhisper
• Graywolf’s SEO Blog
• Inside Adwords
• John Battelle’s Searchblog
• Mashable
• Matt Cutts Blog
• Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Pronet Advertising
• Read/Write Web
• SEOmoz
• Seth’s Godin’s Blog
• Stuntdbl
• TechCrunch
• Unofficial Google Analytics Blog
• Web Analytics World
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Analytics Geek Marketers

Of course we mustn’t forget the analytics geeks, who are a special breed of their own. They are hard-core number-crunchers who use their mathematical expertise to understand consumer behavior, such as Satnam Singh, from the Consumer Insight Group of Avenue A/ Razorfish. Their knowledge of Excel will make you cry.

If you are an analytics geek and data makes you hot, Satnam recommends you check out Avinash Kaushik’s list of Top Ten Web Analytics Blogs.

Technorati Tags: steve rubel, the geek marketer, search engine marketing, sem, search engine optimization, seo, social media marketing, web analytics, marshall clark, satnam singh, lorna li