Posted On November 3rd, 2010 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Headspace News, External Articles, Marketing, 0
Most business owners know that the internet opens up a lot of marketing potential, and that harnessing the power of the web, and specifically social media, is important to staying relevant. However, many entrepreneurs fail in a few key areas of managing their online presence — particularly when it comes to online communities.
NOTE: This article was published in the October 2010 issue of Business Voice.
It can be very tempting to want a blog or forum on your corporate website. After all, getting customers engaged with your brand is the holy grail of all forms of marketing. Some companies opt to use Facebook or Twitter for their online business communications, avoiding the upfront development fees associated with a custom blog. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, provided you keep the following points in mind:
Commit
Too many business owners begin an online community, thinking that simply getting a site built or starting a Facebook page will be all that’s needed. At the beginning they are fired up and excited about it, so they emphatically post their first couple of entries (Usually something akin to “We now have a blog” or “Welcome to our Facebook Page!”) But then life happens, and the posts slow down and eventually cease, much to the embarrassment of the website owner.
There are a few reasons this might happen:
- You may be expecting too much of yourself and your audience. Too many owners feel they need a post or article that is lengthy and detailed. The bar is set so high for themselves that they opt to not post at all.
- You feel that you don’t want posts to be too personal or transparent; that you will appear unprofessional, or even worse (gasp!) your competitors will see what you write!
- You don’t see immediate results. Users are not commenting, and your inbox is not getting flooded with requests for work and flattering reviews of your latest post.
The latter point happens because of the former; users are not engaged because the posts are not regular, or they are not interesting. But abandoning your community is not the answer. I always tell our clients when they want to start an online community that it is akin to starting a fire with wet wood - it takes time up front, and a few failed starts, but once you commit to it and keep adding fuel, it will eventually sustain itself with comparatively less work. So what to do then?
Engage
Don’t be afraid to post brief posts with a personal viewpoint. Users prefer these types of posts because it demonstrates you. No one wants to engage online with a faceless corporation, and the big brands who have successfully started an online community have shared their personal viewpoints and helpful, interesting content that has resonated with their customers. Don’t post press releases on your site. Unless they are media contacts, most users just don’t care!
Don’t make the mistake of trying to directly market or promote yourself with your blog or social community. It will seem self-serving. But if your content is good, it will market you by default because you will stay fresh in the minds of potential customers.
Your staff represents your brand, so get them involved. If they are posting their own thoughts and ideas, or even helping customers through blog comments or Twitter posts, it can only reflect well on your company.
Don’t be afraid of your competition — they are going to see what you write — get over it!
Post regularly but make sure that even if your posts aren’t lengthy and extravagant, they are quality. It’s better to have one great post every week than one boring post every day.
Keep a notepad handy and write down post ideas as they come to you, in the shower, in the car, wherever ideas happen. You can always sit down and compile several posts when the inspiration has hit you, and then stagger when you actually release them online. This will make it appear as if you’re regularly posting, but in reality you’re cheating!
Don’t be too disheartened if no one seems to be commenting. It takes time for an online community to build momentum (remember the wet fire concept?) but you can encourage people to comment by asking questions, linking to your posts in other similar online discussions, and most importantly, responding to the occasional individual who does comment.
Don’t try to control the message. If you delete negative posts on your blog, they will only appear on someone else’s. Instead respond in a positive, humble, but truthful and genuine manner. Even better, if your community is engaged with your brand, they may even come to your defense — you may not have to say anything. You couldn’t ask for better marketing than this.
Posted On October 29th, 2010 Author Amy Wheaton
Filed Under Business, 6
As I rushed to get a design proposal out the door on time recently (why are these things always a rush, no matter how much lead time we have?) I was stopped short by an intimidating list of mandatory to-dos, listed under a bolded, ominous warning that “Failing to complete the following may result in your proposal being rejected”.
Well, um, OK. I guess I better comply, since we’ve just spent 30-plus hours of otherwise billable time getting this beast together and it would be a shame to lose out on this contract because I didn’t print the RFP number ABOVE the RFP name on the cover page. Or photocopy our business registry information double-sided. Or have page three of each of the 19 identical bound booklets signed, in black ink, by someone who is qualified to sign on behalf of our company – but DON’T sign the original copy, which, by the way, needs to be unbound and calligraphied on ecru (NOT WHITE) onion-skin paper and delivered on the horn of a virginal male unicorn at precisely 4:00 P.M. on Friday, October 22, AND NOT A SECOND LATER!!
