Econs.net Blog

Amazon.com opened up their Kindle publishing program to all bloggers. If you prefer to read blogs on your Kindle you can subscribe to SEO Book for the Kindle at Amazon.com.

Publishers get 60 cents per month per subscriber. It is unlikely that we will get enough Kindle subscribers to notice it as an income stream (as we would need about 50,000 Kindle subscribers for it to be a decent revenue stream), but as such distribution opportunities come about on authoritative domains like Amazon.com, they create a great opportunity for filling up branded organic search results with non-negative authoritative pages. And signing up takes less than 5 minutes.

Source:Submit Your Blog to Amazon.com & Become a Kindle Publisher

SEO SEO

Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

To someone new to a field, scams often look more legitimate than the real thing. Just ask anyone who has spent their share of the 100’s of millions of dollars on acai diet reverse billing fraud promoted through fake blogs advertised on the Google content network.

Quality vs Perceived Quality

In terms of sales, the quality of the product or service is typically nowhere near as important as how much mindshare you have. That last sentence sorta reveals one of the major weaknesses of most non-salespeople. You can’t just focus on having the best product and think that will be enough. You have to use push marketing until you build enough momentum that it starts becoming a force of its own. And it needs to be periodically refreshed through advertising, public interaction, and viral marketing.

This is where advertising, building trust, website credibility, and cumulative advantage play a big roll in making a business ubiquitous so the perceived risk of being a customer is much lower.

Word of mouth marketing is great, but you have to encourage it, and promote it.

Scaling a Website

The good news is you do not need a lot of employees to look large, so long as you are good at structuring your customer interactions. Through the above strategies (and being super-efficient), our site (which has 2.5 employees and has its highest value portions locked up as member’s only content) gets more traffic than competing businesses with 20 employees and some of the largest public forum websites (with 10x as many pages in Google & no barrier to entry).

The Alexa blog recently referenced the success of our site’s current model:

seobook.com gets more traffic than seochat.com and seomoz.org. But how do they do it? Loyalty. Despite getting less traffic from search engines, and despite having fewer links than seomoz, and despite scaring away potential customers with aggressive marketing, seobook is doing quite well. They are converting visitors to customers, and turning those customers into regular visitors.

The take-away lesson is that good SEO is important, but it can’t compete with a loyal and engaged user-base. Seobook.com is a perfect case in point.

Building Loyalty

Such loyalty does not come easy though. This quote represents the barrier you have to overcome if you want to build a lasting online community that matters:

In effect, this guy who has twenty thousand friends is completely alone in the real world.
…
In this age of great digital connectedness, we increasingly find ourselves clinging to illusions of intimacy, adrift in a sea of anonymity, surrounded by the great faceless, nameless masses from which no commonality can be extracted.

What barriers are preventing people from getting the most out of your community? What can you do to make your interactions more life-like? How open should your community be? What pieces should you focus on building most aggressively? How can you make it grow larger without damaging the quality of the community? How many customers can you have before you need to hire more people? Who should you hire? What should they work on? Where can you add value to your customer’s experience? How can you leverage your knowledge most efficiently?

Ubiquity

Growing a community is a quite tricky process because every type of marketing causes expected and unexpected consequences. Our ebook, when priced at $79, was coupled with a brand that was seen far and wide. The price-point was so low that it was an impulse purchase that reached virtually every piece of the market - entrepreneurs, small businesses, b2b, retailers, Fortune 500’s, hedge funds, etc. Direct interaction with 10,000+ customers made us quite good at knowing what questions are commonly asked, and how to answer them accurately and efficiently. The most common questions got worked into the content.

Death of Ubiquity

The growing complexity of search (particularly the subjective nature of Google hand edits), the general low perceived value of ebooks (largely destroyed by scammers), and Google teaching people to steal our ebook (via suggested “torrent” searches) killed our old business model. Luckily we saw those market changes coming, and shifted our business model in time to more than double our revenues while focusing on higher quality customers.

The minute a profitable business model appears on the web, many forces work to commoditize and disintermediate it. The only ways to stop that are to build a platform that other people build on, or to build deeper relationships with customers.

One of the most important points of Seth’s Tribes is that to build a community you have to have outsiders.

Growing a Community

Growth of a community beyond a certain point gets tricky though. Any membership site has some level of decay rate and some level of growth. If you push into markets where you don’t fit well then you (temporarily) increase your revenues while lowering your lifetime customer value, lowering average customer quality, polluting your community with people that do not fit, and increasing your maintenance cost of advertising to less receptive markets and supporting transient short-term members.

