MarCom NewsWire

Have you Heard About Cloud Link Building?

2010-12-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard about cloud link-building? We have trained a team of experts abroad, to focus on doing content spinning, authority sites, RSS feeds, SEO link-building, social media marketing, bookmarking, and much more.

MarCom's team manages building cloud linking around articles for locally based keywords and uses multiple IP addresses for a fast track. These strategies and tactics have been tested using the Caffeine beta since early Fall of 2009, and they are working beautifully with the Beta of Google's new Caffeine, the update to Google's algorithm.

Expanding the MarCom Los Angeles SEO team to other parts of the world allows us to focus on online marketing strategies for our clients, and integrating ways to build their business along with building brands.

Most of our clients are on page one of the search engines as a result of these cloud building and mashing strategies, along with the blogs, online newsletters, bookmarking sites such as DIGG and Delicious, and many other white hat link-building strategies.

Visit www.marcomnewmedia.com for more information and case histories of our client successes.

Reputation Management is Crisis PR

2010-08-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

What is online reputation management? It is what marketers and public relations pros used to call crisis management. Frequently being called "online reputation management" today, MarCom started seeing this challenge back around 2005. It was when many chief executive officers started seeing negative listings, comments or articles about them and/or their company’s products and services on the Internet.

Back then, about ten years ago, marketers spent their time training executives in major corporations on how to handle a crisis, but when the worldwide Web was born,things changed. And today, social media channels like Twitter or Facebook, a crisis can travel at the speed of light, and potentially put a company out of business overnight.

In those days CEOs and many company officers unwittingly responded to people in blogs or news forums and to journalists online – and often times their comments were perceived in a negative way. If anyone anywhere online would say bad things about a CEO or their company and products online, it showed up on page one of the search engines when the CEO's name and his company was searched for online. These kinds of complaints or bad reviews that were showing up in a search meant a loss of revenues, and in some cases, lost businesses period.

These days, most CEOs know better than to say bad things online. The problem being that anything you write on the worldwide Web remains on the worldwide Web. Reputation management services promise to highlight positive pages and bury offending sites deep in search results. Most reputation services work by tracking what's written about a client on the Web, then doing search engine optimization (SEO) and promoting the positive pages, thereby pushing damaging references off the first pages of search results.

Even worse, if you EVER had a bad rap sheet from a prior crime or offence that shows up on the Internet. In one case, a book was written about a group of men that were sent to jail for a crime. That book was reviewed in a national business magazine, and to this day it remains engrained on page one of Google and the Internet, mug shots and all. The bigger the website with a negative listing, the harder it is and longer it takes to remove it.

Today this is known as "reputation management" -- a job that typically falls upon marketing and PR people to make what these CEOs said vanish. Five years ago it only took a couple of months to “bury” negative comments online because Google was less sophisticated and there was less content out there. But then it all depends on the business category. Some categories have more content posted on the Web than others. As just one example, optimizing for "purple hearts" is going to be easier than "wireless technology" becaus therer is less out there about purple hearts.

Therefore, online reputation management was born to deal with a businessman, celebrity, or a politician's negative listings. In addition to using basic public relations strategies, SEO and link building became the way to solve these challenges.

The marketing and SEO firm must determine the new key messages for use online. Then they will use these optimum key words in all written content online and offline. That includes website copy, press materials, and optimized press releases that are posted on electronic wire services; syndicated articles for the Web; blogs and newsletters. And nowadays, we also use Facebook, Twitter and bookmark sites like DIGG, and Stumble Upon, to create links back to the client’s website pages with relevant content.

Within weeks negative listings will start to be pushed back off of Google’s first page, and by three to six months a company’s ranking by the search engines should be showing a significant increase in organic listings based on the key words used, and the negative listings will be pushed down on the pages of the se4arch engines, although they may never be completely gone.

Reputation management services have become mainstream because of the growth online. What took a couple of months to "fix" an issue in years past now takes more time, and a bigger team. We have trained and put people in place globally to assist in this effort. And since we have managed online reputation strategies for other clients too.

Today we use bigger teams to create more links faster, along with newer more sophisticated (and time consuming) tactics like short optimized video postings on YouTube, the syndication of many optimized content articles, and an array of interlinked websites and social media marketing platforms to create RSS mashups, hubspots, and a synergistic approach for moving negative listings back to the back pages on the Web.

Best Online Marketing Practices and a Case History

2010-06-29T14:46:00.000-07:00

Today's marketers are asking about the value of social media marketing. As a Los Angeles social media marketing agency, we have researched this topic, and here are their top three questions:

1) Tell me what are the best practices of social media marketing?
2) What are the time management considerations with social media?
3) How can marketers measure the return on investment of social media marketing?

MarCom New Media has been doing social media networking since the beginning about six years ago. We believe that blogs and You Tube are the best practices thus far, although we are seeing pretty good results for corporate Facebook fan pages when done in conjunction with Pay per Click (PPC) ads on Facebook.

If you are still having a hard time believing that Twitter has much value other than for link-buliding links back to websites, join the club. However we do know for the food wagons, the construction workers who use it among their teams, and for crisis management, it works, oh and also for the emdia, and celebrities in the entertainment world. For many other businesses, maybe not.

Social media marketing is time consuming - period. This is where you need good writers, skilled at posting to the various social mediums. Social media may be best served when done by more junior staff members, so that senior management can take on strategies, marketing planning, meetings, and stressing about how we should be measuring it.

Last, many marketers are having a difficult time measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media marketing. In fact, nearly 61 percent of marketers surveyed said their organizations' ROI measurement practices are poor, and 34 percent stated they are "very poor."

It seems that historically, PR has also always had a reputation for been difficult to measure. PR professionals have used the number of press articles (quantitative) and the messages that were written up (qualitative) as methods of measurement in the past, and the reality is that now PR can be measured through onine tools as well.

We will soon start seeing improved measurement capabilities built right into the tools, as search and social media tools are now being improved radically. However, MarCom did a year-end report for one medical devices client in January of 2010 after a big six month push with online marketing. We used many of the measurement tools in the social media services that we have been using use. Here's a sample of what we accomplished during that six month period:

The Value of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

4,803 Links.
63+ blog posts; 90 videos.
20+ Articles each spun over 30 times and syndicated on Web.
10 press releases; 3 consumer, 1 doctor; 1 pharmacist newsletter.
210 Twitter followers; 140 Twitter posts; 2,275 links
114 Facebook friends; 100 posts; Facebook ad ¡V $200 per mo. = average 384 visitors to website. Average cost per month $224. Average cost per visit 60 cents (which is cheap for PPC).
20 Diggs; 20 del.icio.us and many more.
Resulting in over 75,000 measurable, trackable views and visits at a cost of $1.66 (our fees). This compares most favorably with the cost of pay per click at $2.00 per visit, minimum. This is a savings to Wiley of over $25,000 for the six month period July 1-Dec 25, or $4,250 in savings per month.

Increase of 49,000 website visitors in 2009
Additional 11,500 visitors to videos in 2009
Additional 6,000 plus visitors to press releases
Additional 25,000 visitors to blog in 2009
6,412 additional visitors to articles in 2009
Additional 6 to 8,000 visitors to press releases in 2009

ADDITIONAL VISITORS 2009 vs. 2008: 105,912

Has Social Media Marketing Replaced Public Relations?

2010-02-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

We have entered a new era of what has been called public relations over the years. I remember when PR became corporate communications, then marketing communications, and now many are saying that they believe PR has become social media.

I believe that PR is here to stay - although it is not the old school publicist in a telephone booth dialing the media to share the latest news tip on the street. It has changed from one way publishing and broadcasting to two way conversations.

Over the last year and a half, more than 300 newspapers have folded. Around eight magazines with a circulation of 1 million or more stopped their presses, while more than magazines completely shut down. 600 top-tier publishing employees were laid off. In the radio business alone, more than 10,000 jobs were lost. Bankruptcies have overtaken 100 plus television stations after their parent companies filed Chapter 11 bankrupsy.

It is no surprise. 2010 started out as the year of transformation. Whether it is due to the economy, in part, or just a social uprising - we are in early stages of a re-engineering of business as we know it, driven by social networking which has almost replaced the traditional media. (Source: Vocus Media Research Group.)

Today, people interact online in real-time dialogues with each other. Businesses now speak to customers with the hopes of influencing them. And people listen watch and read what other peoople have to say about products and services. Full disclosure. No longer can companies hide behind brand messaging.

However, marketing and public relations do go hand in hand with online strategies today, helping to launch and maintain social media campaigns. As a Los Angeles public relations agency, MarCom will always believe in synergistic campaigns and using the foundation built by yesterday’s public relations strategies.

As of today, 65 percent of marketers have only been involved with social media marketing for a few months or less.; 56 percent, are using social media for six plus hours every week; and only one in three – do social media for more than 11 hours per week. 85 percent of marketers indicated that the number-one advantage of social media marketing is generating exposure for their business.

For more information on MarCom's social media marketing services, call 323.650.2838.

Los Angeles SEO Company Goes Local

2010-01-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

If you want to get a good grasp of where search engine optimization is going in 2010 think like a realtor. Location, location, location. Our Los Angeles search engine marketing guru Mike Keesling has been tracking the just-this-week-launched Google Caffeine algorithm. And due to the work we started doing with the Beta back in the Fall - all of our clients are being ranked high up in page one of Google.

Mike says this year search engine marketing will become increasingly more important as far as Google is concerned. That is why, in both the second and third option of Maintenance SEO, we make provisions for building cloud linking around articles for locally based keywords.

Hidden in the discussion of what the Caffeine update to the Google algorithm means is that location is going to be a huge factor in terms of what results get returned on searches. Here's why.

All search engines are becoming more and more personalized. What that means is that if you live in Los Angeles and are searching for a hair salon (for instance) you will start seeing more and more Los Angeles based hair salons in the search results as we move into the New Year.

What this affords for the Los Angeles SEO companies like MarCom New Media is a tremendous opportunity by using Google Map API's and other localized search optimization tactics to totally dominate the results for your main keyword phrase (Los Angeles social media marketing in our example) for anyone searching for social media marketing firms who work from the Los Angeles area, as well as for anyone outside of Los Angeles searching for the phrase "Los Angeles Social media marketing firm."

This may be the last time there is a level playing field between small business and big business to dominate search rankings.

The Paradign Shift in Online Marketing

2009-11-30T13:53:00.000-08:00

We are in the earliest stages of a massive paradigm shift among the corporate world and our institutions - and it is all being driven by social media marketing and the Web.

Ie seems like social networking has been tagged as a better way to work. Many experts agree it will become an essential utility to do business, so the faster businesses use social media tools, the better they will do in the New Year. But if your website isn't optimized properly for the search engines, it won't help you on your Google rankings.

In the past, we didn't necessarily think that Twitter was a great of a corporate tool as other networks like Facebook. But now we can see, that both have their places - especially with re-Tweeting capabilities, and tiny urls which fit the 140 character format. We have set up corporate accounts and ghostblog, ghostTwitter, and have corporate fan pages for all of our clients. We also do corporate social bookmarking of content that we write and post all over the Web in spots like DIGG, StumbleUpon, and others.

Our clients' YouTube videos are a smashing success. Check out www.YouTube.com/Bioidenticals where we have more than 90 videos for client T.S. Wiley, who sells the Wiley Protocol bioidenticals. The fact is, all of these online social media marketing tools are great for content building and linking back to websites, which ultimately gives you first page results in the search engines. But you must know how to link properly.

The 2010 New Year - some time in January with a national roll-out - is when Caffeine launches, a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. So far we are seeing great results for our clients rankings with the Beta version.

What's more, Google's Social Search is a new program that integrates content from a user’s social network into their search results so they can easily find relevant blogs, reviews and other information from within their own social networking groups.

If there's relevant web content written by people in your circle when you sign into Google, it will show up at the bottom of your search results under an area called "Results from people in your social circle." This means that search marketing is going to become more targeted to individuals, as people seriously organize into groups and communities on the Web. It is also becomming more localized.

Overall, today people just want direct communication with the brands, products and services they like and uchoose to use. People want messages that address their individual needs, even if it is only 140 characters in Twitter.

The era of mo more mass marketing is over.

Call Los Angeles SEO company, MarCom New Media at 323.650.2838 for more information on how we can help your business.

Is Your Website Optimized for the Search Engines?

2009-08-31T17:02:00.000-07:00

Our resident SEO expert Mike Keesling was doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when Pacific Islands Reservations had one website in 1996. With 12 websites today, we have helped them maintain a top ten ranking in Google, MSN and Yahoo since.

If you are a small business you need a website with interactive content that will attract your customers while they are online seeking what they want. When your potential customers type in the key words or phrases associated with your products and services, MarCom will help get your site ranked to come up within the first page of the results in Google or Yahoo.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how people will find your website and it's also a way to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your site. When people use search engines to find what they are looking for they type in key words or phrases. MarCom uses a custom analysis will tell us which keywords your customers use, plus those that your competitors have used.

Most web designers do not install Meta, Title or Alt tags properly. This is critical to the search engines and your customers finding your website. One example is that sites with flash pages are not able to be read by Google, so avoiud them. You can use embedded flash, but make sure there's text on each page of your site. Content is king for the search engines.

Optimized tags and content with the proper key words we will make sure every page on your website is optimized properly. More subject-specific content means better qualified traffic. This text is optimized if the search engines can find it via keyword-density.

For more information on search engine optimization, contact MarCom at 323.650.2838 or go to http://www.marcomnewmedia.com/

Search Engine Optimization Strategy: Essential for Optimization for a Website

2009-07-09T16:02:00.001-07:00

Today, a colleague made a comment about the fact that many of the new open source software and web design applications have built-in search engine optimization. This may be true, but typically the optimization will not work like that of a customized website - the likes of what our SMM guru Mike Keesling does.

Content management sites these days usually are SEO friendly, which means that the page name rewrites a redirect to a file name with an html on it, so it makes search engine friendly urls. Ssecond, alot of these open source CMS sites do come with the ability to individually define Meta tags and title tags, as opposed to before, where we got global tags. They give us a form field, to do individual Meta and title tags -- but you still need to input the correct wording or tag. One still has to do the work and know what you're doing. There is no button to click to optimize your site without doing the work.

Many website designers do not know how to do detailed search engine optimization (SEO). Custom Web site meta, alt and description tags that tie-in with relevant content on each page, and properly characterized. We create a Web site search engine optimization strategy for each of our clients. In fact here's a recent example for client David Gross, founder of Movie Review Intelligence, Inc.

We met with David early in April, and realized that his new movie review aggrigation website would have dynamic content with the new movie reviews each week. MarCom's Mike Keesling knew he would have to be creative with the Website's SEO and come up with a clear onsite search engine optimization strategy.

We typically use the SWAT approach for a new client's launch. That includes:
Search engine optimization
Writing content and linking back to the site.
Analytics to track visitors.
Tracking SEO results.

After conducting a competative Keyword Analysis, he figured out a formula to add the Meta tags dynamically. It worked like a charm and the site was recognized within a week on Google.

Meanwhile we added an RSS press room using Press-feed (http://www.press-feed-com/) and wrote all the press materials, including key words with links to relevant pages on the site.

Next we began the offsite linking strategy, which meant creating a social media marketing strategy, and beginning all the activities of posting tweets in Twitter, Facebook, and the social bookmarketing sites like DIGG. These too include links back to the relevant content on the website.

Currently we are tracking visitors to the website, which are increasing every day. We will do a hard launch with an announcement press release next week on MarketWire. After the second month we will track our search engine optimization results.

Search Engine Optimization Strategy: Essential for Optimization fo a Website

2009-07-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

Today, a colleague made a comment about the fact that many of the new open source software and web design applications have built-in search engine optimization. This may be true, but typically the optimization will not work like that of a customized website - the likes of what our SMM guru Mike Keesling does.

Many website designers do not know how to do detailed search engine optimization (SEO). Custom Web site meta, alt and description tags that tie-in with relevant content on each page, and properly characterized. We create a Web site search engine optimization strategy for each of our clients. In fact here's a recent example for client David Gross, founder of Movie Review intelligence, Inc.

We met with David early in April, and realized that his new movie review aggrigation website would have dynamic content with the new movie reviews each week. MarCom's Mike Keesling knew he would have to be creative with the Website's SEO and come up with a clear onsite search engine optimization strategy.

We typically use the SWAT approach for a new client's launch. That includes:
Search engine optimization
Writing content and linking back to the site.
Analytics to track visitors.
Tracking SEO results.

After conducting a competative Keyword Analysis, he figured out a formula to add the Meta tags dynamically. It worked like a charm and the site was recognized within a week on Google.

Meanwhile we added an RSS press room using Press-feed (www.press-feed-com) and wrote all the press materials, including key words with links to relevant pages on the site.

Next we began the offsite linking strategy, which meant creating a social media marketing strategy, and beginning all the activities of posting tweets in Twitter, Facebook, and the social bookmarketing sites like DIGG. These too include links back to the relevant content on the website.

Currently we are tracking visitors to the website, which are increasing every day. We will do a hard launch with an announcement press release next week on MarketWire. After the second month we will track our search engine optimization results.

Link Building Strategies are Critical to SEO

2009-06-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices have been defined and now companies are competing for visibility within the organic search listings on the Internet. Three years ago it took a couple of months to be optimized; today it is closer to six to eight months. Why? Because so many companies are finally trying to get optimized, and the search engines need time to put them in place. New websites typically spend a month in the Google sandbox, before they are recognized.

Link building strategies are critical to the success of a website’s optimization. Link building provides links using your keywords to various pages on your website, so that the search engines will give the site a higher ranking, and so people using search terms and phrases will be more likely to find your site.

Social media marketing practitioners like MarOm New Media uses various tactics including building links to your site in relevant blogs, photo sites, social media networks, newswires, and directories. If you have short podcasts (audio) or videos, these can also be added to YouTube, and we also syndicate them to hundreds of other video sites. MarCom has completed the Bioidenticals Network on YouTube, for example, for our client The Wiley Protocol, for whom we have filmed, edited, produced, and syndicated more than 42 videos thus far.

Additionally you will find that there are other strategies including ghost blogging, forum posts, and bookmarking on social media networks, all of which provide linking opportunities. Bookmarking means adding content via a button, "add to del.icio.us," for example. You can also submit white papers, or relevant articles to other relevant sites to get your content out there. This way others can create what the industry has dubbed "mashups" to drive traffic back to your website.

MarCom has recently developed some ingenious three way linking strategies for MarCom clients that we'll be launching before July. Hiont: It is named "Billboard Mama."

B2B Social Media Marketing

2009-05-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

We are getting many questions from our clients asking if we should start signing them up corporately for Facebook and Twitter, etc. Since MarCom has been doing Social Media Marketing (SMM) since the beginning, we have some strategic thoughts on what works and how it should be leveraged for B2B correctly.

First you need to do some research. One thing MarCom has done for several clients including Expensewatch.com, and The Interface Financial Group, is an audit of their competitor's search engine marketing programs, and then we provide recommendations for improvement. We told them, you need to review what to accomplish, and take a look at how SMM will complement your overall marketing plan. All companies need an SMM strategy - but it is difficult for most marketers to do this when this area is not their expertise.

For those of you involved in B2B, if you don't yet believe that MarCom New Media can assist you with your social media marketing, read Paul Gillin's latest book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing. This book will educate you about the ways you can extend your brand, engage customers, launch a product, deal with a crisis, and most importantly, generate leads in communities where your customers live online.

Some of the tactics include ghostwriting blogs, posting videos and syndicating them on the Internet, syndicating articles, and bookmarking in places like DIGG or StumbleUpon, to name only a few. Corporate Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are becomming popular as well. And as always, link backs from these social media sites to your website are encouraged for better search engine optimization and website rankings.

Gillin told us, "Social Media Marketing actually appears to be gaining a head of steam. Peter Kim has a great wiki of social media marketing examples that is up to more than 1,500 entries. The list dramatizes the surge in interest that we are now seeing in SMM, particularly because of the attractive economies."

The good news is that once you have read it - you will realize there's no way you can manage it alone, so we hope you will us so we can develop a strategic plan, put our practiced team on it for you and measure results.

Join me to Use Social Media on Twitter, Facebook, My Space and More

2009-04-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

As a Los Angeles social media marketing consultant, it has been interesting to experiment around with all of the new social media marketing mediums -- the convergence of marketing, advertising and PR on the Web. I do SMM every day for our MarCom New Media clients, including ghostwriting blogs like this one on invoice factoring for Interface Financial, writing articles and syndicated them over the Internet, writing optimized releases and pitch letters, bookmarking content in DIGG and distributing content over RSS feeds. When I pitch the media via email I use pitch letters with embedded videos.

Social Media Marketing for B2B has gotten a bad rap. But I make sure we use podcasts embedded, plus images of their latest products and services. Once our social media press releases are posted on the Internet, via Marketwire, they quickly show up in Yahoo and Google News,l SMM requires every bit as much of a professional to manage, as marketing, PR or corporate communications has always required.

Today, only about 10 to 15 percent of marketers nationwide are doing SMM, according to guru Paul Gillin who wrote a book called The New Influencers. The purpose of SMM is to engage with enthusiasts and existing customers in interactive communities in order to drive more traffic and sales.

If you have not already, start experimenting with blogs, online video, podcasts, corporate communities and public networks. In fact, social networks were only beginning to gain traction in the spring of 2007. Memberships are in the hundreds of millions.

Getting on the first page of the Google listings takes a searc engine optimization (SEO) company like MarCom, who spends months getting our clients ranked on the top of the search engines. Check out our Los Angeles SEO Successes

Onsite Search Optimization Tips

2009-04-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

Here are some tips for what NOT to do on your website if you want to attract customers. Never use Flash splash screens. Google and the search engines cannot read it, so Flash is not good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results. Embedded Flash is OK to use, but if your home page is a Flash splash screen with no text, the search engines simply won't see it.

As a Los Angeles search engine optimization consultants, we see everything, and mostly we see that website designers do more harm than good when they say they know how to SEO a website. Usually this is just not the case. Good SEO is also all about content... content... content. Make sure there is plenty of content on your website. Nice designs, photos and no content will not help your SEO results, period.

Meta, Title and Description tags are very important. You may have seen some websites where it says "new page" in the browser? That is because the website designer did not put a title tag on the page. A short message with a key word that describes your site in the Description tag is essential so your customers will click through to your site when potential customers see your site's listing.

Never use repeat Title and Description tags. Website pages should each be unique with a theme for key words or phrases for each page. Make your Title and Description tags match the content for one of the keywords per page. You can't optimize one single page for many different key words.

Do not use text as an image. Some sites have text and images combined into a jpg or gif image, so you can't select the text with your cursor. If a search engine can't find any searchable text, you will not get SEO results. Also don't make any headlines into gif images, because they should be text with a key word in it.

Local businesses don't need national SEO. A cigar store in Pasadena does not need to optimize for the national or global market. Customers must live nearby. MarCom had a client like this, so we optimized them for Pasadena Cigar stores. It worked. Now it would have been different if they had an online cigar store.

For those of you who need some more help with your search engine optimization visit our website at http://www.marcomnewmedia.com/

Google Bans Duplicate Tags and Content

2009-04-07T13:37:00.000-07:00

MarCom’s search engine optimization (SEO) expert Mike Keesling has been telling us for some time that there would be a shakeup about duplicate content on the Internet, and as usual, he was right, because Google is not standing for duplicate content anymore. This includes the Internet, but more importantly, it means no more duplicate META, ALT or description tags on websites.

Recently MarCom New Media looked at a B2B company’s website and noticed that they had their name in all their title tags, which dilutes the effectiveness of the title tag. Google will not give full value to your pages, unless each page has a different title tag. ALL website pages need their own unique description tag. Tags should be keyword rich.

What is a title tag? Interestingly, there are no definitions in the online dictionaries for “title tag.” Not in Webster’s or Wikipedia. However, you will find many other descriptions if you type those words in Google. A title tag is a piece of HTML code that describes a specific web page of content. Title tags guide the search engines in determining what is in the content of specific web pages. TIP: Creating a relevant title tag is one of the most important variables in achieving high search engine positioning.

One of the most common mistakes that we see on 80 percent of our new clients' sites is that they put their company name as the first thing on the title tag for each page. Once we fix that, search ranking results begin to inprove. Most often the url for the site already includes the company name, so wasting valuable characters on constantly repeating the name of the company doesn't accomplish anything in terms of search engine optimization. It also usually ends up making at least 50 percent of each title tag identical which is NOT a good thing.

The other new Google slap is that Social Media Marketing (SMM) content must also be unique. This means that Google's cracking down on social media, just like it did last year with link building farms and bots. The rap is that content in social media sites needs to be original. You need to do the work. Or hire experts like us to do the work. Google will not accept it if you use a service that posts 100 Stumble Upon items that are all the same, from the same IP address or are posting hundreds of other tags, for other clients at the same time they do yours.

Content posted online must be: Unique and from different IP addresses; posted by unique people. That’s true social media...and if this all sounds like Greek to you, then please give MarCom a call at 323.650.2838 and we'll translate it for you.

PS Google LOVES articles these days. Here's just one example of a search optimized article for one of MarCom's clients - The Interface Financial Group. Credit Repair Tips for Small Businesses. But make SURE none of your articles are duplicates. Each article must be a specific percent different than the next.

As the recession forces many consumers to buy less—search engine marketing is key.

The MarCom New Media Search Engine Marketing Audit

2009-03-31T12:13:00.000-07:00

MarCom is no doubt, one of just a few cutting edge social media marketing firms in Los Angeles, and we are always getting leads for companies that have no clue about what their online marketing needs are or should be. Many people believe their web designers, or programmers, who often times "think" they know how to do search engine optimization (SEO). Our experience almost every time is that companies are NOT well optimized. if anything, webd esigners can do more damage than good when it comes to advising about SEO.

In order to help a company determine what they need to do insofar as SEO and SMM, MarCom has been also been conducting search engine optimization audits for companies. We just did one for client, ExpenseWatch.

Here's what our basic statement of work for an audit looks like. First we research and determine the keywords associated with your company's products or services that are most likely to achieve high search-engine rankings. Next we recommended a keyword strategy with the top SEO words and phrases and make suggestions to map the keywords to specific website pages, as well as how these words relate to competitive websites. You'll get a very comprehensive spreadsheet with this data.

Next MarCom conducts an audit of your current SEO and SEM and then provides recommendations for improving both. The audit reviews website content and offers suggestions for how to repackage pages and add to them. The navigation of the site is reviewed. In some cases we can provide a formula for your website Meta, title and description tags but it's often just easier for us to be hired to implement them.

The audit will also include your competitor activities, site visitor information, Google Adwords spends and organic search results. MarCom also recommends analytics or measurement tools and provides tips to analyze data. If your company already has a Google Adwords program, we'll review it (once you give us access) and provide tips for budgeting, improvements in the campaigns and we'll analyze their results. One of our clients was spending $28k per month. They are now down to around $7k per month thanks to our work. We weaned them off of Google Adword spending and improved their search engine results so they tripled their leads. We saved big marketing dollars.

In summary, many companies are able to leverage their existing content and outside websites already linking to them by using best of breed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. These include adding individual, relevant title tags, description tags, and where applicable, alt image tags to the website. But for others, we recommend our three phase approach: 1) Onsite optimization. 2) Offsite Optimization, and 3) Linking strategies and Social Media Marketing.

Find me on Twitter at MarCom4SMM - for Social Media Marketing

2009-03-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

The Aberdeen Group recently published a report, “The ROI on Social Media Marketing,” which was sponsored by Visible Technologies. The report affirms that marketers have developed the methods and tools to drive return on investment (ROI) for companies via social media. It's just one more reason why I now have a Twitter account for MarCom - twitter me at MarCom4SMM.

This just affirms what Marcom New Media, a Los Angeles social media marketing firm, has been doing for the last five years, which entails listening to customers and influencing prospects. Actually, we keep telling clients that in order to compete online, flourish and be more profitable, there are three key steps:

Phase I - Online SEO
Phase II - Offline Link Building and Pay per Click (PPC)
Phase III- Social Media Marketing

The research report said 63 percent of the companies in their survey (defined as best-in-class) planned to increase their social media marketing budgets this year.

The truth is, social media networks started around the spring of 2007, and today, memberships in platforms like Facebook, or My Space, are in the hundreds of millions. We started doing tactics like forum posting back in the year 2000.

But there is something else know as social media optimization. This includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. Tools for this include adding links to services such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Readdit.

MarCom writes unique content (all articles must be 30 to 40 % unique or different than any other document on the Web) that's embedded with your key words and phrases, so when people search online, there’s a better chance of finding your content via the search engines.

We are also a Los Angeles Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firm, and helps clients audit and determine search marketing strategies for increased lead generation online. We use a many different social networking platforms for branding online.

A couple of the areas that have grown for us includes ghostwriting blogs for clients. We also shoot video shorts, edit them and syndicate them online in places like Google video or YouTube, and record and manage podcasts. We recently completed a number of online videos for our client The Wiley Protocol, which are also on YouTube, and syndicated around the Internet.

Email Marketing Report in From Forrester

2009-03-16T10:26:00.001-07:00

According to a March 13, 2009 alert from Forrester, a report entitled, "Optimizing Email Marketing In An Economic Slowdown And Its Impact On Vendor Selection," by David Daniels
with Lauren Jesuitus, Corina Matiesanu, Dave Frankland and Emily Murphy, makes it clear we need to take heed. Following is an excerpt from that document. Marcom New Media, a Los Angeles Internet marketing company, believes that Forrester reports are a good indicator of the marketing marketplace.

"The current economic environment puts increased pressure on email marketers against which they must adjust their practices and strategies. A July 2008 JupiterResearch/Clickz survey of 286 email marketing executives reveals classic challenges of constrained staffing resources and data integration challenges. Driven by staffing challenges and the need to drive further cost efficiencies, 24% of marketers plan on switching their email service providers (ESPs) over the next 12 months. Email Marketers will need to quickly respond to changing consumer communication patterns and social marketing opportunities and must prioritize tactics to create efficiencies within their email marketing practices, such as improved use of targeting, leveraging automation and customer generated content as well as removing non-responsive subscribers from ongoing mailings."

The Future - 2009 Marketing Trends

2009-02-27T17:52:00.000-08:00

-In case you are wondering, or curious, the outlook for 2009 advertising remains pretty upbeat for certain types of online media and marketing - including search, video and multicultural initiatives. However, traditional media and some social networks can expect to face serious difficulties going forward, says eMarketer.

Here are that firm's key trends for 2009:

1. Marketers will continue to stretch their budgets by making use of cost-efficient online ad placements. In addition to the Internet’s accountability and targeting, which permit more-focused media buys, lower prices for most display ads and less competition for many search keywords will make online a buyers’ market.

2. Search Marketing Remains Recession-Resistant: While search marketing is not recession-proof, it is recession-resistant, with estimated spending growth in 2009 at 14.9%, to $12.3 billion.

The reasons for search’s strength:
Search is highly measurable and will help retain many budgets and increase some others, as advertisers look for secure and effective marketing methods to combat the fear inherent in an economic meltdown.

Consumers who monetize search ads by deciding whether or not to click, will be both taking money off the table (by shopping less) and putting money back on the table (by searching for deals).

Search advertising will grow less in 2009 than in any previous year. Its inherent strength means greater spending gains than for any other major form of advertising, whether online or through traditional media.

3. Video Ad Spending Will Run Counter to Economic Trends: Video ad spending growth will run counter to overall economic developments, rising by 45 percent in 2009 to reach $850 million.

Check out these two key factors: First, the sharp escalation of professional video content on the web — coming mainly from TV networks — is creating a viable base for brand marketers. Second, even though most advertisers are increasingly cautious with their budgets, they still need to reach online audiences, and woo their shrinking wallets, with messages that reach their hearts and minds. This should add up to more video, according to eMarketer.

4. Social Network Shakeout: With US ad revenue growth slowing, smaller and niche social networks will have a tough time gaining traction and several may close down or be acquired by larger players. In addition, marketers that have built standalone social networks tied to their brands will either shutter them or migrate them to existing social network platforms where they can reach a broader audience.

5. New Revenue Streams for Social Networks: E-commerce will be a growing revenue stream for social network sites. Expect both MySpace and Facebook to enhance their self-serve advertising systems to allow consumers and businesses to buy and sell real-world goods and services. Facebook, already a de facto business networking site because of the number of businesspeople who use it, will develop ad programs aimed at B2B companies. This will directly affect LinkedIn.

6. E-Commerce Sales Growth From Existing Online Buyers: Online retail sales (excluding travel) will grow by only 4% in 2009—the first full year to feel the impact of the economic crisis. Over the long term, online sales growth has been on a downward slope as the number of online buyers approaches saturation. So, the economy accentuates an existing trend. Most retail e-commerce sales growth in the future will come from increased spending by current online buyers.

7. Seismic Shift in TV Ad Sales: US TV ad spending will decline 4.2% to $66.9 billion in 2009. This precipitous drop in spending reflects not only expectations of a continued poor economy but a seismic shift in the way television advertising is bought and sold, eMarketer said.
Like other traditional media, TV advertising was already suffering, and now the climate will be even tougher. Fragmentation on TV and declines in viewership have made it more difficult for advertisers to reach audiences. Broadcasters will be pressed to redefine their businesses in an increasingly digital world. They will focus on expanding programming to the online realm and will continue to test business models.

8. Newspaper Companies to Become Casualties: Newspaper advertising will decline in 2009 more than any other medium. Industry-wide cutbacks will continue, and there will be some consolidation, while firms will be forced to undertake drastic measures to stay afloat. The industry was limping before the recession and the market can expect more newspaper companies to become casualties.

9. User-Generated Content Aggregation: With so much user-generated media populating the web and mobile channels, content aggregation will become more important than ever. In 2009, expect to see the emergence of real-time aggregation tools that combine algorithmic approaches with human input. These aggregation tools will develop from the ground up, much like the content itself.

10. Multicultural Marketing Will Gain Intensity Online: Although white Americans make up about 70% of the US internet population, more and more African-Americans and Hispanics are going online through their PCs and their mobile phones. Marketers will follow, targeting these segments with language and culture-specific messages, which will evolve from their general-market campaigns.

A Client's Social Media Format Press Release on Bioidentical Hormones

2009-01-15T17:37:00.000-08:00

Today we posted a rather interesting press release on our client's product, the Wiley Protocol. We had just completed five audio tape podcasts of amazing interviews with doctors, so we added one to the MarketWire distribution, and then quoted the other doctor in our release. We added this photo of one of our seminar advertisements, and linked to that page on the website.

We linked to many great reference spots on the website, including testimonials. Since Oprah Winfrey's show today was going to be on hormone therapy, that was mentioned in the release. Since Suzanne Somers' choice for bioidentical hormones IS the Wiley Protocol and she has written about the Protocol in her books, Ageless, and Breakthrough, I used a quote from one of the Wiley testimonials and linked to it on our website.

Next I posted the release on DIGG, bookmarked Del.icio.us and put it in my Facebook page, then Twittered it out to my followers. I blogged bloggers that focus on health, sent it to my personal email list, and the client's list of over 900 contacts, and I plan to email our media contacts tonight and tomorrow.

By the time the Oprah show aired at 3 p.m.PST, our release, blog items, etc. and links to the Wiley Protocol website, blog items, and articles were on the first pages of the search engines like Google when people typed in the key phrases "bio-identical hormones," Oprah Winfrey," or The Wiley Protocol, etc. These tactics are the essence of social media marketing and PR. The release is below.

SOURCE: Wiley Systems, Inc.

Jan 15, 2009 14:57 ET

Doctors Share Promising Symptom Relief From Women on Wiley Protocol Bioidentical Hormone Replacement
Wiley Protocol Hormone Therapy Makes Hot Flashes, Foggy Brain, Sleep Loss, Diminished Libido, Migraines, and Depression Symptoms of the Past; Menopausal Women Look Younger and Feel Like Themselves Again
Doctors worldwide are attending T.S. Wiley's 'Two Days Back on Earth' environmental endocrinology seminars. They are also learning about the only cyclical biomimetic hormone restoration -- the Wiley Protocol bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT).
Dr. Christian Renna shares insights about his patients using the Wiley Protocol bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, stating that it restores the feeling of being yourself after experiencing a loss of self that occurs in perimenopause and menopause.
Highlighted Links

Wiley Protocol Hormone Therapy
SANTA BARBARA, CA--(Marketwire - January 15, 2009) - Wiley Systems, Inc. announced that mounting anecdotal evidence from participating physicians indicates that the majority of women who use the Wiley Protocol no longer experience hot flashes, sleep better, have increased energy, report better sex lives, and are happier, less moody, feel better and look younger.

The Wiley Protocol® is a bioidentical hormone replacement therapy that provides women with a more accurate form of restoration for lost endocrine function than conventional bioidentical therapies. More and more health care practitioners are attending Wiley's two-day environmental endocrinology "Two Days Back on Earth" seminar to learn a new perspective on aging, how our environment affects us, and about cyclical biomimetic hormone restoration therapy. With new rationale for treatment and diagnosis of their patients, they are taking that knowledge and applying it to those in need.

Millions of baby boomer women are either in perimenopause or menopause, and the issue of hormone therapy is gaining considerable media attention. Today's "Oprah Winfrey Show" is slated to air the first of a two part segment -- "The Great Debate: Should You Replace Your Hormones?" A feature story by Mary Duenwald in the February issue of O Magazine tells "Everything you need to know about menopause (but were too hot, tired, confused and cranky to ask.)"
After 12 years of research, Wiley developed a new approach to hormone replacement therapy (HRT) called the Wiley Protocol, which provides women with a more accurate form of restoration for lost endocrine function. The components of this protocol and the amount of hormones women take vary throughout the female 28-day cycle to mimic the hormone levels of youth. The Wiley Protocol is the only biomimetic hormone replacement that features plant derived hormones in a biomimetic way.

Tens of thousands of women report that the Wiley Protocol has changed their lives by relieving menopausal symptoms from brain fog, hot flashes, night sweats, and sleep loss to diminished sex drive, moodiness, depression and more, as evidenced by testimonials on the company's website. Wiley is also the co-author of "Sex, Lies & Menopause," Harper Collins, 2005 and "Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar and Survival," Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2000.

"If I could take anything on a desert island other than my dog, it would be my Wiley Protocol," said Wiley Protocol user Marla Mintz. "I was severely depressed and went everywhere for help and tried everything. I felt just like the woman described in Suzanne Somers' book, ("Ageless: The Naked Truth about Bioidentical Hormones," Crown; 2006) going from one doctor to another and getting nowhere with no help."

According to healthy aging specialist Christian Renna, "The benefits of this protocol are pretty far reaching in that it restores the feeling of being yourself after experiencing a loss of self that occurs in perimenopause and menopause. It's like finding yourself after being lost." Dr. Renna called the Wiley Protocol a universal key to the problem. "Without the estrogen peak on Day 12, the person never gets the full benefit of progesterone activity during the luteal phase, the latter phase of the menstrual cycle."

Doctor Stephen Dalton, a physician certified by the American Board of Family Medicine, practicing in Lubbock, Texas attended the "Two Days Back on Earth" 17-credit *Continued Medical Education (CME) seminar in Glendale, California. "The seminar is definitely scientifically based," he said. "The Wiley Protocol has changed my practice. By far, the best method that we have ever tried is the Wiley Protocol, plain and simple."

T.S. Wiley is a medical theorist in environmental endocrinology and Darwinian medicine. She is a noted writer, researcher and lecturer on the effects of hormones, particularly in menopausal women as well as an accepted expert in chronobiology and circadian rhythmicity. Wiley's CME accredited environmental endocrinology seminars, "Two Days Back on Earth" in Glendale, California are attended by physicians from all over the world.

About Wiley Systems, Inc. and the Wiley Protocol
Wiley Systems, Inc. was founded in 2005 in Santa Barbara, California by T.S. Wiley, who is the developer of the Wiley Protocol®, a trademarked patent pending delivery system consisting of biomimetic, bioidentical estradiol and progesterone (Biomimetic Hormone Restoration Therapy.) Wiley Systems began as a project to fund the union of doctors and pharmacists in a common goal to standardize bioidentical hormones for academic research.

The Wiley Protocol is only available at compounding pharmacies that have joined the project for future National Institutes of Health (NIH) study and have contractually agreed to the standardized methods, materials, packaging and recommended pricing. In exchange, Wiley Systems provides intellectual property and sells 28WP logo-bearing packaging consisting of color-coded bags and syringes. The Wiley Protocol name assures customers that they are receiving authentic Wiley Protocol dosing rhythms based on original research.

*Accreditation: The Medical Educator Consortium, is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. Credit Hours: The Medical Educator Consortium, designates this educational activity for a maximum of 17 hours AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s). Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Contact:Kristin GabrielDirector of MarketingO: 323.650.2838C: 213.840.6978E: kgabriel@thewileyprotocol.comWiley Systems, Inc.P.O. Box 50734Santa Barbara, CA 93150O: 805.565.7508F: 805 456-3939http://www.thewileyprotocol.com/

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Wiley-Systems-Inc-938451.html

eMarketer's Online Predictions for 2009: Multicultural Ramp Up

2009-01-12T09:47:00.000-08:00

This just out ... According to eMarketer, traditional media will suffer in 2009, with more print media going out of business, while online media's future looks bright, including search engine optimization, online video, and social media marketing.

They also mentioned something called multicultural initiatives - which will gain intensity. What is this? "Since white Americans make up about 70 percent of the US Internet population, more and more African-Americans and Hispanics are going online through their PCs and their mobile phones, therefore marketers will follow, targeting these segments with language and culture-specific messages, which will evolve from their general-market campaigns." (Source: eMarketer)
Aside from that, today's Internet is a buyer's market with search engine marketing remaining recession-proof, at an estimated growth of 14.9 percent in 2009 up to $12.3 billion.

Key trends include video advertising spending which is projected to go up 45 percent to $850 million. Just watch the escalation of videos online. MarCom is set up to do our next video campaign for the Wiley Protocol this Sunday. We're interviewing doctors attending her Two Days Back on Earth CME seminar on environmental endocrinology.

Web 2.0 from all our sources is on shaky ground, and MarCom's online guru, Mike Keesling, says it will not go away, but it's reached its peak potential insofar as SEO factors. This is where the youth market is and the referral value is still here.

The main issues this year for businesses with websites are twofold: Are you optimized and do you have good original content? What does that mean per Google's manifesto? You need the correct tags on your Web pages, plus 300 to 400 words of original (and optimized) content on each page.

We can show you how to do do this consistently, how to optimize your tags and do off site optimization and link back strategies. We can teach you how to do it yourself, or we can do it. It is not rocket science but in 2009 you have to do it. Most vulnerable are those who use CMS programs, which for the most part are terrible for SEO.