Rather than trying to get more members, it often makes sense to increase what you get from current members, and look for ways to increase the value delivered to members to increase member stay time.

Price as a Filter

Even though our training program has a similar price-point as the ebook did, it is perceived as being far more expensive because it is recurring. That increases the perceived risk to some of the potential customers who are less committed to learning SEO. This higher perceived cost shaped our community to filter out some of the worst pieces of the market (like the people who buy lots of internet marketing junk on Clickbank and reverse charge most of it) and attract many high quality customers (many of our members have 20x more the business experience and know-how than I do). But it makes it harder for the brand the site to be as relevant to as wide of a group as the old business model was.

More Filters

Our price-point and the stuff we write about on the blog likely makes many people think that we aim for high end experienced web professionals who have a lot of SEO experience. While that perception keeps our forum levels above the level of quality anywhere else on the web, it also causes us to miss 90%+ of the market.

The approach of simply having hands down the best customers, the best customer service, and delivering the highest level of value (which causes people to stay subscribed for a long time) was the best approach to take when running this site as a 2.5 person business, because churn is expensive when you do marketing, public relations, advertising, quality assurance, content creation, customer support, and customer interaction (all while keeping up with changes in the market). We still want to keep our core customers, but might try expanding.

Appealing to More Beginners

You are not your own customer. I am not my own customer. Designing for yourself gives you a good chance of creating something of value, but most of the buying market for how to information are people new to the field.

Put another way, beginners are the largest market segment, and everyone was a beginner at one point in time.

This is precisely why email list internet marketers make so much money. There is always a new, desperate, and gullible crop to feed off of - an Eternal September. And until they get burned a few times and hardened by the market (and/or go bankrupt) they convert at rates well above what other market segments convert at. Greed makes it easy to make poor financial decisions, especially when matched against seasoned marketers and promises of automated wealth generation.

If we are to expand, we will likely need to reach some of the market that thought our site was too advanced for them. Our offers won’t be as hyped as the email guys, but we do have a lot of channels we could use much more effectively. Our training program is certainly easy enough for most beginners to get it, but we need to make our marketing reflect that. My wife used to do offline tech sales stuff, and she is going to help try to do some of the online stuff for this site too. Given that she is up for helping out, I think we can grow the site again…there are lots of things we could make better (like re-doing the intro video, making more video content, and building a few more tools) that I had not got around to because the community was about as big as it made sense to be without more labor.

Websites and tools can be great for both beginners and experts. We just have to figure out how to better reach both market segments without alienating the other.

Source:Social Cues & Increasing Sales

SEO SEO

In one of the more absurd public privacy invasions online, Google has announced they are going to use FICO scores to help advertisers target ads at consumers in different credit buckets.

I wonder if at some point in time if AdWords advertisers selling the scammy government grand & biz-op offers will get to use this data to target poor people with low credit scores. It only makes sense that Google would spin this positively stating that it is good for brand advertisers to find credit-worthy customers, which is the story that was marketed in the above linked piece:

Consumers with high FICO scores demonstrate some unique attributes that show they shop carefully for the best cards. For example, shoppers begin using search earlier in their application process, they use the term “best credit cards” at three times the rate of lower FICO shoppers, and they are more likely to use branded terms.

Consumers with high FICO scores use non-branded search terms more than branded — approximately 60% of high FICO searchers. They tend to search on terms, such as “travel rewards,” “low rate,” and “balance transfer.”

From a marketer’s perspective this makes a lot of sense. Smart people who manage their credit well look for tangible benefits in their financial choices…they don’t just blindly buy the brand.

The problem is that (so long as the current bankruptcy “reform” remains in tact and taxpayers bail out any banking losses) bankers have little to no incentive to reach people with good credit scores. People who pay their credit cards on time are seen as deadbeats while the least credit worth are the profitable market segment because they use credit ignorantly and accrue billions of dollars in unneeded fees every year:

Overall, we find that debt literacy is low: only about one-third of the population seems to comprehend interest compounding or the workings of credit cards. Even after controlling for demographics, we find a strong relationship between debt literacy and both financial experiences and debt loads. Specifically, individuals with lower levels of debt literacy tend to transact in high-cost manners, incurring higher fees and using high-cost borrowing. In applying our results to credit cards, we estimate that as much as one-third of the charges and fees paid by less knowledgeable individuals can be attributed to ignorance. The less knowledgeable also report that their debt loads are excessive or that they are unable to judge their debt position.