Online Marketing in the New Year

2009-01-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

People are always asking us if we do viral advertising, or online advertising. People often think of this as a separate entity ... separate from traditional advertising. But in reality it is all one and the same -- lead generation. That is truly what MarCom New Media is in the business to do. We help get our clients leads that turn into new customers and revenues. It's what marketing and advertising has always been all about.

Today, we just use new technologies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make your website show up on the first pages of the engines like Google when people search for what they want. MarCom does SEO basically in two ways: onsite optimization on your website, and offsite via links BACK to your website. This isn't all that different from direct marketing. The direct mail piece was targeted to you, and if you called the company who mailed it, that was a lead generated.

Customers are more sophisticated and demanding these days. We all like to go online and chat about things. And in order to find you online, we now use what is called Social Media Marketing where we target and interact with other people, share ideas and opinions. It is really just like to oldfashioned "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." Social media is the online technologies and practices that we use to share ideas, opinions insights, experiences and perspectives with other people. There are online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, while social media technology includes an assorted array of online communications hubs driven by users: Internet forums, message boards, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and videos. And there’s also picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, and music-sharing.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) includes offsite optimization strategies with the intent of distributed content across multiple social media networks. Tools for this include adding links to services such as Digg, Del.icio.us or Readdit. This includes writing unique content embedded with your key words and phrases, so when people search online, there’s a better chance of finding your content via the search engines.

MarCom, a Los Angeles Internet marketing company, has been testing social media marketing strategies in this space for many years, and it all started with forum posting, back around 2000. Now we ghostwrite blogs for clients, shoot video shorts, manage podcasts and conduct creative viral email campaigns.

SMM is about being social so this offsite work includes research, and a social media strategy with specific tactics for getting involved and having two way conversations with target audiences. We want to create pages that provide links back to your website, for inbound traffic and links. We also want these pages to rank well in the search engines under your key words and phrases. This ultimately will build traffic, and bring you return on investment (ROI.)

Why Choose a Los Angeles SEO Firm During a Tough Economy?

2008-11-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

There is no question that small to medium-sized businesses often struggle during tough economic times. Over the years we have seen many clients try to cut back on marketing during these times. There are several schools of thought on the topic: 1) A bad economy is the time to spend money on marketing. 2) Don't spend what you don't have.

Well here is another thought. We have actually been getting quite few new business leads lately. Why? Today, more and more people realize that search engine optimization (SEO) is a must, because most people realize that if they are not in the top pages of the engines like Google or Yahoo, their customers may not find them. But with that there is allot of confusion about who they should hire and what the right SEO strategies. Lucky for us we have lots of experience, and in fact are possibly one of the few Los Angeles SEO firms that are also experts in the new Social Media Marketing -- according to guru and author of The New Influencers, Paul Gillin, MarCom is actually part of the ten percent of marketers nationally doing it. The other 90 percent are still trying to figure out what it is.

In 2006, MarketingSherpa did a survey of 3,053 client-side marketers. They determined that SEO was viewed as the most valuable marketing solution in terms of return on investment (ROI.) In other words, ROI is critical during an uncertain economy.

In the past, traditional marketing and advertising meant spending quite a bit of your budget on tactics that typically don't provide tracking methods for figuring out if it works. Today, the beauty of the Internet and new media marketing is that we can track the results, and tweak the campaigns for better results if need be. In other words, we are more of a lead generation company, than just SEO, or PR or marketing.

A good SEO campaign can tell you a lot about your market because when we do our research about your market, we also research your competitors. We can even see how much money they have been spending on Pay per Click ads. We can determine how many visitors go to their website. A keyword analysis will tell us exactly how many people are searching and what words and phrases they use to find what products and services like you offer

We know that our campaigns address a need or a desire - so when we optimize your website, it will be so that the visitors referred from search engines through your target keywords will have a chance to find you and what you're offering on your website. Int he end SEO should help drive quality traffic to your website. And with that you have a better chance of closing the sale.

We use HitsLink for web analytics, which is a great program to tell more details of what people do after they do come to your site. do they stay on one page longer than others? Do they spend enought time on your site? How much time? Where did they come from before they went to your site? Tracking your website allows you to track your users.

So how should you decide if you need to invest in SEO and or Social Media Marketing? In-house employees are going t probably be too pricey. And on top of that, few people in the marketing today have as much experience as we as SEO experts have. So you are better off hiring outside consultants like MarCom.

The bottom line, SEO and social media marketing should not just be an afterthought to your marketing plan, especially during tough economic times. Because with such good ROI, you really cannot go wrong. In fact, you may get more business than you had before.

New Domain Name Controversy for Online Marketing

2008-11-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

So would you like a website domain name that ends in dot.bank? dot.hotel, or what about dot. restaurant? Well in the future of the world wide Web, you may get your wish. This may be the situation, and major brands are really worried about having to spend millions in order to protect their brands.

The entity that oversees the Web, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, plans to start selling the rights to an unlimited number of top-level domain names in the year 2009. The names would be those of popular subjects geographic locations, types of businesses.

Think about it this way. If you were a national restaurant with a cool branded name, for instance, like McWeener, and you already owned all the sites you thought you needed to own surrounding that name, like McWeener.com, McWeener.biz, and dot.org, dot.net, etc. Now you have to worry about owning McWeener (dot)restaurant, or McWeener (dot) Los Angeles and every other city where the franchises exist too!

Big companies are really worried that this situation could open the doors to Internet scams and fraud, and drastically increase their costs of doing business online. Brand names could get hijacked, causing millions in legal fees, and loss of business.

Online Marketing in Tough Economy

2008-10-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

Recent reports say that the percentage of small and midsized home and trade-services businesses with Web sites will increase to 60 percent by 2010, up from just 33 percent today. (Source: Kelly Group.)

And the other trend - social media marketing - shows that there are also a number of consumer referral and home-services community sites like Craig's List or ServiceMagic. In addition, small business entrepreneurs are posting pages on MyFace, while creative talent post on pages in MySpace.

There is much interest in marketing online today, as the costs are less than print or electronic advertising, and more and more customers use the Internet to find what they want. MarCom New Media, Los Angeles SEO consultants, always recommends the business directories for our clients. Yahoo! is around $299, and others include the SuperPages, with a monthly fee at about $75.00

Other tools for small businesses include CitySearch and YellowPages.com to capture those searching in a local geographic area.

Why the Internet is an Awesome Social Measurement Tool?

2008-10-16T15:51:00.001-07:00

I have been reading an interesting book that I know some folks would find quite boring. I even think it is boring at times - as I am NOT a numbers person. But the point is that it is a good indicator of this business we are in called Internet Marketing. The book is called Click, by Bill Tancer, and it is about what millions of people are doing online and why it matters. Much of the book is about the fact that companies competing in the online space need to use competitive intelligence data - because that's what Bill does for a living at Hitwise.

This book has taken me awhile to read, unlike Paul Gillin's book called the New Influencers, which I couldn't put down. I think partly because I am not a numbers person, and Tancer is all about statistics, numbers and data. But yesterday I finally got to an ah-haaa moment when I realized that the point of the book will have tremendous value for some of our clients. In a chapter called "Finding the Early Adopters" Tancer talks about why innovation spreads from one idea to mass adoption.

Why for example did it only take YouTube less than six months to host more than 25 million videos and out rank Yahoo!? He says that the reason is probably because the first group to discover YouTube was called "Innovators." The Internet has always been made up of different segments. He knows this because his company has a tool that figures out what websites people were on before they clicked over to visit YouTube. Turns out allot of them were on sites like MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, and even Facebook.

But here is the really cool part. His data showed after about a month, the numbers started shifting and he was seeing traffic from web-based email accounts like HotMail, or Yahoo!Mail. Why? Because YouTube did a brilliant thing. Once a person posted their video on the site, the company let them email their video production with a link to their video to a friend! And when friends clicked on the video, it took them to YouTube, and the data showed that's where the new audience had come from.

It is the same reason why this target group started getting tongue rings and drinking Hussong's Beer. It was cool. And they shared the news with their friends. Other market segments include what Tancer calls the Bohemian Mix - that Claris pretty much describes as a bunch of mobile urbanites living liberal lifestyles - and are early adopters of entertainment and technology; Money and Brains; and the Young Digerati. You'll have to get his book to learn more about these guys. But my point here is that as a marketer, the trends we are seeing on the Internet can be measured better than any previous kind of marketing, ever.

The ways that we as a Los Angeles search engine marketing firm doing social media marketing online can track a campaign for our clients, are sprinkled throughout our strategies, and we are getting fabulous results.

Social Media Marketing Comes of Age

2008-10-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

After attending a Social Media Marketing "Agency Bootcamp" luncheon yesterday, it has come to my attention that very few marketers are doing what MarCom is doing. In a room filled with Los Angeles advertising agency staffers and consultants, I can honestly say that very few knew social media marketing to the depth that we do. In fact, I have read that we are in the top ten percent nationwide and the other 90 percent are just starting to try to catch up.

We regularly update our website with relevant searchable content and post new search engine optimization (SEO) tags, descriptions and links on the pages as needed. We have set up multiple RSS feeds - one for press releases, another for articles, and I am about to set up a third one for newsletters. we use http://www.press-feed.com/. I have joined a few more social networks and niche communities to mine customers -- places like FaceBook, and I will be updating LinkedIn and MySpace regularly now.

We added a new social media blog on our homepage, so now there are two - each with a seperate focus. I have started conversations online by stepping up my blogging, added more blogrolls, updated MySpace. Next I need to begin Friending in Facebook, then Twitter about current happenings to my growing list of followers.

MarCom has been writing a number of articles that can be social bookmarked at DIGG, but I want to create a Google map mashup and then start a white paper for people to StumbleUpon or find at Squidoo.

My associates and I have been brainstorming ideas for podcasts and videos to post on YouTube, and we have even thought about doing a virtual B-2-B seminar at Second Life. I plan to research and sign up for some new measurement and conversation mining tools to listen to what people are saying online, although everyone in the social media marketing industry agrees, the tools are still not there yet.

We have started conversations with our own clients to update their social media marketing strategies. MarCom New Media is looking forward to continuing to lead the transformation from old school marketing to building relationships in online communities, and we are already celebrating the results.

Oh BTW if you have no clue what I am talking about…you need to read Paul Gillin’s book, The New Influencers, and of course, hire us as your Los Angeles social media marketing firm.

Online Marketing Trends: Virtual Learning via Second Life

2008-09-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

Apparently there's a group at Second Life called 'Real Life Education in Second Life.' It is made up of people who are interested in the educational possibilities of Second Life. According to them, there are more than 400 universities and 4,500 educators participating in the Second Life Educators List (SLED). And this group is studying how to leverage the benefits of learning in a virtual world in order to assist the students of today.

Caption: From Second Life, students role-play a courtroom scene in Ramapo, Suffern (N.Y.) Middle School’s virtual world campus hosted by Peggy Sheehy in Teen Second Life.

In an article written by a professor of computer science at Colorado Technical University named Cynthia M. Calonge, she notes, "the benefits outweigh the risks associated with venturing into a virtual world educational platform. For me, the virtual world is my preferred learning and teaching environment."

What does this have to do with what our Los Angeles marketing firm can do for our clients? It means is that more and more of our clients need to set up social media networks, to engage with customers, teach them, and share knowledge. And it means that websites need to be filled with content to educate people about what they do and optimized properly with the search engines so that they will come up first on the search engines. And blogs are becomming a way of life.

Imagine the magnitude of virtual classrooms? Futurists like James Canton and author of The Extreme Future, have already said that one of the top ten industries of the innovation economy is, "8. Education and Learning. The creation of immediate, portable, transferable, on-demand knowledge sources on a scale equivalent to the Library of Congress."

The True Value of Social Media

2008-09-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

Finally, advertisers are beginning to realize how valuable social media marketing can be. This is truely exciting because now more than before, our clients are starting to understand the value when we recommend social media campaigns.

Just yesterday at the doctor seminar, Two Days Back on Earth, on environmental endocrinology for our client T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol (http://www.thewileyprotocol.com/), Wiley's book publisher talked about the importance of social media to the traditional publishing industry today. She said they now strategize books that have websites for reference materials and more information, and places where people can host e-books and chapters that are bookmarked pages from new book releases.

This means we can strategize longer term social media campaigns for MarCom New Media clients -- and just like any marketing campaign, it takes hard work, tracking, which the Internet makes easy, as well as maintenance.

We can easily blend direct-response and branding. It is about the objective for the campaign, then fine tuning the right strategy. The good news is that the Web is ideal for measurment.

Today, 70 percent of the ad dollars online are going toward direct-response advertising, but the shift toward brand-building campaigns is starting to happen. Check the following interesting stats from a recent research report. (Source: Awareness , Inc.)

The number of organizations that allow employees to use social networks for business purposes has increased dramatically to 69% in 2008 from 37% last year.
More than six in 10 companies are using social media to build and promote their brands, improve communication and increase consumer engagement.
There has been a fivefold increase in the percentage of employees who use popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn for business purposes, from 15% in 2007 to 75% this year.
Some 37% of organizations plan to focus communities on specialty areas where they can provide focused business value.
More than 40% of respondents report using one or more of the following tools: user groups, tags, communities, blogs, social networking and videos.
The most popular internal tools are social networks, blogs and wikis, with adoption rates of between 50% and 55%.

Don't Let Do-it-Yourself SEO Programs Fool You

2008-09-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

Lately it seems we have had some new business clients who contacted us for online marketing or PR services, but when we talk to them about their search engine optimization (SEO), they seem to think that they already know how to do SEO in-house. One prospect even said they know there are all kinds of keyword software programs out there for free, that can tell you what your keywords are, etc.

Here's the thing. Would you tell your optometrist, for example, how to fit you in a pair of glasses? Or, would you feel confident about being able to design your own website in html? And do you even want to learn how to do it and then take all the time required to continue monitoring and doing it? Unless a company has hired a true SEO expert, who has years of experience, it is unlikely that the job will be done properly.

Much of what we do as marketers can always be done by the small business owner "in-house"-- but when a company starts learning and then implementing things like SEO, or PR, it takes vast amounts of time away from what they do. That said, it is often best to leave SEO up to the experts who have been doing it as a career for awhile - like Mike Keesling, our resident Los Angeles SEO expert. He has been doing SEO for more than ten years with excellent results for our MarCom New Media clients. Check out our SEO case histories. As Mike always says, it's best to look for long term results rather than short term instant gratification.

In fact last year we had a client who promised their web development team could be "taught" how to do the website SEO meta-tagging, etc. Mike trained them and we charged our standard training fee. Several months later, their site was still not tagged properly, and Mike had to actually do the job we should have done in the first place. That said we wasted three good months of possibly better search engine optimization results. And yes, in the end we charged more for it than it cost them to be trained. But with this being only a one-time fee, it was worth it because after the SEO started working, their revenues from new leads made up the difference fairly quickly.

Popular Social Media Marketing Terms

2008-09-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

Have you heard of an “RSS feed” or a “mashup?” You know what a“wiki” is, right? If not, you are not alone. In fact, many people are still clueless about social media marketing (SMM), which is defined as the use of the Internet technology tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information with others. In other words, it is all about going on websites like Facebook, My Space, Twitter, or You Tube and sharing ideas, interests and “gossip” with other people of like mind ... or not. (People do disagree online of course.) But more important is to understand is how marketers use social media in our marketing efforts.

We can control messages and market your products and services online with well thought out SMM strategies, and clever tactics. For example, one such social media site is known as "del.icio.us” which is a social bookmarking website. These sites allow users to store and share your bookmarks online. You can access these bookmarks from any computer anywhere, anytime. Another SMM site is called “DIGG,” where users submit content and then other Digg users read your submission and Digg what they like. In this case popularity rules, and the more diggs you get the better it is for your brand.

Much of what MarCom New Media does is search engine optimization, combined with online public relations and marketing that all ties together. We do keyword analysis to see what terms folks use to search for your company online, then come up with a strategy to use those words in blogs, articles, releases, and on SMM websites, linking back to your website. It builds traffic so you can prosper online.

SMM Definitions:
RSS - Really Simple Syndication. This is the primary way people can syndicate content from Web sites, blogs and social networking sites to be read online by other people in what are known as RSS readers. RSS is very important for a company and its website because it allows people to track current news via their RSS Feeds.

RSS Tags. Simple technology that allows you to bookmark specific Web pages and sites of interest. It is how Digg and del.icio.us work.

Mashups. This brings multiple sources of data together and creates a single application, or Web service which helps manage events, etc. Content used in mashups usually comes from a third party via a public interface that combines data from more than one source into a single tool. One new example is Earthquake! A Google Maps mashup – thanks to the recent worldwide earthquakes.

Wikis. A collection of Web pages allowing anyone to add or edit content. This tool can help company employees, for example, in their collaboration efforts for projects or clients.
Internet marketing tactics continue to change on a frequent basis thanks to the search engines like Google, and new technologies. As marketers, we must learn fast, adapt, and then tweak strategies for what works best.

Online Advertising: Video ad predictions at 1.4 billion for 2010

2008-09-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

The online video advertising predictions, according to video ad company, LiveRail, are way up from the $619 million in 2008. The company predicts that online video ad spending will be closer to $1.4 billion in 2010.

Another online research company known as eMarketer, has done another analysis, that puts online ad spending in 2010 at $1.15 billion, up from $505 billion in 2008.

Online video has become increasingly popular on websites like YouTube and Google, so that is partially why online video ad spending predictions are somewhat optimistic. More than half of US consumers currently watch online video, but predictions are that by the year 2012, that figure will be up to nine out of 10 Internet users.

MarCom New Media is not only a Los Angeles SEO firm, but also specializes in online advertising and therefore online video production. We have been busy producing online videos for a number of our clients during the last few years. The most recent one, was a recent project we did for OriginOil, Inc., who shared its vision of the algae to oil revolution with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Green Tech Expo, held in Los Angeles in conjunction with the Border Governors Conference in August. The OriginOil video was not only streamed from the company's website but also placed on YouTube and Google.

Most folks watch TV online because it's convenient, it allows them to watch on their own schedule and many people like the fact that they get to skip the commercials.

Why B2B Companies Need SEO

2008-09-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest problems facing companies with business to business (B2B) as opposed to Business to Consumer (B2C) solutions is the fact that many B2B sites don’t have sufficient content on their websites to respond to desired search terms that folks are using to find them. What does this mean? Simply put, while consumer driven websites may get more daily searches from prospective customers, B2B sites get their fair share of their own niche of potential businesses or strategic partners, and in some cases shareholders who are on the Internet searching, using certain key words to find the B2B solution they are seeking.

Following are just a few of the steps that MarCom takes as SEO consultants to ensure that our B2B client websites are organized into the most logical, user-friendly architecture that responds to organic searches (e.g. comes up on the first page of Google).

1) Benefits of SEO Sooner- Not Later. Today, with so many companies and individuals swarming the Internet and putting up websites, blogs, and posting to social media sites, the search engines are running out of bandwidth for indexing websites fast and efficiently. What used to take a company just two to three months to be ranked by Google and other search engines for keywords that people are using, may now take eight months or longer. The longer you wait to do the proper SEO for your B2B site, the longer it will take to become ranked. The proof is that we can take a look at your competitors today, and in 3 or 6 months, we'll tell you how ahead or behind your SEO is while they become better and better ranked each month.

2) Keyword Analysis. No matter whether you’re are a B2C or B2B company, the first step is still a keyword analysis. BUT the differences are that a B2B company should not make keyword judgments, but rather create the gross list that is as inclusive as possible of the potential terms their actual prospects might use – and this would include vertical markets, potential strategic partners, the government in some cases, and even shareholders. As SEO experts, we then focus on generic keywords based on what these potential customers call things. You also need to think about whether or not searches will be about a problem they’re experiencing, or the type of company potentially offering solutions? And often times geography may play a role in what people are searching for.

3) Determine Relative Popularity of B2B Keywords. Once you’ve created the gross list of potential keywords, we will determine the relative popularity of these search terms to give us some idea of which search terms are used more often than others. The actual raw number of searches for a given search term doesn’t matter as much.

4) The Value Website Optimization. You can now figure out the search terms by which your site will be optimized. For each B2B solution, there will be one or two relevant search terms that rank highly, three to five more that place as seconds, and many others that also have good potential. You can include terms with lower search volume because in B2B , these may yield less search volume or not as much traffic, but more likely it will yield a more serious potential partner or investor. Website optimization is where most webmasters make their biggest mistakes such as universal tagging, repeating the company name, or NOT using key words in Meta, Alt and Description tagging. This requires a true and experienced SEO consultant for the best results.

5) Building Content to Accommodate Extra SearchTerms. B2B companies often have sparse website content, so they will need to find a home for all of their search terms. As always, each page of content should focus on a specific term. In other words, where else on your site can you create a credible landing page that is going to respond well to organic search for each of these terms?

6) Internal and External Link Building Strategy. Some of the pages might be directly accessible through your site's primary navigation, other pages may be in the sub-navigation, and others may only be accessible through text links in the body copy of pages. Always keep the landing pages for the most popular search terms closest to the home page. Never go more than three layers deep, or the engines won’t look there. Go for the least amount of clicks possible to get to the landing pages with the best key words. Landing pages related to less popular, more obscure terms (also known as longtail keywords) can reside deeper on the site.

7) Inter link Between Related Search Terms. If there are three landing pages for a given product page, a case study page, and a blog posting-make sure that the site visitor can easily get from the landing page to the other “related” pages.

8) Create Content and External Inbound Links. Articles, blog posts from external blogs, videos posted to YouTube or Google and the hundreds of other video sites, and bookmarks on Social Media websites must be created so there is activity generated TO your website from other places on the Internet. And this does NOT mean recripricol links, but just one way inbound links. This will help get your site ranked faster than anything. AND while we build these links, we can also add other versions of this same content with your keywords to pages of your website, so the search engines have a better chance of finding your B2B company among all of your competitors.

In summary, the faster you accomplish all of the above steps, and do them right, while continuing to build content and links, the better your ranking will be in the search engines. MarCom shoots for all of our clients to become ranked on ALL of their keywords, and then STAY in the first page of Google, Yahoo and other search engines. As things change, MarCom New Media will make sure we continue to stay up on all the latest SEO trends.

Why SEO firms Know Corporate Blogs are a Good Idea

2008-08-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

Corporate blogs have finally caught on in the business world as part
of a company's overall marketing strategy. Research from May 17,
2008 says that 58 (11.6%) of the Fortune 500 are blogging. However we have noticed that some companies are still "afraid" of using this tactic. We hope this will help clear up any confusion. Why? Because blogs are a great way to keep the conversation going with current and perspective customers, and can often answer questions that people are asking. And blogs are a great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool that when used properly, can help get your company ranked in the top pages of search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Yes it is really important to maintain a blog strategy and carefully monitor ANY correspondence on the Internet, as we know because we also do reputation management for clients who may have said the wrong thing online or in a blog. BTW forum posts or responses to other blog posts are not always the best thing for an executive or an officer of a company to do online. We even have one client with a negative mention because of a book he is "badmouthed" in on businessweek.com. So we have a corporate blog that I ghostwrite on his behalf, talking about his charity work and trends in education. His personal website is getting great positioning within the top two listings in Google, and slowly but surely that negative listing is being bumped down to page 2 of the search engines.

But it is time for companies to pay attention when the Wall Street Journal writes about corporate blogs after a new study in June 2008 by Forrester Research. After they reviewed 90 blogs run by business-to-business companies in the Fortune 500, as well as close to 200 B2B marketers, word has it that most B2B blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Seventy percent focused on business topics, 74 percent do not get many comments, and 56 percent are full of old company news. Forrester does not suggest giving up on corporate blogging, but rather suggests companies spice the blogs up, post regularly, stick to it and give their blog posts some personality. Businesses need to offer visitors something like tips, insight, tidbits on how a product was designed, or something funny. The company says Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is a great B2B blog example.

We have been doing corporate blogs as part of our SEO work for companies for a long time. We can train or ghostwrite blogs. They are a fantastic way to provide link backs to our client's websites. In fact, outside of affiliate websites, and optimized press releases, the blog is the next best tactic for online optimization.

It is always best to have your blog on your own website, because the weekly blogging activity creates a stir that the search engines notice. In fact MarCom has been experimenting with one new blogging program lately, and we are about to put up our own internal blog on our website, as opposed to only using Blogger.com. We'll use both. If your have your own blog on your website you would do internal linking to other pages on your website.

We have been ghostwriting a corporate blog for one client called the Entertainment Career Connection, a company that has recording, film, and radio schools for people who want to learn how to be a recording engineer, directors and producers, or DJS or sports announcers.

There are a number of types of blogs including CEO or executive blogs, employee and group blogs, advice or advocacy blogs, educational blogs, and of course, purely promotional blogs. Two to three posts per week are recommended in the beginning. Tagging and linking of the blog are also important tactics. TIP: Even photos posted to your blog can be named using your keywords.

If your company chooses to do an executive or a group blog, there's no doubt you are opening up to potential issues, so you will need to create and or extend your corporate policies. You will also want a blog moderator, who can go in and "clean up" a posting. Also it is important to give company bloggers a list of the key words and phrases so they can use at least three of the words in their blog posts, which will improve organic search results.

Here are some of the daily challenges of having a blog. Most blogs don’t receive tons of traffic, especially at first - as you can see if you go to http://www.technorati.com/, where you will note what blogs have made it to the top of the list via what is known as "authority." Some have no authority, some like ours have an azuthority of 4, qand others more than 300.

Blogs require time, making it important to consider the cost per hour of any employee - from managers to executives - posting on the corporate blog.

Another concern includes the challenge of CEO blogs in a public company, which require someone to manage. We often recommend adding a safe-harbor provision, which is a boilerplate statement that could prevent lawsuits. CEO bloggers need to be very careful in what they say, and they may not be able to offer strong opinions.

Marketers also need to remember that blogs can be PART of a corporate marketing campaign, but it is not a campaign in of itself, so there is no ending date. It is also important to remember that employees don’t always know how to represent a company or brand properly. Last, it can be difficult to measure specific successes. Although marketers can measure campaign successes by drops in website visits and registrations, and we measure the optimization successes via monthly reports that show increased ranking in the search engines.

At MarCom, our goal as Los Angeles SEO consultants, is to provide our clients with a strategy, then work hard to accomplish our goals mutually. The Internet is constantly changing, so tactics like a corporate blog will always require monitoring and deployment of new better practices for optimum SEO results.

Engaging in Social Media Optimization (SMO)

2008-08-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

Finally we are seeing that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of websites is being taken seriously. Although many companies have been perfecting this for years, including our expert, Mike Keesling, today's best practices have been defined and now companies are competing for visibility within the organic search listings on the Internet. So much so, in fact, that while three years ago it took a couple of months to be optimized, today it is closer to six to eight months. Why? Because so many companies are finally trying to get optimized, and the search engines need time to put them in place.

As always, when it comes to new marketing practices, Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the latest new practice that is gaining visibility and ground. SMO is primarily a link building strategy providing links to a site from other sites so the search engines will give the site a higher ranking, and so people using search terms and phrases will be more likely to find your site. As SMO practitioners, we include links to your site in relevant blog posts, vlogs, forums, etc. Last, SMO is the tool by which Social Media Marketing (SMM) thrives. What is SMM? It is the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with one another.

What does all this mean? Many websites are static. In fact when MarCom posted our new Los Angeles SEO consultants website, our old website known as MarCom Broadband was static, rarely updated and nothing more than a portfolio of our work. So the first rule (after your site has been optimized) is that you want to increase your links, the most important priority for websites. In order to increase the likability of content on our new website, the first thing we did was to start this blog with links back to our website. And it is important to reward those who read your blog. Mention them, allow them to post comments, and send a quick note of appreciation to them. I also mention other bloggers or authors in our space. Note Paul Gillin, Expansion Plus, etc. in our blog roll on this blog.

Next, we started doing PRWeb or MarketWire releases, and then posted articles on the Internet each with a keyword strategy that includes three key words or phrases. Every blog, article, press release and newsletter links those three key phrases back to the MarCom New Media website. There are other strategies including white papers, form posts, and and bookmarking on social media networks, all of which provide linking opportunities.

Tagging or bookmarking means adding content via buttons, for example, to "add to del.icio.us." You can also submit white papers, or relevant articles to other relevant sites to get your content out there. What's more, if you have short videos, these can be added to YouTube, plus syndicated to hundreds of other video sites via RSS feeds. This way others can create what the industry has dubbed "mashups" to drive traffic back to your website. Wikipedia defines this as "a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work."

This new era of social media marketing is different than push marketing of the past. It is all about truth, and sharing of ideas. And more and more marketers are realizing the value of having a good social media marketing strategy in place.

Most important -- on the Internet -- it is critical to just be authentic.

Social Media Marketing Facts and Trends

2008-08-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting report with statistics for social media, which is the sharing of information and opinions online. The research firm called Datamonitor reveals an increase in the number of people participating in online social networking, and it is not all here in the United States.

In a separate report by Nielsen Research, the UK currently leads Europe and is expected to increase to 27 million users by 2012. In fact, in Britain, users spend the majority of their time online on social media sites. They spent four billion minutes on consumer generated content sites in April 2008, which is up 47 percent, according to Nielsen Research.

Social media sites that people visit include blogs, social networks and photo and video sharing sites. People are spending time online in community groups where they share common interests with one another on things that are important to them. The trend is that now, consumers are in control because they can choose what they want to read online. And they can share their thoughts, and opinions.

According to VNU.net, nearly half of the online adult population around the world is a member of at least one networking site, with Facebook and MySpace being the most popular. They have more than 170 million monthly active users combined.

People no longer log online just to read relevant news. Following are some other new stats on the latest social media activity:

394 million people watch video clips online
346 million people read blogs
321 million read personal blogs
307 million visit a friend's social network pages
303 million share video clips
272 million create and manage a profile on a social network
248 million upload photographs
216 million download video podcasts
215 million download podcasts
184 million start a own blog
83 million upload a video clip
160 million subscribe to an RSS feed
(Source: Wave3 research of active users)

It also appears as if blogging and reading blogs is big with 34 percent of bloggers posting opinions about products and brands quite often. This is why it is so important for companies to be part of those conversations, or even to start the conversations. In fact, 36 percent of online users state that they think more positively about companies who run their own blog.

MarCom has been testing a variety of social media approaches with our clients over the last couple of years. Social media helps clients with building their brand, and a community of people for things like opt in lists, relationship management, and that can include crisis and reputation management, product development and customer support. And last but not least is known as defensive SEO. Nicely put, this is when you can get rid of negative mentions on the Internet or bad press by building positive online mentions. We have done this successfully for one client who wishes to remain anonymous, through his educational and charity website, a blog and articles distributed on the Internet.

What we have learned, is the most important thing is to have a social media marketing strategy. And in order to develop a strategy here are some issues that need to be considered:
1) Determine your goals - SEO, PR, traffic, etc. Are you trying to drive awareness, or advertising click through? Or is a conversation your goal?
2) Who is your audience - where does your target demo hang out online?
3) What are your realistic resources and budget?

First you need to look at social media as one of many Internet marketing channels. Second, social media marketing both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 sites- so you need to be anywhere that there are discussions, people are sharing, and users are generated content. This includes:

Blogs, discussion boards and forums
Consumer review websites
Online Communities and social networks
Social news websites (e.g. Yahoo or Google News, etc.)
Social bookmarking websites
Social photo/video and music websites
Directories
Article websites
Wikis

At first you cannot expect social media to provide a return on investment (ROI). It will engage your audience(s), and should encourage user generated online conversations which increases your web presence, and can expand brand awareness. It also will generate publicity and provides measurable SEO benefits – but it will not necessarily convert. It can convert if you own the community, and can capture your own leads.

It is important to first gather all the blogs, forums, websites that are out there and monitor what people are saying. Then develop your strategy. Put a method in place to monitor what is being said. Then be prepared to go in and interact. However know that trust is a HUGE factor when it comes to social media marketing. It’s most effective when those in the community know and trust you, so you need to hire someone like MarCom to spend a lot of time online and track and manage your social web strategies.

Much of MarCom’s work is creating ghostwritten blogs, monitoring discussions in Forums, and knowing how to jump in with linking strategies back to our client’s websites using key words and phrases, which are picked up by Google and the other search engines.

This is evidenced by our client the Entertainment Career Connection, which is all about courses where you get a mentor. We have been improving their lead generation through SEO for over a year while reducing their Pay per Click budget. Now we have been able to take the funds saved, and invest in a social media network of writers that are building content on a special website. This site will be designed to track and capture leads. Once the community is flourishing, we can drive conversations, call-to-action, ads, promotions, and contests, anytime. Check out our MarCom Los Angeles SEO consultants case history.

Tactically, we also do blogger tours or we can gather a team to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in conversations, or go to forums with key messages for posts there.

Another method is via social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Readit, or the Newsvine, where articles posted there work for you if your news item relates topics that the community likes.

Finally today’s press use these sites to troll for trends and story ideas, so your articles and news can get picked up by bloggers.

The bottom line is that sales are a secondary benefit of social media, which is mostly about awareness.

Online ads Go Local

2008-07-31T13:19:00.000-07:00

If you have been thinking about doing online advertising, then you may be in luck. As a Los Angeles online advertising firm that is forging strategies and tactics in the online arena for measurable results, we know that today, a commercial message is often thought of as an intrusion. It has to be creative and compelling for someone to read it, let alone interact with it.

Today's Wall Street Journal Media & Marketing section had an article about the fact that newspapers are finally starting to think locally for online ads. In the past they believed they had an edge over Internet advertising because they supported communities. Plunging print ad revenues have forced newspapers to re-think things. Over the past two years, the number of local salespeople selling online ads for newspapers went from 5,900 to 15,500 (Source: Borrell Associates.)

As our Creative Director Brad Stone often says, "Many people ask us what is the secret formula for a successful marketing, advertising or communications campaign? It’s creativity that gets to it. Emotions. Appeal. That’s what drives the difference for success." Brad's work for Guess, Ralph Lauren, Rampage, Nextel, Neutrogena, and Glacier Bay Vodka stands apart when it comes to concept and design.

When it comes to advertising and design in Los Angeles, MarCom can manage both traditional as well as online ad campaigns such as Pay-per-Click (PPC). In fact, we have actually saved clients including the Entertainment Career Connection money in that arena. Depending on your industry category, PPC can be quite costly. This client sells accredited courses and mentor programs in the film, radio and recording industries. Here's what we have done for them to save money in online advertising campaigns. In less than one year, we reduced the Entertainment Career Connection’s PPC budget from $29k per month to $9k per month, while increasing SEO and social media marketing campaigns. For one third the budget they are getting 170 percent of the business, we have decreased Entertainment Connection’s original PPC budget by 67 percent of what it was, and increased the number of leads by 67 percent.

The market for spending on local ads expanded to 57.2 percent last year thanks to Google and Local.com whose ads target consumers searching the Web for products and services. Together they control 53.3 percent of the local online ad market, which is up from 25 percent in 2006.

Los Angeles SEO Consutants

2008-07-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

We have been Los Angeles SEO consultants for quite some time - way before most people even knew what search engine optimization, or SEO, was all about. I remember starting about ten years ago writing forum posts for a client. Next I got involved doing articles, then ghostwriting blogs, and following that, reputation management for a fallen executive.

I met Mike Keesling about four years ago. His background is multi-dimensional, which is one of the reasons he is such a good marketer. He not only does SEO, but he helps our clients with their business strategies online so they can earn more revenues.

Mike produced the first Energizer website campaign for Chiat\Day advertising. After that, he started doing SEO, and one of his clients has maintained a top five ranking for their primary keyword phrase “oahu vacation rentals.” Just go to Google and type that phrase in. The results say it all.

One big lesson that he has taught me, is that because of Google, things are always changing and you must be patient. For instance, during what has come to be know as Google’s Florida Dance --which dropped 97 websites out of the top 100 in fifty different categories -- his client was dropped under their key word "oahu vacation rentals." Mike gave his best SEO advice ever, which was to do nothing. He recommended that they just wait and ride it out and he was proved correct about 23 days later.

MarCom used to be strictly a Los Angeles Public Relations firm. Then we realized, during the high tech and dot com era, that many of our clients actually needed it all - marketing, advertising and PR. Today, thanks to the emergence of the Internet, there's been a paradigm shift in marketing. Now I can't do PR without an SEO program in place. Why? Because the media are out there searching for stories online too! And if our clients are optimized with links on the Internet back to their website, they rank well in the search engines, and the press can validate the company.

One thing many people don't realize is that you not only need patience, but you also need an SEO and a social media marketing strategy. With more companies joining the marketing rush on the Internet, it is taking longer to rank on the first pages of Google.

As one example, I have been writing optimized press releases and articles for our client Peternity.com for about a year now. Her key word strategy was to optimized pet urn, and pet urns, then pet memorials. So every article or release that I write, links those key words back to her site. Her sales on pet urns have increased substantially. And now we are ready to choose a new key word to optimize. Again, patience is the key, and it is an ongoing marketing project.

The State of Internet Advertising

2008-07-10T21:29:00.001-07:00

According to ZenithOptimedia research the Internet will account for 10.2 percent share of 2008 global ad spending. Television comes in at 37.6 percent and magazines at only 11.6 percent. It’s no wonder that all my magazines now fit in the mailbox – their pages keep getting thinner. But then we have known this for quite some time as more and more people adapt to getting their news from the Internet. In fact analysts have predicted that it will take another ten years before the medium is well established.

I still prefer reading the hard copy of the Wall Street Journal every morning. Speaking of which, today there was a long feature article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal regarding Google’s push to sell ads on You Tube, the place online where they claim people watch videos more than one billion times a day.

Historically, it was 2002 when Google revamped its sales model for search ads – when a Google user searches for something online, ads related to the search words pop up next to the results. Right now Google makes most of its money via the text ads that are part of online searches. That means if you are looking for the latest trends in education, these ads come up in the results page -- the ones in the middle are called “organic” listings, while those in the grey blue boxes along the top and the sides are Google text ads. But the company wants to expand its video ads and claim the other 89.8 percent of the global ad dollars that are not currently being spent on the Internet – meaning video and display advertising. After all that is why Google bought You Tube in 2006.

Just imagine – some day when you go online you’ll get all the same stuff we get today. Television commercials at the beginning, middle and end of people’s personal You Tube videos – maybe display ads on blog posts – and billboards will be everywhere along the Internet highway.Google refers to the video spots as "preroll" and "postroll" ads, which could run before and after video clips, and companies that post video clips would get the option to sell these ads, and share the revenue with Google. Advertisers consider them very effective.I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, because after all this is our business here at MarCom New Media.

But if you read the WSJ article, you’ll see how things have been slowed down much like the entertainment industry strikes – thanks to copyright litigation, which has made the YouTube advertising push more complex. This is great news for us because it gives us a chance to digest strategies for our clients for Internet advertising. I love all the food related projects code names the company came up with for all of their latest initiatives –“Project Spaghetti” which is designed to help untangle the challenges with its advertising operations, which was 98 percent of Google's Q1 revenue. As always, people in high tech are always thinking about food.

Google also recently acquired DoubleClick Inc., to ramp up their display ads revenue, but that has not done too well. The company is known for inserting ads onto Web sites in addition to offering a way for ad agencies to manage and track online ads. They say these display ads are only generating a few hundred million right now.

We have one client called The Entertainment Career Connection that provides educational apprentice programs for the film, radio, television and the music recording industries. EC has mentor programs in more than 100 U.S. cities in all fifty states. After Mike Keesling, our SEO expert did SEO for three of their websites, we are now focusing on branding, public relations and social media marketing, in addition to their PPC campaign, he began to manage their Pay per Click (PPC) campaign. It was at around $29k per month.In less than one year we reduced the Entertainment Career Connection’s PPC budget from $29k per month to $9k per month. After six months of a carefully planned and executed reduction of the PPC budget, PPC media was at $11k, and after the SEO campaigns kicked in, plus after re-skinning the websites, we reduced the PPC campaign to $9k in about a year, while increasing SEO and social media marketing campaigns. We like the SEO technology environment better than PPC because it costs less than the ads.

Here’s the kicker -- for one third the budget they are getting 170 percent of the business, as we have decreased Entertainment Connection’s original PPC budget by 67 percent of what it was, and increased the number of leads by 67 percent. Their websites is getting excellent rankings for the keywords including: The Recording Connection, The Film-Connection and Radio Connection.

In the end, it will be up to the consumers to drive successful advertising online. I got an email this morning on my blog from a guy who really liked one of my old blog posts, "Consumers Define Social Media Marketing." Check it out and let me know what you think.

MarCom's New Website - SEO Tips for Launching

2008-07-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

Thanks to our strategic partner, Rigney Graphics, we just launched our new MarCom New Media website. The reason we changed our name from MarCom Broadband to MarCom New Media, is because today Internet marketing is all about the new media. The term has settled in, and we believe people understand what it means. But what many people still need guidance on, is what MarCom does - search engine optimization (SEO), online PR and social media marketing (SMM) strategies and tactics.

In designing a new website, there are a few rules we thought we'd share based on client experience, and our knowledge:

Be prepared. Have your navigation and content map ready before you meet with a web designer or web design firm. If you have tracking analytics on your old site, then take a look at where people come from and how they get around on your site. This is a good tool for what to do and what NOT to do on the new website.

Talk with an SEO expert early on. Many web designers don't know the details about SEO. They design, and you should not expect them to know what has taken us a decade to learn. So bring in an SEO expert team, like MarCom, to advise and work closely with your design team before it is too late. One client of ours decided to have a new firm redesign three of his sites into one master website. Despite having guidance from Mike Keesling, our resident SEO expert, they didn't listen. They used Flash, and they initially did not have the old websites redirect to the new one. This risked losing all the last year's SEO efforts. Now only time will tell what damage has been done.

Look for a good web design firm. Check their references, and look at sample sites. Do not expect miracles overnight. Our site took about 6 weeks. And any good site will take time. Rigney Graphics is one of our strategic partners, and they design excellent websites - including ours. Also make sure the copy you write and prepare for them is letter perfect before you have them add it to the design, or it will waste their time, and your money with revisions.

Tagging website Pages. This is the magic of what excellent SEO can do for your website so customers can find you. Typically you want your page content to each have focus for one keyword or key phrase in three places per page. Each page then gets meta tagged with that same keyword, so the engines will be able to find relevant content as people in Google look for what they want.

If you have a Flash website - note the search engines can't read it. But the good news is that Adobe Systems Incorporated just announced today that they have teamed up with search industry leaders to to improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs), which is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. It may take up to a year though, so keep an eye on the developments...

Embedded flash will work. Our client The Wiley Protocol uses this in their site with embedded Flash movies. The search engines read content, so the more content with your key words, the better your chances of being ranked on the first pages of the engines, so customers can find you. A trick is that you can post a blog on your home page as long as it is on your site and not on Blogger or WordPress. This will have an RSS function that can help Flash sites until later.