Bankers have historically hidden these fees in illegible 30+ page contracts, as mentioned by Elizabeth Warren

I teach contract law at Harvard Law School and I can’t understand my credit card contract. I just can’t. It’s not designed to be read. Read the Government Accountability Office (GAO) study on this. The GAO looked at credit cards and they said: “Nobody can understand this stuff.” Are you kidding me? And understand when you’ve got terms that say: “In effect, we’ll charge anything we want any time we want for any reason or no reason at all,” what’s the point of reading it?

She later commented on the ideal credit card customer

Every credit card for a credit card company is like a lottery ticket. They’re just waiting to see who’s going to maybe stumble a little. Maybe get into trouble on a car loan. Maybe nothing at all except they just look vulnerable. They’re just in the right zip code. They’re just the right profile for people who won’t be able to run any place else. And those are the ones you slam. Those are the ones you hit with the 29 percent interest rate, the 35 percent interest rate, the new fees. And then, because of course if you can’t pay it, then you get hit with a fee for not paying or for paying late, for going over limit. And the game is afoot. With any luck at all from the credit card company’s perspective, these people will become little annuities that will just keep generating profits for the credit card companies for months, for years, maybe forever.

The idea of only servicing legitimate debt needs of customers that can afford their credit card bills has made banking industry executives so angry that they are threatening hitting consumers with lots of bogus new “conveninece” fees:

Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.

This new consumer-credit profiling Google is offering will be far more profitable to use on the poor, the weak, the desperate, the ignorant, and the uneducated. In early research Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin stated

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. … We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

So were they right back then? Or are the right now? They can’t be both.

Source:Your FICO Credit Score Follows You Around the Web

SEO SEO

Do you know what attracts your readers? What headlines they respond to most? Do they respond to pictures? Do they know what your offer is?

No doubt we all agree that testing is a good thing to do. We can see clearly if our ideas are working or not. But a lot of testing is, quite frankly, tedious.

Measuring user behavior patterns and visitor paths is, in most cases, worthwhile, but there is always a trade-off in terms of the time it takes to setup and run such testing verses the reward for doing so.

Here are a few cheap and cheerful testing ideas that don’t take a lot of time, but can improve your site performance significantly.

1. Write Your Copy, Then Leave It Alone For A Day

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of your copy is to simply leave it until tomorrow before you hit publish.

It can be very hard to read your own copy objectively, especially as you’re writing it. It is often laced with emotion, and the impulsive desire to just finish the damn thing and get it out there.

By leaving it until the next day before you hit publish, you force yourself to re-read your copy in a more objective light. You allow yourself a mental separation between your writer and editor brain function.

When editing, replace long words with short words. Break up long sentences into short ones. Minimize. Eliminate duplication. All copy benefits from rewriting.

Leaving copy aside for a day is the cheapest way to get the objective help of an “editor”, without actually having to hire one.

2. Get Someone Else To Read Your Page Aloud

It’s a good idea to read your copy out loud. It helps you spot weaknesses more easily.

It’s an even better idea to get someone else to read it aloud.

You’ll experience your copy how other people will hear it in their heads. Does it get your message across when it is read by someone who doesn’t know the point you are eventually going to make? Does it sound like they want to read what is coming next, or do they sound confused or bored? Are the most important points emphasized? Is it obvious what the desired action is?

It can be difficult to spot these factors when reading copy in your head, but blindingly obvious when someone else reads it back to you.

3. Basic Split Run Test Using Adwords

Even if you’re focusing on SEO, Adwords is a great way to test the effectiveness of your your chosen keyword terms and site copy.

Once you have a keyword list for SEO, run a short adwords campaign against those keywords. Test the titles and descriptions you plan to use. Test the performance of your landing pages by swapping out one page for another on different days. You can then feed this information through to your SEO campaign. Run with the winners, and cut the losers.

Keep in mind the Adwords won’t perform just like a SERP listing, because a lot of people ignore advertising. However, this method is likely to give you a rough idea on what people who search on your chosen keywords are really interested in. Chances are if it works in Adwords, it will work even better in the main SERPs.