Make sure you have a tracking analytics program. There are free programs like Google Analytics, but others like HitsLink are better at tracking your website traffic. This will allow your SEO team to tweak key words, site content and link building strategies so your optimization will improve month to month.

You need a keyword analysis. Do you know what words your customers use to find you? For MarCom New Media as an example, people may search using Los Angeles Internet marketing firm, or search engine optimization firm in Los Angeles. Note how I have linked to this key word, and it goes to our website page about search engine optimization. That is called a link back to our site. You want many legitimate links to your new site.

Put up a Press Room and post articles and a newsletter. We find that Press-feed offers the best tool for a press room, that includes an excellent RSS feed built right in. Plus it is easy to post releases, newsletter or articles, that are then stored so people can review them later, and that offer excellent content with your relevant key words, which the search engines like. Check out our MarCom Press-feed.

Include an interactive function to get people's names. For future marketing, the best way to build your own opt in list is to have options for people to safely fill out a marketing survey, like we have on our MarCom home page, or an interactive newsletter sign up.

Re-skinning your website. This is a term for re-designing your site without disrupting its SEO. One of our other current clients is about ready to re-skin their three websites - so by the end of July, check back and you can see the before and after: http://www.film-connection.com/; http://www.recordingconnection.com/ and http://www.radioconnection.com/.

Ghostwriting Blogs for Clients for Link Building and Social Media

2008-06-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

I have been writing blogs for quite some time. Blogs are a great link building tool, and they are also great for customer relationship building, reputation management, and a good survey tool to get a feel for what people think about new products and services. In order for a blog to be a good search engine optimization (SEO) link building tool, however, one must use linking strategies that are acceptable and effective with the engines like Google and Yahoo. Right now, one of my blogs is for our client Entertainment Career Connection.

Blogs are great for customer relations if done properly. And remember that anything you post on the Internet can come back and bite you later on. It will stay up for a long time. So be very careful what you say. Authenticity is very important, and starting conversations with your readers is what works today, and in fact, it is the shift in marketing all together.

I have a blog for one of our clients and as part of his campaign for reputation management we do an educational blog that talks about his activities on the Boards of two charities, and also serves as a research and information tool for trends in education, and enables link backs to his website. I use every single blog topic that I write to also revise it into a longer article for submission to article websites. But you cannot submit duplicate copy or the search engines will not count it.

There's one aspect of blog writing that people often do not understand - and that is the search engine optimization and PR value. Take for instance, Rocco's blog above. I post one to two times per week in his blog. Basically you can type in Rocco Basile on Google, and note that many of the items in the ranking list are now positive posts, and include both his official website as well as blog posts, some PR Web listings, and articles. Inside his blog posts I always provide links back to his website. And the linking strategy can be to specific pages in his website that are related about my topic - not just to the home page. There are times when we have seen blog posts get picked up by other bloggers, who link to the blog.

Blogging requires a goal, and they are a lot of work. But the beauty of blogging is that it provides a marketing vehicle that does NOT rely on a third party, such as an editor writing an article about you. Corporate blogs provide you with an opportunity to tell your company's story. Various executives in your company, large or small, can post to a corporate blog, so you can create a strategy ahead of time, then assign folks to write.

Blogs are a great "Crisis Management" tool. Just look at how popular Martha Stuart's blog was during her court battle. And blogs are a great way to build a database of interested people, users, etc. Just shoot folks over to a sign up form from your blog, and you are certain to get some opt ins.

And as for the return on investment for blog writing, it costs very little - you can set up a blog at blogger.com, for free. So it costs you in time - your time, the time of your employees, or the writing fees to hire someone like MarCom to ghostwrite your blogs. You can check to see if your blog is building website traffic, because of course, the better your blog's linking strategies are, the more folks will visit your website. Once a visitor comes in to your website from your blog, what path do they go down? do they ultimately get funneled to a sale? These things must be tracked on your website by programs like Google Analytics, which is free, or HitsLink, which is the one we like. And of course, you need the experience to be able to read and analyze the reports once they are generated on HitsLink, to track successes over a period of time.

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Website Search Engine Optimization Tips

2008-06-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

We have been meeting with many new clients lately, and in doing so, realize that most of their websites are NOT properly optimized. This is in part because today's website designers and web master's have not yet caught up with SEO tactics, knowledge and practices.

MarCom's Mike Keesling, who has been doing SEO since the beginning, says the most important element of website optimization is NO SPLASH SCREENS AND NO FLASH! Next is if you are going to opt for an open source solution for a database driven site (such as Big media USA) make sure you can do individual title tags.

It is unfortunate because most companies would be realizing much improved traffic to their sites if they were optimized. These skills have taken our MarCom SEO experts years to develop and hone, so it's not likely that a company can do it alone - or if they do it will take longer than if they hire SEO specialist teams like MarCom.

The first tip is that you can never use Flash on your home page. It may look nice, but Flash blocks the search engines from reading a web page. Embedded Flash is OK. Remember the more content that has been optimized in your pages the better. Most designers hate this, because white space in design has long been preferred. But when it comes to website optimization, make the pages above the fold or middle pretty, then add more optimized content below the fold.

By optimized content we mean that it has your key words and phrases embedded in the copy. Take for example MarCom. Our key words are website optimization, search engine optimization, social media marketing, online marketing, SEO, social media marketing strategy and so forth. NOTE how I linked the main key word pertaining to this article to our website? I would typically link it to a page on our site with focus to website optimization. Once our new MarCom New Media website is up I will do that.

Social Media and Blog Marketing Strategies and Measurement

2008-06-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

We recently had an inquiry from a new business client about doing blogger relations, and or blog marketing. As MarCom has been doing search engine marketing and blogs since the beginning, we have some sweet case histories, or success stories, if you will, but what came up is that it is often hard to write a case history when you don't even know how many bloggers have picked up your story without tracking them on Google. This era of new media marketing is still processing some of the measurement techniques - and the reality is - these results can take more than just a few months to track.

So as an exercise to do a "Client Successes" document for blogger relations, we used our client The Wiley Protocol, and believe it or not, even just in this year of 2008, I tracked back on Google - at least ten pages - and found that we have logged about 50 plus blog mentions since January. Some of these hits were picked up from our SEO press releases and articles. That said, blogger marketing actually goes hand in hand with SEO. And, that said, it should be part of, not separate from, your SEO and Social Media Marketing strategy. Figure out your objectives first - such as reaching brand advocates, or reaching consumers versus young medical doctors online. Or it could be getting more media, or promoting a special offer for a specific product or service.

As for how we can measure our successes? My associate Mike Keesling suggested that some measurement can be quantitative (such as the number of mentions on blogs below) and also qualitative. For example, you can measure traffic stats on your website and track (using HitsLink or Google Analytics tracking) how many people come to your website because of a blog post. Did traffic increase? You can also measure key words used on the blogs, and the SEO results. Again a strategy is required. And the results must be reviewed over a couple of months. It all takes time.

Another one of our clients - Peternity.com - has been optimizing mostly for the key word pet urns, or pet urn, dog urn, cat urn. Of course we also optimize for the words "pet memorials." It is working. She is finally getting customers buying more urns when their pets die. She writers her own blog, but if she didn't, MarCom would ghostwrite it for her, and the bottom line is that we are all on the same page with the SEO and social media marketing strategy. I write optimized press releases and SEO articles as well for this client. Check it out. Also note how I am linking in this blog (see links) for MarCom as well as our clients.

Our excellent results are below for The Wiley Protocol (www.thewileyprotocol.com). We started working with her on SEO about a year and a half ago. Now, our key word strategy has paid off, because she is in the top pages of Google for most of her most important key words. This client now has tens of thousands of consumer customers. The list of close to 50 blog mentions is below – mostly since Jan 08. And this may be only part of them.
http://www.bobyoungmd.com/wiley.htm
http://www.womensvoicesforchange.org/2007/01/ask_dr_pat_bioi.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/94472.php
http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Wiley_T._522431849.aspx
http://www.therealcougarwoman.com/2006/11/wiley_protocol_.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/fashion/15suzanne.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=health&pagewanted=all
http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Wiley_T._522431849.aspx
http://health.propeller.com/story/2008/06/01/ts-wiley-showcases-the-wiley-protocol-bio-mimedic-bio-identical-hormone-restoration-thera
http://www.riverwalkma.com/womenhealth.htm
http://www.topix.com/health/womens-health/2008/01/t-s-wiley-showcases-the-wiley-protocol-bio-mimedic
http://www.thespiritedwoman.com/newsletter/2005/10/august_2004.html
http://www.blogtoplist.com/rss/wiley.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2007/0049567.html
http://www.onlypunjab.com/fitness/fullstory-insight-fitness+healthcare-newsID-247310.html
http://www.exploringcollege.com/article.cfm/id/179879
http://menopause.gaia.com/blog/2006/8/bioidentical_hormones_-_the_wiley_protocol
http://www.nature.com/ijir/journal/v20/n1/full/3901622a.html
http://online-pharm-review.blogspot.com/2008/01/ts-wiley-showcases-wiley-protocol-bio_18.html
http://www.griffinmedical.com/thewileyprotocol.htm
http://www.health78.com/health-news/TS-Wiley-Showcases-The-Wiley-Protocol-Bio-Mimedic-Bio-Identical-Hormone-Restoration-Therapy-BHRT-At-The-Integrative-Healthcare-Symposium-IHS/83796/
http://menopause.gaia.com/blog/2006/8/bioidentical_hormones_-_the_wiley_protocol?printable=1
http://www.westmoreland-pharmacy.com/retailer/store_templates/ret_custom_page2.asp?storeID=EE488B11DB25472285D10D6CC02CA42A
http://spa-namaste.com/article.cfm/id/252071
http://www.tummytucksurgery.co.uk/news/article_t_s_wiley_offers_physicians_039_two_days_back_on.php
http://www.myhormonereplacement.info/article.cfm/id/207103
http://www.myhormonereplacement.info/article.cfm/id/181820
http://menopause.gaia.com/blog/tags/bioidentical+hormones
http://www.escapecollege.com/article.cfm/id/179879
http://www.bobyoungmd.com/documents/OHN10-FemaleHormoneReplacementTherapy.htm
http://www.bio2000.com/article.cfm/id/252870
http://www.searchdisease.com/article.cfm/id/252870
http://personallifemedia.com/guests/740-ts-wiley
http://digg.com/podcasts/Beauty_Now_The_Intersection_of_Cosmetic_Surgery_Longevity_Bio_Medical_Innovation/318151
http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/stlog/2006/11/weird_and_wiley_science.php
http://www.mjmls.com/viewtopic.php?t=86004
http://www.blogcatalog.com/posts/replacement%20protocol
http://www.heartlandhealing.com/pages/News/flier_OHE.pdf
http://www.bionity.com/lexikon/e/?ps=T.+S.+Wiley&didsearch=1&defop=and&wild=yes&d=none&dienst=lexikon

Oh and just FYI there are also blog posting services for $20 to $75 per blog where you are guaranteed blog posts. So just like anything else in life, you can buy your way onto a blog, and it would be a legitimate link (back to your site) which is great for your SEO results. But that requires a strategy and money. You can get a couple of hundred blogs with a good budget, or you can hire MarCom for blogger relations for much less per month.

The Best Link Building Practices

2008-06-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

One of, if not the most important element in getting high search engine rankings for your Website is what is called link building. The search engines analyze and count links to your website - and they take a look at patterns for linking, linking profiles, deep-linking, and if you have used one-way versus the now old school reciprocal link building strategies.

As we have said many times before, content is king on your site. But right up there in importance is the quality of each link. That is more important than how many links you have.

Here are ten tips from our MarCom SEO expert, Mike Keesling's tips for link building.

1) Make your links inbound one-way links with anchor text that is related to your site.
2) Links should be from a site that’s related to the theme and content of your Website.
3) You need to vary the anchor text of your keywords and keyphrases when getting links from other sites.
4) Find your competition’s links at Yahoo.com -- type linkdomain:competition.com.
5) Do NOT do reciprocol links, but IF you do, create a special link swapping page on your site.
6) Don't use link farms, which are sites that host a large array of spam links.
7) There are some good directories for link building but most are worthless.
8) Links from social media websites like DIGG are fantastic. Getting an article on the front page might even cause your server to crash!
9)Electronic press releases are good links. Use PRweb.com.
10) Do NOT purchase links.

Basically, anyone can do these link building SEO strategies, however, those of us who have been doing SEO and social media for as long as we have, use other special tricks, and we know how to get the best links because we also link using your key words and phrases.

Website Optimization and other Search Engine Tactics

2008-05-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

The last year has been particularly interesting. Having been in this space now being called social media marketing, since before it even started, means that we have been able to test many of the practices that PR professionals are just now learning to use as mainstream. In fact, my associate Mike Keesling was doing Search Engine Optimization in Los Angeles for Pacific Island Reservations, a Hawaii Vacation Rentals site, back in 1996, when they only had one website. Today they have 12 websites, and for more than a decade he has helped them maintain a top ten ranking in Google, MSN and Yahoo. In fact - check it out if you are looking for a place to stay in Hawaii for vacation this summer! It'll save you money.

Onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO) defines your website and targets your visitors. Whether you are a small business or a corporation you need an Internet marketing strategy that includes a website with interactive content that to attract your customers who are online using the search engines to find what they want. Then when your potential customers type in the keywords associated with your products and services, your website will come up within the first page of the search engines.

We call this Website Optimization – and just FYI, most web designers (no offense) do not install Meta, Title or Alt tags properly, and in fact they can cause more damage than good. For example, Flash websites cannot be SEOd, and this is critical to the search engines and your customers finding your website.

Another tip - with the right keywords we will make sure every page on your website is optimized properly with those words. More subject-specific content means better qualified traffic. This text is optimized if the search engines can find it via keyword-density. And your site should also be a good read.

Sitemaps are another thing you should consider. There are two types of sitemaps: 1) An HTML page listing the pages on your site by section so users can find the information they seek. 2) XML sitemaps, a way for Google to find all the pages on your site, and that includes URLs that may not be discoverable by their standard Web crawling processes.

Website Analytics –This tells us the behavior of your website visitors, allowing us to use data collected to determine which aspects of the website are working, such as which landing pages encourage people to take an action. We can use it to track visitors, sales or measure month-to-month SEO results and tweak online strategies.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) content syndication feeds are also a social media and Internet marketing must these days for better search engine visibility and better qualified traffic to your site.

And my favorite, being a PR professional, electronic press rooms and optimized releases are a must. Our eco-friendly electronic press kits are also optimized for the search engines making it easier for the media and your customers to find you. Here is another one of our client's online press kits that has been getting alot of attention lately. A company with a Los Angeles recording school, plus film schools and a radio DJ school known as the Entertainment Career Connection.

The Social Media Marketing Press Release and Wire Services

2008-05-15T10:06:00.000-07:00

MarCom has been using various forms of the new social media marketing press release for our clients for the last few years. In fact a press release just went out yesterday for our client Acutrack, Inc. regarding their new eco-friendly consultation services to help other businesses learn how they can leave behind a smaller carbon footprint while remaining profitable. Acutrack has been helping ease the burdens their clients are placing on the world a number of ways, including environmentally friendly CD and DVD manufacturing. We distributed this release via PR Web, for several reasons. It was a longer than normal release because we added some of the customer testimonials, and PR Web's costs for distribution can often be more modest than MarketWire. Although we use both company's wire services. Each has various methods and distribution cost rates -- PR Web's premium one is $360. The release cannot be more than 800 words basically.

Acutrack's release was already picked up by a couple of newswires -- Acutrack, Inc. Announces Eco-Friendly CD and DVD Manufacturing and Packaging Solutions. There is also PR Newswire, which I have used for years for traditional press release dissemination to the media. Most all of the wires today are doing search engine optimization -- so, right now, I believe it is a matter of client budgets and experimentation for preference as to who gets you the best results.

Oh and BTW I just noticed this MarketWire press release regarding the fact that the inventor of the new social media press release format (now on version 1.5) PR agency Shift Communications, just won the Holmes Report "New Media Agency of the Year." Well done.

SEO RAP -- No Nos from Los Angeles SEO Firm

2008-05-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

We are all used to the tips for how to do search engine optimization (SEO) but what about the no nos that you never knew about? We'd like to offer some help by offering you ten steps for what not do do on your website if you want to attract customers.

Throw Flash and Splash screens in the trash. Do not use Flash and expect to get good SEO results. You know the websites were you see a pretty picture or animation on the home page and have to click enter her to go beyond? No text on your home page means the search engines won't read it. Good SEO is all about content... content... content.
Don't forget to add Title and Description tags on pages. You may have seen some websites where it says "new page" in the browser? That is probably because the website designer did not put a title tag on the page. It is really important to the search engines.A site without a Description tag is meaningless. A short message with a key word that describes your site in the Description tag is essential so your customers will click through to your site when they see your site's listing.
Don't use repeat Title and Description tags. Your website pages should each be unique and contain a theme for key words or phrases for each page, so make your Title and Description tags match the content for one of the keywords per page of the same topic. You can't optimize one single page for many key words.
Don't use text as an image. Some sites have text and images combined into a jpg or gif image, so you can't select the text with your cursor. Search engines cannot find any searchable text, so you get no SEO results. Also don't make any headlines into gif images, because they should be text with a key word in it.
Local Business do not need national SEO. It won't do a cigar store in Pasadena any good to optimize for the national or global marketplace, because their customers can't come in and buy a cigar unless they live near Pasadena. MarCom had a client like this, so we optimized them for Pasadena Cigar stores. It worked. Now it would have been different if they had an online cigar store.
Redesign your site with caution. Don't lose optimized URLs. Once a website's pages have been indexed by the search engines and people are finding you, you do not want to lose the SEO traffic you have already established, and the search engines will be sending your potential customers to pages, or URLs that no longer exist. To redesign your site you need to have your web master use a similar structure of the old site had and retain the same URL addresses for the new pages.

And for those of you who need some more help with your search engine optimization feel free to check out our website at www.marcombroadband.com

Our Small Business SEO and Social Media Teleseminar

2008-04-28T12:24:00.001-07:00

Last week our MarCom associate Carole Hodges hosted a free teleseminar where I focused on small business websites, SEO and social media marketing. Carole's latest venture is The Yes Connection at http://www.carolehodges.com where she assists business partners and individuals with their start-ups and small business decisions.

There is a lot of confusion these days about what is needed on the Internet to market new and existing websites. So our teleseminar addressed the questions that the non-techie business owner may have.

The free teleseminar is about 40 minutes long, but in the end has some really good tips and information. To listen online: go to http://www.audioacrobat.com/play/WXcl1C3s

In summary, some of the points we covered included how you should spend your marketing dollars wisely insofar as the complexity of web marketing. We answered questions including:

Does every business need a website? Are there times when an inexpensive “Website Tonight” type product from GoDaddy is an appropriate choice? If you don’t have a lot of money, is a free Blog a good starting place? How do you differentiate between the types of websites? For example: Brochure – e-commerce – Membership Site – Services (online purchase and not.) Do you NEED to be selling something online to benefit from a website? What brings traffic to a website? Why do I care about SEO – Couldn’t I just pay for clicks to my site? What are traffic statistics? What are keywords? How do I know what keywords are right for my business? How do I determine how much traffic I really want on my site? What makes people STAY on your website and look around? Why should I look for competitors on the web? What if I have BIG plans for growth... is there a way to structure my website so that I start out simple and later add product sales or a membership site? What advice do you give to someone who is starting out and does not yet have a website? What advice do you give to someone who has spent a lot of money on their website but it is not giving them the results that they want?

Tough Times Require SEO and Social Media Marketing

2008-04-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

Most of us over 40 years of age have all been though tough economic times in our careers, and having just done my taxes, and reading the Wall Street Journal every day, plus watching the news ... I can now admit, times are getting a bit tough. It's an election year.

Many folks have been talking to MarCom about doing search engine optimization and social media marketing -- and my associate Mike and I agree on this one -- the worse thing companies can do is stop marketing altogether. This is a huge mistake, because while you stop marketing, your worse nightmare of a competitor is ramping things up.

The reality these days is that in order to keep your small to medium sized business afloat - you need to do a minimum of a limited amount of marketing and advertising. But then what does that mean today? Many folks are just realizing that SEO and social media are party of the marketing mix, therefore they had just started to get serious about hiring experts like us to help them.

The bottom line? Do it. Here's why. If you have a company with products and services, and you rely on website traffic for sales, if you don't appear on the Page One of Google and other search engines, chances are people will not find you. And many folks are already optimized. We have a dentist client - as an example - Wilshire Dental Care. Just as fast as our client's website increases in its ranking with Google, his competition is working just as hard or harder and paying their SEO specialists allot to keep them on top! So our client really should increase our SEO and social media marketing efforts so that he stays on top and ahead of his competition. The bad news is IF he were to stop, his rankings will diminish, and six months from now? His competitors will be on page one of Google, and he will not.

Also the crazy thing is that right now, many SEO specialists are charging more than we do. I just did an analysis of Los Angeles SEO experts -- and we came across others who do what we do but who charge triple what we charge.

Here are some pointers you may want to keep in mind when considering SEO and social media marketing.
• There should be a compelling reason for you to look at it, read it, listen to it, watch it, like it, interact with it, and ultimately buy it!
•Today, people use search engines, like Google, to get what they want, how they want it - fast.
•The biggest challenge now is how to communicate your story over multiple channels, including the Internet.
•Becoming an “Authority Website” is the gold rush of the Internet.
•Authority = Attention
•Attention = Money

Ten Steps: Defining Social Media Marketing

2008-04-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Internet is not just a different advertising channel, but an entirely new and unique culture with a multitude of online communities. Although there are many folks that think social media marketing is just the latest fad, it is not. The reality is, it is changing how we do business.

Although traditional marketing and new media strategies continue to morph, the Internet has emerged into a tremendous platform for direct and open communications among the media, businesses, and individuals worldwide.

Many of our new clients need some basic education on what we recommend, why and how we do what we do. We have been using these ten steps in most of our proposals for quite some time now.

Search engine optimization, social media marketing and online PR tactics include:
1) Fully analyze your situation, including competition, market, etc.
2) Conduct keyword research to determine the keywords associated with your name most likely to achieve high search-engine rankings and create a keyword strategy to map the keywords to specific website pages.
3) Optimize the pages of the website, www.meridianlasercare.com.
4) Create a blog and ghostwrite apx. -1 to 2 posts per week recommended.
5) Social Media Marketing: Create additional site content through writing and publishing articles to disseminate over the Internet
6.) Post and distribute electronic press releases (Using wires such as MarketWire or PRWeb)
7.) Create bookmarked posts to social media sites. (DIGG, Del.ic.ious, Stumble Upon, etc.)
8.) Optimize existing and new content over the next three months and execute the social media PR plan.
9.) Acquire reciprocal links and incoming links via article submissions, electronic press releases and a blog.
10.) Purchase directory listings for your new website to provide additional, high page rank links. Directories include Yahoo! Directory, Superpages as well as any industry specific directories with high page rank. (Yahoo is $299/Year Superpages runs $22/month)

The real truth is that although these basic steps are usually recommended, there is no single template for every client, because every client's situation, website, and place among thier competition is unique. MarCom's Social Media Marketing proposals are customized for each new client, and then throughout the yearly campaign tweak their strategies based on results we are seeing from the tracking results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Versus Pay per Click (PPC)

2008-04-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

We had a new business opportunity this week with a medical professional client who is completely confused about search engine optimization (SEO), versus Pay per Click (PPC) advertising. And she is not the only potential new client who doesn't get it. Some of my most sophisticated professional friends are having a hard time grasping the new media tactics that we do required for getting their websites onto the first pages of Google and the search engines.

This gal asked about her PPC campaign, and why it isn't getting any results after three weeks... so my associate Mike spelled it out. First he did her competitive landscape, and determined that she only had three other real competitors in her geographical area. One of the three was getting 15,000 visitors per month. But they also had more than 300 pages of content on their website. Her site had very few in comparison. He researched and noted that the competitor was spending about $700 in PPC advertising. The lesser known competitor got about 570 visitors per month, and did not have a PPC campaign. Both of her competitors have press rooms which means she will need one too and they are a great place for linkable content. The more content on your site with relevant keywords the better.

If your goal is to book five clients per week initially, and then eventually in a year, you want to have ten clients per week, think about these numbers. Typically conversion rates for Internet customers are a three to five percent lead generation per visitor to your website. Out of 100 visits per site, you should get three to five leads, and out of those, one percent will buy. Basically it takes 20 leads for one customer. You need a minimum of 100 visitors per day to get business, or about 500 visitors to get a sale. It's compounded as well, so the more visitors, the better the chances for sales.

But here is the deal insofar as PPC. It's important to remember that PPC may be beneficial when launching a company and its products and services online, but ultimately PPC and offline advertising benefits will disappear as soon as you stop spending money, while SEO keeps on working long after the money is spent. We actually helped wean another client off of spending thousands on PPC ads, while increasing their SEO results. The Entertainment Connection, who offer film schools for audio engineers and radio professionals - people who want to learn how to be a DJ for instance. One of the tactics I worked on was to get their press room up and running with press releases and a press kit. Next I will be writing articles and blog content for them to provide links back to their website, while Mike will continue adding website content and track their optimization, tweaking their site for increasing their customer leads via SEO.

That said, our goal for clients is to evaluate their needs, by asking these six questions:
1) What is your URL or website address?
2) When people search for your product or service on Google, where does your website appear?
3) Do you have a tracking or measurement program for your website?
4) Who are your top five competitors (National/Regional/Local)
5) How much traffic do you think your website can get by this time next year?
6) How many customers from your website would you like per month?

For a free analysis feel free to email us - check out http://marcombroadband.com/

Internet Growth Projections: 6.6%

2008-03-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

I was doing research for our client the Entertainment Connection and found a Hollywood Reporter article written by Georg Szalai siting an annual study from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in June of 2006 predicting that a surge in growth in the online sector, global entertainment and media will expand into a $1.83 trillion industry in 2010, up from an estimated $1.33 trillion in 2005.

The report also indicated that the biggest global industry engines during that time frame will be Internet advertising and access spending, for which PwC projects a compound annual growth rate of 12.9 percent. The Internet sector, the report said, would be set for a five-year compound boost of 8.4 percent -- driven by online ads, radio/out-of-home media.

The article also said, "Internet advertising will see the largest five-year surge -- at an 18.1% compound rate -- from an estimated $22.45 billion last year to $51.6 billion in 2010... TV network ad revenue will increase to $51.95 billion in 2010, and online ads to $25.5 billion."

These figures are interesting, especially when we note other research that talks about declines in other media. In our MarCom social media marketing powerpoint presentation I have mentioned the following stats:

Decline in traditional media
–Box office is down 7%
–Newspaper circulation peaked in ‘87
–Down another 2.6% in 2006
–Radio was down 4% in 2006
–TV viewership is rising; audience is fragmenting and show ratings are declining
–Magazine ad revenues are up a bit; number of ad pages is flat; women’s magazine circulation is down
–Celebrity magazines continue to grow …

Ask any student where they hear the news -- as did at Cal State Northridge where I lectured a couple of weeks ago -- and they will tell you, "on the Internet."

The bottom line here is that marketers are realizing that the budgets they set for the future must include good white hat search engine optimization and social media strategies.

Social Media Marketing and Revising Websites

2008-03-19T18:53:00.000-07:00

Given the fact that folks are beginning to notice some changes in business and the economy, MarCom Broadband is getting lots of new business referrals. I think it is because we have little experienced competition out there. Few companies have been doing search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing as long as we have, which is basically since it all started.

I got a call today from a prospect who is planning on revising his website. This often happens. We even had one client who refused to listen to us a couple of years ago, and they redid their website, ditched half the content and lost traction with their rankings on Google, even though we warned them!

Point is that you do not want to change the name of your url if you don't have to, but if you do, then certain SEO tactics must be put in place. My associate Mike Keesling often works very closely with website design firms, like Rigney Graphics, right from the start of a client's redesign on their site to make sure their site SEO is done right. Their newsletter, called LunchMeat" is pretty fun BTW.

As an example, MarCom is about to change our company name from MarCom Broadband to MarCom New Media -- and we have a new url, so we will be redesigning our own website. The only way we can salvage our current ranking with Google is to point the old site to the new site. And we need to salvage much of the old site content and rework it with our key words on the new website.

Also what many people do not understand is that the Meta tags on each website page must correspond to content and keywords inside that particular page. There are many other little intricate tactics that we have learned to use to improve client rankings.

Pitching New Business: An Integrative Approach with Social Media Marketing

2008-03-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

Once again it's that time of year when my associate Jeff asks me and my colleagues to do a guest lecture at his class of PR and communications students at Cal State Northridge. Our MarCom Broadband creative director, Brad Stone, is heading there today. And I will talk on Friday.

When I was chatting with Brad this morning about his presentation, it came up that now, with the press and the Internet, media don't need PR folks as much because they can research whatever they need online. And to get the media to respond to a pitch is becoming more and more difficult. Nowadays we wrap video right along with website links inside email pitches.

Having been in marketing and advertising for several decades, it's easier to see trends, and as the saying goes what comes around goes around, because patterns tend to duplicate. What I mean is that many years ago when we pitched new business, we gave a killer presentation, provided our creative ideas and often won the account (whether advertising or PR) based on the creative ideas within. We had to start getting the potential clients to sign and promise not to steal our ideas and use them without hiring us. Then along came technology and the dot com world, where that went out the window. We never gave any creative ideas away UNTIL we were hired. Our proposals where based on case histories and results for prior clients.

Today we are back in the place where with social media marketing and search engine optimization being wrapped into our presentation, and with competition out there, we are doing more presentations with creative ideas inside. Now back to a place where we need client signatures again.

Social media marketing is becoming a part of all of MarCom's new business pitches -- even though many clients still request just one thing - like PR. We must incorporate it into all of our marketing, advertising, PR and social media marketing strategies these days.

Is Social Media Marketing Revolutionary?

2008-03-06T14:07:00.000-08:00

I read another blog post today that said that social media marketing is the biggest shift that has taken place in marketing since television. That's a pretty big claim. Hat Tip to Karl Long and FutureLab. His blog references the same study I referenced in my last blog on Feb. 28. about the TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony study that polled more than 60 marketers and discovered that social network marketing is still a puzzle, and agencies don't seem equipped to help clients "get it."

There was and always will be shifts in marketing. That's why the term "new media" was coined. It wraps all the new marketing strategies and tactics into one term. And again, it is why we will soon be changing the name of our company from MarCom Broadband to MarCom New Media. (Our new website will be up soon.) Our business has shifted entirely in the last two years from marketing and PR, to marketing, branding SEO and social media marketing. We started out with the concept of helping companies go to market faster in today's world, i.e. the Internet, which has the potential to reach millions of people in quantum time. Ergo the broadband in MarCom Broadband. But people understand new media more than broadband.

There is still much confusion about new Internet driven marketing strategies. The Web has changed everything, yet it in reality is merely another channel in which to market through -- a channel with worldwide reach. The television, as Karl said, changed everything. And I do believe he is right about the revolutionaries, who are "participating in the conversation" and building deeper relationships with their customers, versus those who are "waiting to see."

We hear questions like this all the time. What's the best way to design a website? Is Flash in or out? I know I need Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but just exactly what does that mean? How is Search Engine Marketing different from SEO? If I invest in doing business over the Internet, what marketing strategies will guarantee sales results? My company works with consultants who are in some cases virtual, so what's the best way to manage them? I see other companies getting excellent PR stories, so why can't I? Do people really read email or pay per click ads? Do web banners work? What is social media?

The bottom line is that the most important thing we can understand as marketers is our need to first "get inside the client's challenge." Once the challenges are identified, we can put a strategic plan together that will allow our clients to "go to market" and get measurable results with a return on their investment. The thing is - it's hard to measure television commercials. SEO measurement is easy.

Skills + knowledge + thought + creativity + channels = positive energy and results.

Adweek Survey on Social Media Marketing

2008-02-28T19:02:00.000-08:00

Brian Morrissey reports on social media marketing in Adweek (Feb. 28, 2008) about a TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony study that polled more than 60 marketers and discovered that social network marketing is still a puzzle, and agencies don't seem equipped to help clients "get it."

With more and more clients starting to place emphasis on trying to master social media marketing, they seem to find that their agencies are not equipped to help them succeed in that space. More than 60 marketers in North America, France and the U.K. were polled to see how they are doing in figuring out the world of social media. They were asked for feedback on their agencies' abilities to help with social media.

According to TNS "Agencies don't get it." Clients complained that their agencies -- creative, media, public relations, design and others -- typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media.

In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area. What's more, one client pointed out that his agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video-sharing sites for themselves.

The perceived, and real lack of social media competence at agencies will present opportunities for new providers. That means firms like MarCom Broadband will be getting the business because we have been deep into social media marketing for the last five years, and well into search engine marketing for over ten years. Following are just a couple of our customer case histories.

Client: Entertainment Connection (http://www.film-connection.com/, http://www.radioconnection.com/, http://www.recordingconnection.com/) SEO and online PR
Result: In less than one year, in addition to expanding the websites tremendously, we have decreased Entertainment Connection’s original PPC budget by 67 percent of what it was, and increased the number of leads by 67 percent. For one third the budget they are getting 170 percent of the business. We are currently drafting press documents for launching the company’s corporate press room, and will soon write articles for submission – all in the new social media format. Future plans including a Spanish version of each site. Each website is getting excellent rankings

Client: The Wiley Protocol (http://www.thewileyprotocol.com/) SEO, PR and Social Media Marketing
Result: After a year of SEO and social media marketing, the Wiley website is ranking well in search engines. With Joomla as their content management system there are limitations, however as one example, a year ago the company was ranked 35 on Google under the key word phrase “bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. It is now number five on page one of Google. PR and social media efforts continue.

Client: Wilshire Dental Clinic (http://www.oralimplant.com/) SEO and Social Media Marketing
Result: In a year this client is ranking on the first page of all the major search engines for most all of the key words for the website www.oralimplants.com. Social media marketing continues, and we will begin ghostwriting a blog for Dr. Afar in February, 2008. These bi-weekly postings will further improve and maintain rankings of each website.
CyberDefender.com (www.cyberdefender.com)

Client: CyberDefender, Inc. (http://www.cyberdefender.com/) Reputation Management, SEO and PR
Result: Negative listings for the company’s CEO and the prior company were pushed back off of Google’s first page within six months. Within three months there were increased product sales and revenues and after six months the company’s ranking by the search engines showed a significant increase in organic listings based on the key words, while increased product sales and revenues amplified.

Search Engine Statistics in SEO

2008-02-26T16:19:00.000-08:00

I was doing some research and found that 75 to 80 percent of traffic comes through the search engines. Most people do not look beyond the first two pages of search results. And even less click on Pay per Click (PPC) ads. So if your website does not rank in the first two pages of engines like Google or Yahoo! it is probably only getting about 20 to 30 percent of traffic, and even less for your revenues. The bottom linbe is that you need to rank high on the search engines with those "key" words that your customers will use to find you on the Internet. It is all about relevance.

At MarCom we have noticed that many of our new business clients worry about how much traffic they are getting on their websites, but few really notice or know how many of these convert to sales, or even where they came from. Recently we had one client -- www.peternity.com -- mention that since we have been working on a keyword and social media marketing strategy of pet urns/dog urns/cremaiton urns and her ranking on these words has improved, she for the first month she actually had orders for these urn products It's nice when we can take credit for revenues for our clients.
Another client that we have been working with for reputation management - RoccoBasile.org - has improved in just a week and gone from ten to eight in the first page rankings on Google.

Another thing we recently put together because of all the confusion about social media marketing services, is a standard rate sheet. Our services are actually very cost efficient. We typically charge a one time fee for keyword analysis of $650. Online website optimization depends on each client's current ranking, number of web pages and their situation.

Using Linked In for Social Media Marketing

2008-02-20T15:16:00.000-08:00

I was invited to a colleague's BNI networking group this morning, and they had recently implemented a group instruction to network each other via Linked in. I have been on the service for years. And I am guilty of not always using it correctly, as I suspect is an issue with many business people, even though I know the value of social media networking sites like this. We instruct our MarCom Broadband clients about the value of social sites like this.

Because LinkedIn is an online network of millions of professionals from around the world, it will help to improve your Google Page Rank, or Google PR. You can post your personal profile and make the information available for the search engines to index. LinkedIn gets high PR in Google, so it is another way of influencing your ranking so people will find you on the Internet. It is pretty simple: just create your public profile and choose the option called “Full View.” You may also want to have your profile’s URL be your actual name, or the name of your company. Then link this page from your blog, or website or from press articles online.

Also LinkedIn is a great place where you can list your website with a link, and or your blog link. All links back to your blog or website create "activity" on these sites which Google likes, and which will go as credits towards your , or PR, on those sites. Be sure if you link to your blog that you include your name or keyword phrase in the link, which will provide search-engine optimization for your blog site.

Linking in press releases and wire services

2008-02-15T09:45:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting experience yesterday. I was submitting my client Peternity.com's press release, when I called tech support at the wire service that I use and was told that I could add my key words - and that I was allowed one key word per 100 words. The release was 800 words long, meaning I could add eight keywords. I did this but, to be honest, it really looked stupid. So I contacted my colleague, and social media marketing mentor Sally from Expansion Plus, who said that three links per article "work best." We changed the release.

We've been practicing social media marketing at MarCom Broadband for quite some time, and every day I learn something new. For article submissions, I have only been using three links per article. And the same rule applies for articles as for releases. It is best to link to a key word phrase in the first paragraph, and at the end -- because, as I have been told, the search engines read from the bottom up, and top down, and pick up words most used on the beginning and end of sentences.

One more issue. When in the article submission sites, they do not allow linking in the main text of your article. However they will allow a maximum of two URLs in what is known as the RESOURCE BOX. You are allowed to use HTML code to make the link work. If you don't link up your URL they will automatically assume that you only wanted it displayed, but not linked. Oh, and they also do not allow these links in the resource box to contain a downloaded file of any kind. Plus they won't accept articles that have the same link in the box more than one time.

And as always -- stick to white hat, not black hat SEO practices, or they may reject your articles.

SEO, Google Descriptions and Growing Clicks

2008-02-12T15:24:00.000-08:00

I searched Google today, and you probably did too. Have you ever wondered why you choose and click a specific link and not others? One reason for click through is probably because of the description, or a short bit of text that sits right below a link. When the descriptions are done right, the number of people clicking your link goes up, and when done wrong, your result link becomes meaningless to users. The competition may get your business.

One of our associate companies, Enthusiast, Inc., is sponsoring a webinar on the topic of how to use Google descriptions to grow your website click though. When you have an e-commerce site on the Internet, your competition is vast compared to typical retail locations at the local mall or on Main Street. So that means your really need to make sure that you are practicing the right search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to get folks to your website in the first place.

MarCom Broadband's Mike Keesling will be talking about this topic tomorrow Wednesday, February 13, 2008 12:30 PM - 1:00 PM PST Using Google Descriptions to Boost Traffic

Join web veteran Jon Cline from Enthusiast Web Solutions and search marketing expert Mike Keesling as they take a closer look at the vital result page description.

You will learn how to:

Improve specific entry pages for more site traffic
Make your result link look more relevant
Avoid getting your cut off descriptions

And you can ask our experts SEO questions. Join us!

The Economics of New Media, or Social Media, Marketing

2008-02-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

As of this week, MarCom Broadband is transitioning into a new website that will be known as MarCom New Media. And I also have another blog that I have started to mirror the new MarCom corporate identity, called MarCom New Media. For awhile I will post on both my blogs. And as always, we try to instruct as we do, so just a hint here ... the content needs to be 30 percent or more different if you post the same topic in more than one place on the Internet. Otherwise only one gets the "credit" with the search engines.

There are several names in marketing for basically the same thing these days. We happen to prefer the term new media, as opposed to social media. During a recession, people in business often pull in their horns on advertising dollars, especially for branding and awarenhess campaigns. In fact, one of my new associates has been calling people who have big ads in the pages of local newspapers, educating them on how they COULD be spending their money on online tactics , which are measurable and bring better results.

New media, or social media marketing is more about people sharing information than awareness. And because of that, interactive new media marketing is here to stay. We believe it is almost recession proof. One reason is the cost factor. Social and new media applications include blogs, social media platforms like FaceBook or MySpace, article submissions, etc. which cost next to nothing except the professional's time to post. Even PRWeb releases, are only max. $360 per post as opposed to more costly wires. I also like using ProfNet -- a great way to find editor's who are writing about a specific topic. It saves in PR media pitching time. I have a ProfNet account under the health category for my client T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol.

Furthermore, social media is also measurable, generating leads, at which point the conversion ratios can be measured. If 3000 people come to your website, and only 200 purchase a product, with the right social media tactics, you might be able to increase that number so that more peopole convert from lokkie lous to customers.

Search advertising, pop-up ads and email marketing might also be recession-proof, as would integrated direct mail programs that direct folks to a special website (which will measure who shows up). Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising even has its place until your SEO has time to take over, at which time you can reduce your PPC budget, and insome cases for our clients, we have illiminated PPC from the marketing mix. One client recently cut his PPC from more than $18k per mo to $0. And even more leads are coming in thanks to our excellent SEO efforts.

But, none of these new media tactics will work without the right search engine optimization (SEO). With Flash websites and content management software (CMS) -- they are often not SEO-able. My associate Mike Keesling says, embedded flash works, and some CMS programs are much better than others. But the bottom line, if you don't have an expert to do the keyword analysis, and recommend what keywords should be used to Meta and Title-tag your website, people who search for your product or service using search engines like Yahoo or Google, may not find your website. You want to be ranked withing the first page of the engines listings.

New media and social media marketing is about helping provide links from six ways to Sunday on the Internet, so people will find your website, and interact.

2008 Trends in SEO and Social Media Business Models

2008-02-01T14:54:00.000-08:00

Now that the new year is well under way, we have been getting questions from current and potentially new small to medium sized clients regarding business models and the online arena.

In fact, MarCom is also currently undergoing a new website development strategy for our own website MarCom Broadband. Although we liked the original design two years ago, we want a more corporate content driven site today, so we've decided that the black background needs to be switched out. Plus our website in need of upgrading to a more SEO and social media friendly design. We will be having our web designer add this blog, and make it easier to switch out content on the pages of the site. Websites with lots of dynamic changing content rich with your key words get the attenditon of the search engines, which will mean better rankings.

That brings me to the fact that I noticed a great article on Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion blog this week which talked about some of the new online business models. There is of course, "advertiser-supported advertising" in which some of the big brands are partnering with online media properties. Then there are"advertiser-subsidized devices, " where incentives play a big part. However, the model that fascinated me is is known as "just-in-time," which is digital advertising planned, placed, measured and evaluated, so that people can decide if the program should be tweaked or tossed. According to the report, new technology allows marketers to create "just-in-time" campaigns that adapt to conditions, so creative campaigns will adapt and change based on specific triggers -- such as sales/ERP data, blog chatter/consumer feedback, or other external conditions.