Quite often, the keywords you imagine are the most important don’t work so well in practice. Or perhaps the title tag you were planning on using might not be enticing enough. For a small sum, you can test keyword effectiveness before embarking on the long and involved process of SEO, link building and ranking, which you’ll have to live with for years.

4. Are You Selling The Solution To The Problem

Say you want to build a mailing list by giving away a free e-book.

These days, that’s a boring offer.

Unfairly, e-books have a bad reputation because they are often perceived as low value and are frequently associated with scams. “Free” on the internet is essentially meaningless, given that most things on the internet are free.

Instead, sell the solution. i.e “Do you want to know how to find the top five investment funds in any market? Do you want to find the funds that have consistently returned over 10% p/a for the last ten years? Sign up for our free e-book download that answers these questions, and more”

Much more enticing than “free e-book give-away”. The form (e-book) is not the important bit, the benefit (finding the right investment funds) is the important bit.

The internet has a lot in common with direct marketing. Proven and tested direct marketing methods dictate we should “sell the sizzle”, wherever appropriate. The idea is that people don’t buy products and services, they buy the benefits of those products and services. They ask “what’s in it for them?”

Does your copy always move towards answering this question? Read your copy aloud. If it doesn’t, then rewrite until it does.

5. Does The Picture Sync With The Message?

Pictures are powerful attention grabbers.

But do you have the right image? The right image is the image that helps you sell. Grabbing attention doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. Flickr is full of attention grabbing images that will never sell themselves, or anything else.

In terms of doing business, a picture, like words, should relate to the product or service. A picture’s function is to increase sales. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be there.

The most obvious relationship is direct i.e a picture of the product or service. Modern advertising tends to focus on indirect relationships, such as implied association with people who use the product. i.e. a group of cool skater kids hanging out may advertise Vans footwear, even if you don’t actually see the shoes in shot. The benefit for the audience is to become part of this cool tribe. More indirect methods tend to be used in brand building advertising.

The closer you are to direct marketing, the more direct the imagery tends to be. If you want to sell an Apple iPod Touch, you show a big picture of one. Basic stuff, right? But it’s surprising how many sites use vague imagery that might look cool, but gives the viewer no idea what the site is about, or doesn’t lead them to identify with your product or service.

Don’t ask “Is this picture worth a thousand words? “, ask “Does this picture tell the customer a thousand words about my product or service?”

Got any more cheap and cheerful testing methods? Add them to the comments.

Source:Site Testing That Isn't Tedious

SEO SEO

At lunchtime today we took part in the Oxford Science Park summer event. We played giant beach volleyball, winning our only game, and bungee darts where we were useless and didn’t score a single point between us!
Unfortunately we have photographic evidence too!
Bungee Darts - Richard and Stuart

Kevin and Richard - Bungee Darts

Giant [...]

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Source:Friday Fun: SEOptimise Giant Volleyball & Bungee Darts

SEO SEO

The most obvious trend when it comes to SEO is “going local”. Ever since Google introduced Google Maps and Local Business Center and later added local search results to Universal Search displaying them on top of everything else businesses everywhere strive to be there. Additionally the proliferation of smartphones and netbooks accelerates this development even [...]

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Source:44 Local SEO & Search Resources for Business

SEO SEO

Posted by Danny Dover

Update: Google representatives responded to complaints of the Google News delay with the following explanation:

"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We’re sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for." - Source

---

 First and foremost, let me extend my best wishes to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. I can only imagine the pain of losing a close friend and then having to watch it play out on a global stage. He made an extraordinary impact on the world and although not perfect, he is a teacher even in death (as evidenced by this post).

The following is a timeline of how the news of the Prince of Pop’s death traveled across the internet. Not all the times are exact (they might be off by up to 5 minutes) and not every source is included. All times are GMT.

From an internet marketer’s perspective, I found this story fascinating to watch unfold. I was impressed by the speed of information distribution and very surprised to see which site posted the news first. Wikipedia is still the fastest news aggregator. It was faster than Twitter and much faster than Google.

---

19:21 - One of Michael Jackson’s employee’s calls 911

The next forty-nine minutes are best described as the calm before the storm. The Los Angles Fire Department arrived at Jackson’s rented mansion in Bel Air and family members were alerted of the news.

20:10 - (Story Breaks) A small entertainment site called x17online.com breaks the story.

They post photos and a brief story a full 20 minutes before the much larger entertainment site TMZ.com posts the news. Information goes live on the internet. BOOM!