Yes this works for those who are online. But what about people who still are not online all the time, like pharmacists or doctors. I believe that no matter what the business model, the reality here is that consumers are still interacting in a variety of mediums with the exception of email spam now which typically goes in the trash. Direct mail for example can still work in conjunction with postcard campaigns that drive folks to a website where they can accept a special offer by filling out a survey, and instigate a lead gen call from a sales rep. This works really well for some businesses.

Our new client, Peternity.com, for example, is a small business that currently relies on online lead generation, based on people who are searching for pet urns, pet memorial markers or information about pet burials. A targeted direct mail postcard campaign to vets, or pet stores, could lead to new business tie-ins and direct customer referrals.

Blog ?s from our Search Engine Optimization Clients

2008-01-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

We always get quesitons from our clients about how they can improve their skills on tactics that they are doing. Yesterday for example, I had a quesiton from my client at Peternity.com
a place where people honor their pets for eternity by offering pet memorial products like pet urns, garden statue pet memorials, and other pet memorials.

Colleen asked, "Do you think it's okay for me to do my blog posting thanking another blog for featuring me on their blog. It would give me an opportunity to put in links to product pages on my site through my blog."

We get this and other questions often. Basically the answer is yes, however it's common courtesy to actually link to the other person's blog. Here are the rules about blogging ethics… Another thing you may want to do is blogroll folks that have other blogs that you want to promote. In your blog that means you list other blogs that you recommend.

And of course, MarCom Broadband is all about search engine optimization and it's critical that if you want folks to even FIND your blog, your keywords need to be in it. Make wure that you list them in headlines, close to the beginning of the sentence in para one and close to the beginning middle and end of the blog in general.

Social Media Marketing Versus Public Relations

2008-01-08T11:34:00.001-08:00

I was reading Paul Gillin's newsletter this morning (which if you don't get, you absolutely MUST) and something he said in a prelude to a podcast he did with David Strom (in St. Lewis) triggered this thought. What skills can PR pros still use in the new world of social media marketing? This is actually something that I initially was concerned about some three or four years ago as I became familiar with search engine optimization (SEO). I called it search engine marketing (SEM) back then, and now it's known as social media marketing.

Check out Tech PR War Stories. Their podcast was prompted by Tamar Weinberg's list of the best Internet marketing blog posts of 2007 .

Paul encourages PR folks NOT to focus too much on all the new SEO tech tricks and services, stating, "With so much focus on search engine performance and user recommendations these days, PR pros may be tempted to spend all their time learning how to game the various traffic drivers that are sprouting up all over the Internet. Sure, it’s always nice to get a traffic boost from Digg or StumbleUpon, but the value of that traffic may not be worth the effort."

They talk about what IS important which includes the fundamental skills of PR, mainly creating compelling content, building relationships and delivering a message which are all still really important on the Internet. In the podcast David and Paul try to put the recommendation engine craze in perspective.

This is why MarCom Broadband has continued to focus on an integrated approach, and why we named the firm MarCom in the first place -- as in marketing communications -- which encompasses almost every aspect including advertising copy and design, marketing, journalism or content building, public relations, and now, Internet tactics. The Broadband part of our name just addresses the quantum speed at which the Internet allows us to do it all now. The short of it is that your 2008 Internet marketing strategy should include all of these points.

Strom commented about how new technology changes things all the time, to the point where it can be overwhelming ... because it's not enough to continue to just do the same thing year after year. Download their podcast here. (http://www.gillin.com/Podcasts/tprws-41.mp3)

Gillin also believes headlines that are search engine friendly are very important. We agree, that's one tip that I have used that really works, as evidenced just yesterday when my associate Mike Keesling did a quick review of one of our clients.

One year ago, we started working with T.S. Wiley, who developed a new protocol for bio identical hormone therapy (BHRT) protocol, known as The Wiley Protocol. When we searched for bioidentical hormones a year ago, she and her website came up as number 35. Today it shows up in Google as number five. I have been writing many articles for Wiley, posting them on the article submission sites throughout the Web -- therefore we have many Google Alerts that show up with headlines including her key words which Mike did in his keyword analysis last year - such as hormones, bio-identical hormone replacement therapy, and bioidentical, etc. We have been doing PR Web releases, and some newsletters. This year we are ramping up with a blog.

So it IS important to take a look at using the keywords in headlines, in a company's website, including all the tags such as meta and alt tags on each page (stuff Mike does for our clients). And also keywords can go in photo caption tags and videos for You Tube

It all comes down to content which will serve you best. As David and Paul said, "Content is the king."

Blogging is a Top New Year SEO Trend

2008-01-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

The world of the blogosphere has grown, matured and diversified as a business communication medium and a tool used by search engine optimization and social media marketing experts like those of us at MarCom Broadband.

Just like websites, blogs are just another way to provide information -- but the difference is that a blog is more dynamic, contentwise. Many websites, even our own at MarCom, are more like portfolios. Although the trends are to have a more dynamic website, many folks still have static information or web copy on websites.

There are several different types of blogs for companys. An executive blog can profile comments and/or blog content from it's management team, or the executives of the company. But it is important that these executives take the time to write -- at least two to three times a week, otherwise you should ghostwrite for them.

Currently I am helping one client with his blog at http://www.roccobasile.blogspot.com/ so you can check out how we talk about his charity work.

You may need to coach your clients and help them with editing their blogs. And they need to learn how to make sure their key words are inserted into the blogs properly, or it won't do any good for their SEO.

There's also another type of blog, which has been tagged by the experts as an "advice" blog. That's what this blog of mine is. I give advice on social media marketing. Sometimes I go off topic, which is fine, and actually encouraged. These kind of blogs do really well in the search engines.

Whatever you blog about, the key thing is that you are consistant, with two to three posts a week. Keep it of interest, keep it real, and add your keywords.

As for how to set up your blog, I like the templates in Blogger.com, but there's also Wordpress, and other blog formats that are free and very easy to set up and use.

Happy blogging in the New Year!

News from a Social Media Survey

2007-12-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Tanya Irwin at www.mediapost.com mentioned a recent survey indicating that nearly one third of Web marketers plan to increase spending significantly on social media, including blogs and discussion boards. This survey was conducted in September by Prospero Technologies, LLC (www.prospero.com).

According to their 2007 Social Media Survey, 59 percent of respondents reported that social media performance in 2007 met or exceeded their marketing objectives, boosting future spending expectations--with 31 percent planning to spend significantly more on social media applications in 2008.

The survey also mentioned that current challenges include integrating community-generated content with the rest of the Web site and understanding best practices for new and evolving technologies as well as keeping up with new social media technology advances.

This is the area that MarCom Broadband is getting alot of new business. Writing content, adding key words properly, and nd making sure the meta and alt tags have been done properly.

Regarding the types of social media applications currently in use, respondents said blogs and discussion boards topped the list. And for 2008, they say that discussion boards and blogs still top the list for Web and brand marketers followed closely by ratings and reviews and then social networking applications.

That's why we ghostwrite for our cients blogs, such as Rocco Basile's new blog on his charity work with Children of the City in Brooklyn.

Happy New Year!

Powers of Social Media Marketing

2007-12-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting factoid. If your website isn't optimized properly, it's probably no more than a portfolio, and unless you just point people to it, nobody will find it. And if it is flash, it can't be optimized for the search engines. In fact, for expedience and time, it's probably much faster and more effective if you have a blog, or post information in social media sites like You Tube, or My Space.

We have a couple of new projects at MarCom, one of which will require launching and getting information out to the masses by early January. We need to build a simple website first, and even if my associate Mike did a key word analysis, and then optimized all of the new website pages (the meta and alt image tags), Google and the search engines would not necessarily start tracking the site for well over a month. Mike is a pro at website optimization.

One mistake is that many website are using same title tags for all pages and no description tags. And then I typically take a look at the content inside each of the pages, and make sure the key words are placed properly.

There is one pretty cool program that we often recommend to our clients. It's called PRESSfeed. This is a cost effect and easy way to put up a press room and post and show press releases within a website. But more importantly, PRESSfeed is a Social Media Marketing tool that creates RSS feeds for online content syndication and publishing as well as for better search engine visibility.

A blog on the other hand, is also a great online marketing tool. They are pretty easy to set up, and ready to go insofar as the RSS feeds. This blog, for example, is by Blogger. It's easy to set it up, choose a template, add photos, and add keywords, or as they say "Labels for this post."

Another tip is that social media marketing strategies must be well planned in advance. This means you need to map out a schedule and budget for posting PR Web releases ($360 each), along with traditional press releases on a newswire such as PR Newswire. You need to schedule blog posts. Three per week minimum is advised at first. And then you can always do a social media video to post on You Tube - and the 30 or so other video websites online.

In fact, we have a new client that we started about a month ago that we can now begin tracking in my next blog as a case hisotry. Stay tuned...

The 30 Percent Rule in Social Media Marketing

2007-12-06T15:58:00.000-08:00

Here's a tip for those who are posting content online. When the search engines look at website content, they read left to right and bottom up and top down. Therefore the beginnings and ends of all your sentences are being scanned. If you have several identical documents online, say a press release posted on your website, and also on PR Web, the engines like Google will only count one.

However if you post two different types of release - each with content that is at least 30 percent different, search engines will count the releases as two separate documents -- giving you more credit toward rankings on the search engine pages.

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. Their PageRank™, is a system for ranking web pages which plays a central role in their web search tools. As Google puts it:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."

Therefore, whether you are writing an article, a press release, blog post, forum post, web content, or a white paper -- all about the same topic -- each ducument must be about 30 percent different. And don't forget to add your key words to each document.

MarCom Broadband has done hundreds of keyword analysis reports for out clients. You'd be surprised which longtail words do the best.

Consumers Define Social Media Marketing

2007-11-29T14:23:00.000-08:00

As with everything in marketing, it’s the consumer who defines the market in the end. And we are there ready to give them what they want via what we call MarCom On Demand. Today it’s essential that companies – large or small – deploy an online marketing strategy that engages its customers. People research stuff on the Internet, so they can basically find anything that they want online. They go to chat rooms, and join social networking sites like Linked In, Facebook or MySpace, read blogs, newsletters, news groups, and often interact in online forums, wikis and chat rooms.

We have been out there experimenting with all the latest the social media marketing tools for more than three years – the search engine optimized online marketing strategies and tactics that will draw customers in by way of putting our clients’ info out there on the Internet. It’s working. Many of our clients are now on the first pages of the search engines like Google, or Yahoo. As people are seeking information about our clients’ products and services, we have made sure that every piece of content on the Internet about our clients, such as their website copy, press room, and then press releases we distribute over the wires, and articles that we post in submission sites, are chocked full of the keywords that we have determined are best. We do a keyword analysis for each client, and these are the words being used to pull in information in on by individuals searching the Net.

Nowadays, we have become more like online business consultants at MarCom Broadband, and we have to really know our clients business, and know their customers. It takes hours of research sometimes – just to get it right. Then we use many different social media tools to convey messages for our clients – everything from ghost writing their blogs to writing newsletters. My associate Mike is doing some really cool video podcasts and video shorts for clients that he posts in over 25 plus different video sites, including the big ones like YouTube and Google, as well as on the client’s websites.

Meanwhile I have been busy writing, as I call it, “six ways to Sunday” with topics that stretch from press releases to blog copy to articles that I write in a very special social media format. This includes keywords placed in specific places, and using a specific number for characters in the titles and subheads. It’s all geared for the search engines to be able to read the content – and if your keywords are placed right, Google reads it, then serves it up to people using their engines to find what they want.

The bottom line is -- the days of just simply advertising and pushing PR messages out to people are over. With anti spam software, how many emails to you simply avoid these days? Even the media use the Internet to find what they want, so PR people become less important. It’s now more important than ever to engage people in conversations, get them interested, share knowledge, and let them sell themselves on your client’s products and services.

The Value of SEO and Social Media Marketing

2007-11-21T13:45:00.001-08:00

The transition that is going on in the marketing communicaitons industry is interesting. There are alot of people who know that their websites need Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and many actually believe that their website designers have already done this for them. We see all too often that web masters use duplicate title tags. For example, each page may have the same name - the name of the company. This does not work because Google sees it as you spaming yourself. Here are some basics below.

Each page should have its own unique title tag with keywords (preferably chosen from a keyword Analysis) done by an SEO pro like MarCom's Mike Keesling. If possible, each page should have its own unique description tag as well. Note: in some content management systems this is impossible to achieve as they assign descriptions on a global basis only. In this case, it is better to eliminate the description tag entirely, rather than use one phrase repeatedly for every page.

This brings me to content building and social media marketing. The purpose of building content on your web pages is so that you will have more opportunities for keyword placement. Flash sites cannot be optimized. And sparcely designed web pages with little content offer no SEO advantage either. At least have other content (clickable) on back end pages. Three deep is about as far as the search engines will go.

Content building is part of social media marketing. I write articles for clients that feature their keywords and link back to specific web pages on their sites with those key words. This way Google sees that there's activity going to their website, and begins ranking their site better. The goal of course, is to get the client ranked on page one of Google.

Reputation Management Online

2007-11-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what to do when something shows up online that you wish would just go away? You know - like when you blasted that person's blog comment. Or the time you were being interviewed by the press and said something they took out of context and published online.

In case you hadn't noticed, things have a way of lingering around on the Internet -- and in fact -- they never go away. They just get pushed back to the earlier pages of the search engines like Google -- and if you are lucky -- when it's something you want to just forget about, it will eventually be replaced. The bad news that it's always searchable, and findable. There is even one website where you can find stuff on the very first initial Internet. Internet acrchives - if you will. (I forgot the website address for that.)

The first and MOST important thing is to remember that ANYTHING you post online, anywhere, will remain there, visable for all to see. So be careful what you say in forums, and on other people's blogs in the comment sections.

I do many press releases, if you search for my name on Google, you will find a number of old press releases that I have written and posted. They go back for years. And there is a novelist (romance novels) named Kristin Gabriel, but it's not me. I spoke to her once and asked her if that was her real name. Nope she just invented it for her writing. Now I can't use my name for the book I am writing. It will have to have my niddle name associated with it.

A couple of years ago MarCom had the pleasure of helping one former client with this problem, and it seems that he's not the only one, because we are getting more new business calls regarding this topic. It took about 6-9 months to clean up the mess that was online. We actually used one cool trick. we created a special website only in his name. And we posted a ton of content there that was bout all the good things he has been doing - like charity events, etc. That site was optimized properly, and then we started adding content articles in other spots on the Internet, and built links to his website. It really helped push his negative posts down off page one.

In some cases, when there's a live link on a website with negative content that you want to disassociate from - it may be necessary to approach the person who posted the info, and ask them to remove it.

Another place to be careful - and my associate Mike Keesling would be happy to talk in depth about it - is Wikipedia.com. Another client of ours, T.S. Wiley and The Wiley Protocol, has had an ongoing challenge with an adversary group. All contributions are subject to Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and only adminstrators have special privileges, however, updates can become more than definitions, but online arguments. It's not very productive, and at some point can become fodor for legal disputes, especially when companies are concerned. The point here is that some people can use tools like this to try to succeed with smear campaigns. Wikipedia does allow the posting -- "This is a controversial topic and may be under dispute. Please read this talk page and discuss substantial changes here before making them." But in the end, using Wikipedia this way requires a huge amount of monitoring.

When doing reputation management strategies for hte web, we use many of the same tools we use for online marekting campaigns -- such as blogs, article submissions, and PR Web releases. It's all about pushing the negative listings down and replacing them with positive links.

BloggerWorld Conference

2007-11-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

This week from Wednesday - Friday, Nov. 7 - 9 the first "BlogWorld & New Media Expo" will be taking place in Las Vegas. (Go to www.blogworld expo.com.) The promoters promise it to be an exciting forum for members of both the new and traditional media. It's open to any blogger, vlogger, podcaster, Internet radio broadcaster, or producer of any other form of new media content. I wonder if their press room is open then to ALL bloggers, or just traditional media.

I am happy to see that the traditional "media stunt" is sill part of this celebration. The conference will play host to the first annual BlogWorld & New Media Expo's "World's Largest Pajama Party." That should serve up some interesting podcasts and photos.

I also wonder if the presenters (there are seven keynote speakers) will be answering some of the questions that we are confronting these days with clients as everyone transitions into the blogosphere. One keynote is with Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and founder of HD.net, plus a recent contestant on ABC-TV's Dancing with the Stars. He is the author of the popular "Blog Maverick" blog.

For example one of my questions came about when writing a press kit for one new project. It has come to my attention that many websites are no longer featuring press kits for the media. On eBay, for example, I could not find a traditional press kit to download. As this is a traditional media tactic, is it still important to make press kits available that are journalistically written in AP Style for the media to specifically just "lift" and use the content therein? I think so -- although I no longer believe a had printed folder with paper inside is a good idea. environmentally speaking it's a waste. So a CD/DVD version would be better for handing out at trade shows. Our client Acutrack, Inc. handles that for marketers in its On Demand Production product.

I have numerous blog posts out there to query and find out the answer to this question BTW, and I will post the answers in a future blog post.

I know that from now on many media within the blogosphere, won't pay any attention to anything unless it comes in RSS format. In fact, here is the Shift Communications new media format RSS enabled press release.

Happy blogging.

Big Influencers in Social Media Marketing and PR

2007-11-02T10:22:00.001-07:00

I am talking about Paul Gillin's new book about blogging "The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media." If you come out of technology like I do, you probably already know Paul. He was editor-in-chief of Computerworld, then started TechTarget. I met him along the way when I worked for several anti-virus companies. But as the book tells us on the cover, "This is essential reading for anyone who missed the blogging train when it left the station." I was on the train, but like many PR professionals, was preoccupied looking out the window watching the landscape speed by while others, like Paul and most all of those mentioned in his book, were conducting.

The problem with recommending this book is that the more people who know all the details about social media marketing, the more competition MarCom Broadband will have. LOL Oh well. I got an earlier start than most, and have been doing search engine optimization and marketing for almost three years now. My first assignment was trying to get rid of negative Internet posts for one client. (Hint: Be careful what you write on the Internet, because it will stick around for awhile.) I am still tripping over some technical issues with blogging. Adding trackbacks, blogrolls, etc. It's easier to recommend to one's clients than to have the time to do it for yourself sometimes. It's that old shoemaker and his kids going barefoot routine. But I'll get there.

We have successfully converted many traditional PR clients to half PR and half social media. Again much of what PR people do best is writing - and its all about content on the web. (See my other blogpost on this topic.) One project in particular that has been a big success is T.S. Wiley, who is an author (Lights Out and Sex Lies and Menopause) and an expert in the controversial topic of hormone replacement therapy, having developed The Wiley Protocol.

Here's one bit of advice that everyone can use. The future is all about change. A new economy is emerging (or for some - has emerged). And if you made it through the tech boom without getting rich, now's your chance again. Study up, be innovative and start blogging. The difference now is that we all must be totally honest, because communicaitons is all about new ways to connect, and share ideas and information in real time.

PS: After finishing the book this morning, I was convinced to start another blog - a special interest blog, which I did, and will divulge it once I have made some posts. (Just a hint, as my friends know, it is about a favorite topic of mine -- real ghosts or "energy" and psychic experiences.)

Google Sandbox Controversy

2007-10-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

I got a new gig, to be a blogger on another blog - MixCat Interactive, a web hosting company, http://www.Mixcat.com/blog.

My associate Mike had provided the fodder for my frist blog there, about the fact that Google has now extended the timeframe that new websites will stay in their sandbox. We got a number of comments about this from blog readers who disagreed, agreed, etc. Eight in fact, with some questions about search engine optimization (SEO), meta tags, etc. For those of you who don't know what this is -- here ya go.

We all played in the sand box as kids, and now as adults there is a chance we will be at it again. If you have a new website, the latest news is that it may take you about a year to get out of what is known as the “Google Sandbox” or “Sandbox Effect,” as seen in Wikipedia. Until recently the wait was for 5-6 months. With newly-registered domains, Google puts them in this holding area before rankings can begin in the indexes of Google. A site must first be 1) proven, or deemed by Google as appropriate for ranking; 2) legitimate; and 3) have some action taking place. Frequent ownership or nameserver changes also put sites at risk. All the more important to make sure that your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics are in place, so that Google notices action happening on your site. This includes inbound links to your site, the proper meta-tagging of pages, and more.

I also made a joke that perhaps this is Google’s way of getting more folks to sign up for those Google Ad words to kick start it all. Comments came in that disagreed with the 5-6 months wait...and OK, my bad, it used to be as little as 2 to 5 months. This is very dependant and unique per website and the content on it.

Google sandbox does exist. It is now taking up to a year for new sites to appear in search results on Google. For those of us with suspicious minds, we might think this a result of Google greed--obviously if you launch a new site you want traffic and if Google shuts you out for a year your alternative is to buy Pay Per Click (PPC). It is a controversial issue isn't it?

Ron Angels added, "It is also very important to get in as many other search engines as possible. Google appears to pick up these listings in its equation as well. People do use them to find things sometimes…"

Here's what Steve Phillips said, "Don’t worry about the “Sandbox”…just do all of the necessary SEO things you need to do:* write good content rich with keywords.* write strong page titles for each of your pages.* write fresh content.* write a blog* get strong links pointing to your site."

Thanks guys. Well put.