20:30 - TMZ.com posts "Michael Jackson — Cardiac Arrest"

TMZ.com posts the story on its homepage and the story is distributed to hundreds of thousands of people via RSS. My guess is they paid a pretty penny for the image above and it paid for itself ten fold with all of the links TMZ got from the story.

21:12 - Wikipedia reports Jackson’s Cardiac Arrest

A member of Wikipedia adds the news of the Cardiac Arrest to Jackson’s Wikipedia article. This is well before any other news or social media source.

21:20 - TMZ.com posts story of death

Report of Jackson’s death starts to show up on RSS feeds and eventually Twitter. It is 11 minutes before the first person clicks on a bit.ly link to TMZ.

21:30 - CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital

The official CNN account tweets to its 2 million followers that Jackson went to hospital after suffering from a cardiac arrest

21:31 - First bit.ly link to TMZ story

The first bit.ly link about the story is clicked by someone which leads them to the TMZ article.

21:45 - Wikipedia freezes Michael Jackson page

After an explosion of edits to Jackson’s Wikipedia article, editors take the step of locking it down in protective status.

21:46 - Wikipedia article discussion has first reports of Jackson’s death (Note: Event updated 6/27/09 due to new information)
Wikipedia editors first mention Jackson’s death on the article discussion page.

21:50 - bit.ly link reaches high of 2,500 clicks a minute

Bit.ly link to TMZ hits high of almost 42 clicks a second.

22:03 - TMZ story on Jackson’s death is submitted to Digg

A bit late to the game, the story that would eventually go on to be one of the most dugg stories ever is first submitted to the site.

22:11 - TMZ story goes popular on Digg

The story is moved to the front page of Digg where its distribution erupts.

22:19 - "RIP Michael Jackson" tops Trends on Twitter

Story takes the next step and appears on Twitter’s Trends. Tens of millions of Twitter users now can see the story.

22:20 - MSNBC.com Confirms Jackson’s Death

One hour after the news of Jackson’s death hits the internet, the first mainstream news source publishes a confirmation article.

22:25 - CNN.com Confirms Jackson’s Death

CNN, out maneuvered by TMZ and MSNBC, confirms Jackson’s death.

22:27 - Wikipedia first reports Jackson’s death

Wikipedia editors get enough evidence to post Jackson’s death.

22:34 - Approximately 2000 mentions a minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter

Mentions of Michael Jackson hit an all time high on Twitter with nearly 1,500 a minute. That’s almost 20% of all tweets at that time!

22:38 - Twitter starts to overload. First signs of the fail whale

Twitter starts to falter as a result of the massive spike.

22:40 - First stories of Jackson’s death make it on Google News

1 hour and 20 minutes after the story is first posted on TMZ, Google News starts to report the story.

22:46 - Google News Results of Jackson’s death start showing up on the results page for the query "Michael Jackson"

Google News results top the Google results page for "Michael Jackson".

22:58 - Googlebot crawls CNN twitter feed

Google starts returning CNN’s twitter feed in "Michael Jackson" SERP and provides link to cached version.

23:00 - "Michael Jackson Died" shows up in Google Trends

Google trends updates and show’s "Michael Jackson Died" as hottest trending item.

23:18 - 4chan.org goes down

4chan members temporarily overload servers. I mention this mostly because I find it really funny. ;-p

23:47 - "Michael Jackson Heart Attack" and "Michael Jackson Cardiac Arrest" show up as suggested search on Google Homepage for "Michael Jackson"

Indirect news of Jackson’s death (if someone types "Michael Jackson") shows up on Google’s homepage.

My Take Away:

Google has a really big problem and SEOs need to pay attention.

(Note: I choose Google rather than the other search engines because it leads them in all of the aspects I mention below. Everything I say about Google applies even more to the other search engines. I only have a basic idea of how difficult the technology problems are with the issues below. For better or for worse, I hold Google to a higher standard and I am not afraid to expect more.)

First, a little background information. I believe it was Ben Hendrickson who first mentioned to me the existence of three separate time priorities when indexing the web. He pointed out that the current version of Linkscape crawls and analyzes the slow moving web with a delay of about 4 weeks. (This is damn impressive given an index size of 54+ billion pages.) Blogscape (PRO Only) is much faster and aggregates the fast moving blogosphere of millions of feeds with less than 6 hours of delay. While impressive, we are still trying to catch up with Google and have started to run into the same wall as them. Sites like Twitter, have created a new real-time web. It is only in the order of perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages but indexing it is almost useless with a delay of more than a few seconds.

The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is falling behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as a auto completion suggestion on Google’s homepage. In the computer age that is a huge amount of time. It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want.

As SEOs, we largely rely on the success of Google for our incomes. These are the same incomes that put food on the table for our families. It is easy to think that Google’s technology is flawless, after all, it really is incredible. However, it is experiences like the events of Thursday that reveal how truly vulnerable the search engines are.

For me it was humbling,

Teaser: SEOmoz does have a plan for the real-time web and we are excitedly working on it. More information to come in the future.

---

If you have any other story sources that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that’s not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) Thanks!

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Source:A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson's Death Traveled Across the Web

SEO SEO

Posted by MikeK@DanconiaMedia

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

It’s been said here before: Press releases are much less powerful than they used to be for SEO purposes. While churning out news releases and submitting them to free sites may not do much, the medium can actually be more powerful than ever if used right. Convincing a single reporter or high-profile blogger to pick up your news is infinitely more beneficial than posting worthless releases all over the place and Digg’ing and StumbleUpon’ing them with your multiple accounts.

I have a somewhat unique perspective about news releases. Not too long ago, I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter, and my inbox was regularly inundated with press releases. Some of them caught my attention and were turned into lengthy stories. Others, however, failed to captivate me or my peers and, as a result, went nowhere.

Here are some tips on how to craft your releases in a way that increases the odds of them getting noticed by the media:

Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some releases were even about. If you’re looking for a creative outlet, press release writing is not the avenue. Try writing a short story.

At least pretend you’re objective. Obviously, you have a vested interest in what you’re writing about, but it’s still important to craft your releases like down-the-middle news stories. Avoid unnecessary adjectives; most adjectives are unneeded. You don’t want your release to read like an advertisement. Pick out the newsiest element and concentrate on that.

Speak English. I see releases all the time that are stuffed with industry jargon that most people do not understand. Don’t assume that what you’re writing about is a familiar subject for the people who’ll read your release. Dumb it down. Assume your release will be read by the densest guy in the room.

Send it out manually. Instead of just dumping your releases into submission sites and hoping someone important notices, email it yourself to media outlets and bloggers you think might be interested in it. If you’re publicizing a new product, send your release to newspapers in the company’s area. If you can, find out which reporters cover the relevant beat and send it to them directly; that usually only takes a phone call.

Have good timing. If you’re looking for coverage, sending your release out on Election Day or after hours on a Friday is goofy. Those are good times to release bad news you’re obligated to report – any White House spokesman will tell you that – but it’ll do you no good unless your story is wildly sensational. News outlets are typically more desperate for copy during the summer months and around holidays.

Act like a human. Interactivevoices’ post about getting a link from CNN.com – the only PR10 news site – illustrated this perfectly. There’s no harm in picking up the phone and calling reporters directly to see if they’re interested in your story. For all you know, the only thing preventing your news from being published is an over-finicky spam filter.

Don’t beg. When I was working as a reporter, I didn’t realize why some sources were so hellbent on me including links in my stories. Now I know. If your link is relevant to the story, the reporter will probably include it. If not, you’re still getting good publicity.

Of course, all of this will only help if you actually have something worthwhile to say. If you think there’s nothing interesting to say about your enterprise, you’re probably wrong. You just need to think long and hard to figure out what it is.

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Source:Tips from a recovering journalist: How to write effective press releases that help SEO

SEO SEO

This weekend I was doing a little housekeeping on some of my domains and hosting accounts and decided to test and see if it was possible to get a website indexed using XML Sitemaps and no external links.
Since some piano player in New Jersey owns the domain MichaelGray.com I had a few options but the [...]

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Can You Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps?

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Source:Can You Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps?

SEO SEO

Do you know what attracts your readers? What headlines they respond to most? Do they respond to pictures? Do they know what your offer is?

No doubt we all agree that testing is a good thing to do. We can see clearly if our ideas are working or not. But a lot of testing is, quite frankly, tedious.

Measuring user behavior patterns and visitor paths is, in most cases, worthwhile, but there is always a trade-off in terms of the time it takes to setup and run such testing verses the reward for doing so.

Here are a few cheap and cheerful testing ideas that don’t take a lot of time, but can improve your site performance significantly.