The Digital News Era Gets Personal: Malibu Fire Story

2007-10-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

This week there was allot of tension, due to the fires in California. It amazes me, I could not reach my friend Mark, who lives in Malibu during the fires, until he finally replied to an email, and then called me today to let me know that he's OK. He also mentioned that he was interviewed by NPR radio, in a story entitled, NPR : Malibu Man Refuses California Wildfire Evacuation.

So he actually got an online interview story that had I simply searched for his name online, I would have been able to see that he was OK, much earlier. He was stuck in Malibu with no electricity, no telephones, and no gas, for several days.

Over and out.

Navigating the Online World Via Search Engine Marketing

2007-10-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

According to search engine marketing firm iProspect’s Search Marketer Measurement and Performance Study, eighty eight percent of search marketers measure the ROI of their campaigns, 9 percent more than in 2005. The company said that they commissioned the study to get a better understanding of search marketer behavior regarding results measurement and personal-performance evaluations. The study was fielded in March of 2007 by Jupiter Research.

It seems like most of our MarCom Broadband clients require much more than just public relations or search engine marketing these days. In order to navigate the online world, smaller businesses, and emerging technology clients like Acutrack, Inc. need marketers like us to help them with an entire host of other marketing dilemmas.

Hopefully, since 2005, the industry is doing a better job educating and providing resources for search marketers, and that’s why MarCom’s business model is ever changing. Just today we proposed that an affiliate marketing campaign might be of interest for Acutrack’s On Demand Production model, which gives their customers the ability to produce and ship custom packaged CDs or DVDs one at a time. On Demand targets recording artists and filmmakers, photo-service providers, software companies, marketing and PR professionals, authors, and self help businesses.

Keyword analysis and implementation and public relations tactics are only a part of what we do today as online marketers. Some people need to know how to build or rebuild a website. We get questions all the time about affiliate marketing, email marketing, and the value, or not, of direct mail. And though many small businesses can’t afford traditional print advertising, there are lots of questions about online advertising and banner ads.

Many smaller businesses are still wrapped up in the web challenges on the Web, fighting with organizational or technical challenges keeping them from measuring return on investment (ROI). And with this said, they should have an eye towards the future when it comes to putting these practices in place.

For those companies that we represent who are a bit more sophisticated, if the number of search marketers that now measure the ROI of their campaigns has risen to 88 percent, it would seem that these same marketers are motivated to understand the financial gains from their efforts.

Of course, in order to measure online results, there’s a need for web tracking and analytics tools, and professionals like us with services that support clients so that we can all evaluate the success of their efforts. Catch our newsletter for some tips in that area.

MarCom’s website has a Cool Tools section you might want to take a look at. In addition, back issues of this blog share data about social media marketing and how that can drive traffic to websites and help sell products and services.

New Social Media Marketing Guidelines

2007-10-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

I find it of interest to keep up with others in our marketplace. As a public relations (PR) professional I see so many changes taking place that just as soon as something new and interesting is published, it's already old news.

But with that said, I bought a new book called The New Influencers, A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media, by Paul Gillin because the book has been praised by The Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News and the BBC. Once I read it I can report back...

However, here's something you might want to check out. Over the last two months I have been conducting an initial social media campaign for our client Acutrack, Inc. I've been posting weekly article submissions and blog items, several times a week, and we got a hit today about their On Demand DVD Production service on another blog site, who picked up one of my PR Web releases. BTW if you are not using PRWeb (www.prweb.com) you should be, in addition to PR Newswire, for press release distribution. I use the $360 version, and it goes out to all the RSS feeds, and to select media outlets. PRWeb, a leader in online news and press release distribution, has been used by more than 40,000 organizations of all sizes to increase the visibility of their news, improve their search engine rankings and drive traffic to their Web site.

Also here are some tips on social networks:
Digg (http://www.digg.com) -- a technical social network, that focuses its resources on technical topics.
Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) -- is a social network that focuses on a consumer topics, and is often easier for average users. Here are a few of the other hot social media networks:
StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com
Reddit - http://www.reddit.com
Furl - http://www.furl.com

Happy networking!

Google's Social Meltdown

2007-10-16T15:25:00.000-07:00

Today’s post is courtesy of my associate Mike Keesling… who is MarCom Broadband’s search engine optimization expert, and a creative guru out of TV production and advertising. We don’t always agree on issues related to marketing, but I will admit that he’s right more than not.

Said Keesling, “It was only a matter of time before Google came to their senses and re-evaluated using social media as one of their weighted algorithms. To me the whole proposition of giving any weight to social media was what we call in the trade, an ass idea. It's the same thing as comparing reality TV to something worth watching (and if you're one of the morons who sees nothing wrong with wasting hours on irrelevant people doing ludicrous things then please stop reading, right now! This article is not for you.) Let's face it, reality TV is impossible to achieve once you let people know there's a camera on them.”

I don’t agree, for instance with Mike’s next comment basically because I am seeing the content we build and place in article submission sites and blogs, linking back to our client websites, work. “Social Media has always been a lowest common denominator content form, lots of volume, all noise...in other words a bunch of crap.”

He continues, “Why on earth (no, not Google earth which is cool) Google ever entertained the idea that a site's SEO should be influenced by social media content is beyond me...it reeked too much of the blind leading the seeing eye dog. To me, the purpose of a search engine is to help you find the information you seek, the answers to questions you ask; and how and why Google figured that MySpace Content, amateur videos and the like could be of help in my searches is perplexing to me. To their credit, this misguided experiment only lasted about three months before Google silently gave up the concept.”

And he wraps it up with this summary… “Apparently, Google fell victim to the Web 2.0 hype. Newer does not mean better, and much of Web 2.0 is the same-old, same-old with a new name or acronym to describe an existing practice or concept. I find no fault with Google; in fact I commend them for being one of those rare corporations in the top spot that is not willing to rest on their laurels, and is always trying to raise the bar. When you do that, invariably you will have some ill-advised choices, I just think Google could have spotted this one as a lemon before they ever 'went to press' with it. As it came down in the real world, it served solely to justify more idiots putting up more crap.”

Content. Content. Content. The Future of Online Marketing

2007-10-13T17:15:00.000-07:00

It’s growing more and more important for companies to produce content for the Internet. We have one emerging technology client who recently asked how we can product 500 pages of content for their website so they can compete with their competition. Easy. Start writing. BUT there are some tips that you need to be aware of first.

The first and foremost challenge, and there’s a reason that I am saying this, is that you MUST know your customer. Content marketing is all about producing content that addresses the concerns of your customer. Your Internet content can and should include web pages, traditional press releases, PRWeb releases, articles, white papers, blogs, forum posts, and podcasts. Content marketing is relevant information delivered by a company to a targeted audience with the goal of changing behaviors. The Internet offers plenty of opportunities for placing relevant content. But it MUST be optimized properly first, or Google can't rank it for when a customer searches for what they want to know using key words and phrases.

First you need to dedicate one person or group to the editorial content you create. Whether this is an internal communications specialist or a contracted team of social media marketing and SEO experts like MarCom Broadband, you must create great content for customers and prospects – and you need to have someone who knows how to optimize the content with your keywords perform their magic.

Next, invest in a good design team. Your customers deserve to enjoy looking at your website and reading your material, so make sure to use designers who have a good understanding of user behavior and preferences.

Use microsites – you don’t need all of this content on your main domain. Vertical portals or microsites are a great way to add content to a site. But for Google and the search engines to be able to read these pages, make sure they are meta-tagged properly and that they don’t go any deeper than three clicks. Make each micro page on one topic, and optimize each page with relevant key words.

I always say that I can take one single topic for a client, and write and use content for that topic – six ways to Sunday. Have fun.

Links: To Buy or Not to Buy

2007-10-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

Now that Google has taken the gloves off against websites and firms that they consider in violation of link building protocols, we must pause to reconsider our link building strategies. Initially, Google indicated their policy was to disallow, or even penalize, any paid links as well as websites who purchase paid links. Google may be the purveyors of the one of the world's most advanced linguistic parsing algorithms, but my associate Mike Keesling of MarCom Broadband's SEO expert found their statement to be full of holes.

Would a website be banned or penalized because they had paid for a Yahoo! directory listing? Aren't Pay Per Click (PPC) ads essentially paid links? Would Google really penalize their own adwords users? In the following months, Google has zigged and zagged through this semantic minefield of their own making. Google clarified its Yahoo! Directory position, saying that since inclusion was not guaranteed until approved by a human this did not constitute a paid link. Google clarified its PPC position by saying these are ad buys so they also do not constitute paid links. All well and good, but we are still confused.

If one buys a link on a site that sells them, couldn't this also fall under the safe harbor of being an ad buy? Who determines this and what are the guidelines? The definitive answer is probably many months away. In the meantime, one certainty is that the value of reciprocal links has actually gone up (provided the linking partners are legitimate and within the same or related business categories or markets). How long this bump in reciprocal links lasts is anybody's guess at this point.

So what would Mike recommend? For reciprocal links, choose your linking partners carefully. Make sure their page rank is the same or better than yours. Make sure they aren't blackballed by Google. Look at potential partners websites ... Do they look and feel like a legitimate company website or do they have the barnyard smell of a link farm?

For directory listings (one of the best places to get one-way inbound links) exercise the same smell tests just described. Double up on the inbound links you can control--press releases and article submissions. Mike said he would take a pass for now on the pay per link or pay per blog post outfits. Figure it's at least 50/50 that these will be next to feel the wrath of Google.

"In a weird way, I welcome Google's position, stance and actions against paid link builders--Link building is the most pain-in-the-butt of all SEO practices and this allows people who hate building links (like me) to slack off on it for a damned good reason," said Keesling.

The Environment, SEO and the Eco-Friendly Internet

2007-10-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

It seems like lately we have been getting business opportunities in the area of eco-friendly, or environmental issues, several of which I can talk about now, and two more that are not yet announced.

Oil and the environment are on everyone's minds these days. With gas prices in LA closer to $3.00 this week, it's no wonder. My friend Patrick dropped by yesterday and he showed me a website called http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ - a rather dismal view of what's happening with oil.

As social media marketers -- we now have an opportunity to use the Internet to help peoople understand the seriousness of the problem, to help raise awareness and begin to mitigate the problem before say the year 2050, when there may be close to nine billion people on earth.

Author and futurist James Canton, Ph.D., already predicted that the "Clean Tech" market will emerge, which happened, and now we are in an era where people are promoting social responsibility and profit. In his recent book The Extreme Future (Dutton, 2006) he is asking, "What does it mean to global growth and productivity if we do not discover new energy sources as oil supplies are dwindling?"

One of my colleagues, Riggs Eckelberry, has been working on a new project known as OriginOil - a very interesting concept. Think ocean, algae, and oil. Oil and water never seem to mix well. But in this case, Origin Oil is breakthrough technology that will transform algae, the most promising source of renewable oil, into a true competitor to petroleum.

Another client, T.S. Wiley, author of "Lights Out," and developer of The Wiley Protocol, who is using biodegradable eco-friendly plastic in her product targeted to the women who opt in to bio identical hormone replacement therapy.

I did a search for the most influencial bloggers using the key word environment, and as of today, Technorati's directory delivered 11,225 blog posts about environment; 4933 blogs about the environment; 2002 blogs using the key word environmental; 323 blogs about eco-friendly; 29 using the key word oil crisis; and 2,137 blogs about global warming.

Key words like these are beginning to land on web pages everywhere, making it essential for marketers to get on board and begin to market their products and services in this arena with the right search engine optimization and social media techniques, just to stay ahead of the fray.

In the next few days, MarCom Broadband will be featuring more about its most recent eco clients in our newsletter, which can be accessed at www.marcombroadband.com.

Another Transformation in Business and the Economy

2007-09-25T22:49:00.001-07:00

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about the state of business, my clients, and what's next. It seems that although many of the new search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics that MarCom is doing are working very well, I have felt restless and as if there's something on the horizon that I am missing.

Last December I proclaimed that I wanted to work on business and for clients who are making a difference in the world. As always, the law of attraction takes hold, and that's what I called in. Clients in health care, environmental technology, and businesses with fair practices tools. Now in my most recent exploration of what's next, I found that some futurists are saying that we are now in the midst of another extraordinary shift. There was the Industrial Age, and we have most recently been through the Age of Information. Now authors like Patricia Aburdene are talking about the constants of ever-present creativity and innovation and how this is now leading companies into a new era that's all about consciousness.

For the last six years I have been focusing much of my personal time on spirituality. Now it would seem that this it's the new changing values that will be leading the economy via transforming capitolism. In her book Megatrends 2010, Aburdene talks about this "new economy of consciousness" at length and conveys new concepts which, as a marketer, I can already see taking root among my own clients. Even the trends of my work in social media marketing is starting to make a difference, and our clients are popping up in Google Alerts all over the Web. Today it's all about full disclosure, as you can read about in my last blog. PR isn't just about the "spin" any more, and if anything putting a spin on a clients products or services may just do them more harm than good.

Take blogging for example... What a great way for people to share truths, wisdom and perspectives. Reality TV is another media trend that we have seen spawn shows like The Biggest Loser - programs that ultimately are doing much good in society today. Online radio or podcasts are available 24/7 with content about any topic that people can watch or listen to any time any day of the week. Here are some recent stats to check out:

–Box office is down 7%
–Newspaper circulation peaked in ‘87
–Down another 2.6% in 2006
–Radio was down 4% in 2006

Even the recent news that I wrote for one of our clients this week, will have a tremendous impact on the future. Acutrack, Inc., a fulfillment house with on demand replication technology and e-commerce solutions (http://www.acutrack.com/) applauded the recent announcement by the DVD Copy Control Association (DVDCCA) to approve a final copy-protection specification for on-demand disc burning. The DVD CCA is an industry copy prevention organization, and this approval is the authorization for companies to sell digital downloads for on demand viewing.

As more and more people (including the aging Baby Boomers) jump online to watch and read the news, less people read magazines, view TV and/or listen to the radio. After all, personal iPods are fast replaced the radio. Today, people use search engines, like Google, to get what they want, how they want it, and fast. The biggest challenge now is how to communicate your story over multiple channels, including the Internet.

Now is the time that marketers can make a difference and effect change, using the new tools and techniques of SEO and social media marketing, and consequently, have an effect on economic change and the future. Are you with it?

Showstoppers Webinar on Social Media, Blogging and Podcasting

2007-09-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's ShowStoppers Webinar, "How to Engage Bloggers & Podcasters to Boost Buzz and Generate Coverage" was a success with over 159 signed up, and more than 90 attendees. Maybe some folks got stuck in traffic as it started at 11AM EST, but 8AM on the West coast. Our host was a long time colleague, Steve Leon, cofounder, partner and producer of the fabulous ShowStoppers press events.

There are always lessons learned when woking with new technologies. This was one of my first webinars. I really enjoyed the process, and look forward to even better future sessions. We used GoToMeeting (http://www.citrixonline.com/) and had several dress rehearsals. This was key, because the first time, I learned that the entire webinar needed to be very conversational. We had a PowerPoint as a guideline for the participants, but the goal became not to read from it. This gave us plenty of time in advance to come up with questions for Steve our host, and to set up the function for participants to email in questions. Lena West, one of the speakers, was a great guide as she has set up many shadowblogs and crisis PR blogs for major clients.

Here's another tip ... It's really important to silence all of your telephones prior to doing a webinar. I use Vonage, so I went online and disconnected the call waiting function, and voicemails. I put a do not disturb sign on my door, and closed all windows. Don't use a mobile telephone, or the speaker function on your direct land line. This is important in our case, as the webinar was recorded, thanks Lena West, who is a columnist and blogger for Entrepreneur Magazine and an Infoworld blogger. She is also CEO of XynoMedia, a New York-based social media strategy firm, serving high-growth companies and PR firms.

Let's go back to the basics here and review the inportance of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. A site’s ranking in a search is essential for directing more traffic to the site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives. It requires:
•Participation
•Openness, transparency and disclosure
•Conversation
•Community Driven
•Facilitation (facilitating conversations that are already happening online)

That said, our webinar focused on just a couple of the tools that are used in social media marketing -- blogging and podcasting. Lena had some great tips for PR professionals insofar as pitching bloggers -- lessons I too have learned in a recent blog and podcast tour for a diet book. KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. One paragraph, links to the press releases, or website info. Lena made the point, fiercely... if she wants more info, and is interested in covering your pitch, she will contact you. Period. Do not send attachments, long press releases, or long anything, for that matter. Bloggers and podcasters are really busy. And as my associate Mike Keesling said, who used to work at a news station in Hawaii, he got hundreds of pitches per day and only had time to read the headline (subject in email) and a couple of concise sentenses. So if you cannot consolidate your email pitches into a couiple of sentences, then you are hosed.

If you want to read more tips, I strongly suggest that you download Lena's little eBook of invaluable info on pitching bloggers and podcasters without ticking them off. Go to
http://www.xynoMedia.com/showstoppers to download your copy of The Blogosphere Cluebook: How PR Agents & Publicists Can Effectively Engage Blogosphere Influencers Instead of Ticking Them Off by Lena West.

Enjoy.

Sources:
PowerPoint: http://www.showstoppers.com/webinar/bloggersandpodcasters.ppt
The Webinar: http://www.showstoppers.com/webinar/bandp.mp3

The Value of Podcasts

2007-09-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

More and more, we are seeing opportunities for online radio, otherwise known as podcasts. Just this evening, my client - author T.S. Wiley - did a podcast on Dr. Fitness and The Fat Guy -- a popular online radio show about fitness and weight loss.

Another client, Acutrack, Inc. based in Livermore, CA, has been doing podcasts successfully for quite awhile. The interesting thing is that in electronic media such as radio or TV, and now podcasts, we hear from people who talk in a comfortable first person one-to-one manner. The podcast is available 24/7 on the Internet, and when someone searches via key words on a specific topic, they will locate podcasts, and can listen and or watch at their own will.

Here are some interesting facts:

The online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives.
More than 70% of Americans ages 15-34 actively use online social networks – e.g. Wikipedia, My Space, You Tube, Flickr, Second Life, MiniClip, Digg, Facebook, Match, etc.
58% Americans aged 50-64 – fastest growth in the Internet Source: TRU, TNS, Marketing Evolution.

Podcasts are simply part of the new world of public relations know as Social Media Marketing, which requires participation, openness, transparency and disclosure, conversation, community, and facilitation (facilitating conversations that are already happening online). These are non-commercial messages (unless there is a compelling reason for you to look at it, read it, listen to it, watch it, like it, interact with it, and ultimately buy it!) This is what bloggers and podcasters excel at…

To learn more, please join us for a Showstoppers® sponsored Webinar on Sept. 18th entitled, "How to Engage Bloggers & Podcasters to Boost Buzz and Generate Coverage." Featured speakers will include me, Kristin Gabriel, and Lena L. West, columnist and blogger for Entrepreneur Magazine and an Infoworld blogger.

Go to http://www.xynoMedia.com/showstoppers to download your copy of 21+ Ways to Get a Blogosphere Clue: How PR Agents & Publicists Can Effectively Engage Blogosphere Influencers Instead of Ticking Them Off.

To sign up for the Showstoppers Webinar:
Time: 11 a.m. to noon ET (8-9 a.m. PT)
Place: Your telephone and web browser
Cost: Free
To register: Click here, https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/677428751

The Art of Article Submissions

2007-08-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

I have been doing article submissions for a couple of years now. It all started with writing them for an antivirus company who was looking to push some negative stuff that showed up in Google searches down and off of the first and second pages of searches in MSN, Yahoo or Google. I used our key words, wrote articles, and it worked.

Next I started writing articles for all of our MarCom Broadband clients. I always say that one good topic or article can be written "six ways to Sunday" when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing tactics. Here's an example of that:
1) Press release on PR Newswire - a traditional news release.
2) PR Web optimized press release on PR Web.
3) Articles on articles submission sites like http://www.articlesbase.com/
4) Forum posts in industry forums and chat rooms.
5) Social media site postings on sites like Wikipedia, My Space, etc.
6) Blog content - you really need a blog to regurgitate content.

Plus you have your website content.

You do need to be careful about how commerical articles are in the submission services. Most of them will not take promotional content. But you can add your company's name and website address in the resource box. You just need to be clever about how you talk about a company or client by name. I often mention several comapnies, or provide a quote.

Last, none of these SEO tactics would be of any value without adding your key words. The first thing we do is a key word analysis for clients. Then we all use these key words in every single thing we write up.

Results are fantastic. You usually see results for certain key words within a month or two. And again, it's all about content content content on the web. The more of it you have, the better your rankings in Google.

The Value of Podcasting and Online Radio/TV

2007-08-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

I mentioned these numbers in my last blog, but some info is worth repeating. According to Arbitron, 27 million Americans have listened to a podcast, or online radio and TV. Early adopters in any category are going to benefit from this.Internet radio has been around for awhile. One of our clients, Big Media USA, Inc. , provides this service. It's not music, it's information.

Just think of them as the Time Warner of the Internet -- with a number of stations that have a number of channels on topics such as business, health, sports, spiritual, etc. In fact, very soon I am going to be hosting a new channel there on social media marketing.

The value here is that Big Media has been around awhile, so their site has allot of content on it, and Google spiders their site daily. This is great, because if you have a radio or podcast show on BMUSA, and your key words are in the copy of your show promo, or in a press release that BMUSA or you put out, you will be spidered too.Podcasts are easy for others to listen to or watch online 24/7.

Plus the content is great to have transcribed for use elsewhere via social media marketing -- in press releases, online articles, and even in forum posts -- all excellent ways to optimize your website for better rankings by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN, etc. Then if someone is seeking information open something, they may come to your podcast. That's why it's important to keep them short, and get the key messages about you and your products or services into the first five minutes or less as you can.