1. Write Your Copy, Then Leave It Alone For A Day

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of your copy is to simply leave it until tomorrow before you hit publish.

It can be very hard to read your own copy objectively, especially as you’re writing it. It is often laced with emotion, and the impulsive desire to just finish the damn thing and get it out there.

By leaving it until the next day before you hit publish, you force yourself to re-read your copy in a more objective light. You allow yourself a mental separation between your writer and editor brain function.

When editing, replace long words with short words. Break up long sentences into short ones. Minimize. Eliminate duplication. All copy benefits from rewriting.

Leaving copy aside for a day is the cheapest way to get the objective help of an “editor”, without actually having to hire one.

2. Get Someone Else To Read Your Page Aloud

It’s a good idea to read your copy out loud. It helps you spot weaknesses more easily.

It’s an even better idea to get someone else to read it aloud.

You’ll experience your copy how other people will hear it in their heads. Does it get your message across when it is read by someone who doesn’t know the point you are eventually going to make? Does it sound like they want to read what is coming next, or do they sound confused or bored? Are the most important points emphasized? Is it obvious what the desired action is?

It can be difficult to spot these factors when reading copy in your head, but blindingly obvious when someone else reads it back to you.

3. Basic Split Run Test Using Adwords

Even if you’re focusing on SEO, Adwords is a great way to test the effectiveness of your your chosen keyword terms and site copy.

Once you have a keyword list for SEO, run a short adwords campaign against those keywords. Test the titles and descriptions you plan to use. Test the performance of your landing pages by swapping out one page for another on different days. You can then feed this information through to your SEO campaign. Run with the winners, and cut the losers.

Keep in mind the Adwords won’t perform just like a SERP listing, because a lot of people ignore advertising. However, this method is likely to give you a rough idea on what people who search on your chosen keywords are really interested in. Chances are if it works in Adwords, it will work even better in the main SERPs.

Quite often, the keywords you imagine are the most important don’t work so well in practice. Or perhaps the title tag you were planning on using might not be enticing enough. For a small sum, you can test keyword effectiveness before embarking on the long and involved process of SEO, link building and ranking, which you’ll have to live with for years.

4. Are You Selling The Solution To The Problem

Say you want to build a mailing list by giving away a free e-book.

These days, that’s a boring offer.

Unfairly, e-books have a bad reputation because they are often perceived as low value and are frequently associated with scams. “Free” on the internet is essentially meaningless, given that most things on the internet are free.

Instead, sell the solution. i.e “Do you want to know how to find the top five investment funds in any market? Do you want to find the funds that have consistently returned over 10% p/a for the last ten years? Sign up for our free e-book download that answers these questions, and more”

Much more enticing than “free e-book give-away”. The form (e-book) is not the important bit, the benefit (finding the right investment funds) is the important bit.

The internet has a lot in common with direct marketing. Proven and tested direct marketing methods dictate we should “sell the sizzle”, wherever appropriate. The idea is that people don’t buy products and services, they buy the benefits of those products and services. They ask “what’s in it for them?”

Does your copy always move towards answering this question? Read your copy aloud. If it doesn’t, then rewrite until it does.

5. Does The Picture Sync With The Message?

Pictures are powerful attention grabbers.

But do you have the right image? The right image is the image that helps you sell. Grabbing attention doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. Flickr is full of attention grabbing images that will never sell themselves, or anything else.

In terms of doing business, a picture, like words, should relate to the product or service. A picture’s function is to increase sales. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be there.

The most obvious relationship is direct i.e a picture of the product or service. Modern advertising tends to focus on indirect relationships, such as implied association with people who use the product. i.e. a group of cool skater kids hanging out may advertise Vans footwear, even if you don’t actually see the shoes in shot. The benefit for the audience is to become part of this cool tribe. More indirect methods tend to be used in brand building advertising.

The closer you are to direct marketing, the more direct the imagery tends to be. If you want to sell an Apple iPod Touch, you show a big picture of one. Basic stuff, right? But it’s surprising how many sites use vague imagery that might look cool, but gives the viewer no idea what the site is about, or doesn’t lead them to identify with your product or service.

Don’t ask “Is this picture worth a thousand words? “, ask “Does this picture tell the customer a thousand words about my product or service?”

Got any more cheap and cheerful testing methods? Add them to the comments.

Source:Site Testing That Isn't Tedious

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