I don’t think preparing and submitting RFPs will ever be fun. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the process is supposed to be fun. Potential clients need to know that you’re willing to put in time, effort, and precision on responses to their RFPs to show that you’re serious about working with them. With this comes a degree of challenge – locating the most appropriate work samples, ensuring your proposal is tailored specifically to their individual requirements, proofreading it again – and again – and again. RFP does not stand for “Ridiculously Fun Project”. Really f-ing painful? That might be more accurate.
The purpose of an RFP is to evaluate an agency or a firm on its ability to work with and on behalf of your organization. Whether it’s specific to strategy, design, account management, or a full suite of services, it’s a company’s chance to check out your expertise, your references, samples of your work, and the qualifications of your employees and determine which agency is best for their needs. It’s an opportunity to see how well a firm can answer your questions and respond to your unique objectives.
Fair enough – but why the need to make agencies jump through hoops, write out the gazillion-digit RFP number again and again and again, sign here and here and here, and so on to prove they can do great work? Worse still, the RFP documents that list their mandatory requirements on different pages, causing no shortage of angst as the unlucky account person (me) riffles through a novella of background info and appendices to make sure everything has been done correctly.
There are some RFP documents we receive that are just beautiful. I may actually clap and bounce up and down when I see them. They’re clearly laid out, with the mandatory requirements all in one place, straightforward questions, and contact info prominently marked. My secret inner dork actually enjoys completing these proposals – I could even go out on a limb and says that they are, indeed, ‘ridiculously fun projects’. (Then again, making lists is one of my spare-time hobbies, so my definition of fun may not be akin to that of a “sane and well-balanced person”.)
Before you send out your request for proposals, give it a review. If your requirements are responded to correctly, will you have the information you need to review sufficient samples of an agency’s past work, their unique approach to your project, and their team’s credentials in relation to your project? Are you determining that they are indeed a legitimate and established company without requiring fingerprints, criminal checks, and blood type of all team members? If so, you’re on the right track. Would you pull your own hair out by the handfuls if you had to respond to the same document? If not, go ahead and hit send. (Send it to us, actually. I love ridiculously fun projects).
Posted On October 26th, 2010 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, Marketing, 1
This is part 3 in a series of blog posts. The last two dealt with
This deals with the question: How can I improve my ranking and get closer to #1?
Google looks at a number of factors to decide how highly to place a website for a given search term. One important factor is the age of the domain. So if you had a url like www.dartmouthcomputers.net for a couple of years, it’s already likely to rank higher than a brand new url you just purchased last week.
Link Building
Think of Google as a snob in school that only likes the popular kids and their friends. Google has it’s own way of ranking how important a website is called PageRank. It is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, so a website like Apple has an extremely high PageRank, whereas a new website has next to nothing.
The way to increase your PageRank is by having website’s with higher rankings (the popular kids) link to your website. When another site links to yours it is called an inbound link. The best thing you can do to rank higher for your chosen keywords is to get as many high quality links as possible. I say “high quality” because if you have other low ranking sites linking to yours, there will be slim to no improvement in your ranking. But if you can get a really high-traffic website link to yours, you will see almost immediate benefit to traffic and search rankings.
So how do you convince another company or blogger to link to your site? Like anything else on the web, content is king. If you have an informative or entertaining piece of content or if your company provides a product or service that is valuable, use this as leverage to entice another website to give you an inbound link.
The Benefit of Blogs
Having a company blog is a great structure for producing unique — if you are committed to keeping it up to date that is. Let’s face it, a basic site that just lists your products or services and has company history and contact information is unlikely to entice any other website, but if you have something truly worthwhile then that is called Linkbait, or content produced solely for the purpose of becoming viral.
As an example, if you were a computer repair-shop that wanted to get good quality links, you might produce an instructional blog post called “5 first steps of diagnosing a problem with your PC”, or “How to upgrade RAM in your computer”. These types of posts have multiple benefits; They establish you as an expert in your field, gaining you a loyal following and users are likely to bookmark the page and/or pass it around via Facebook, Twitter or email. Secondly, another website may link to it in their own blog post that discusses a related topic, thus getting you that precious inbound link which in turn increases your PageRank and drives search traffic.
A Case Study
Here’s an example of how Headspace implemented a successful Linkbait strategy for ourselves:
At Headspace, we use the software ExpressionEngine as our content management system of choice which let’s our clients update their own website from an easy to use control panel. When we do that, we normally give them an instruction manual PDF to use as a reference in case they forget some of the basic functions. I had designed an attractive manual complete with large, captioned screenshots and a table of contents.
Knowing that there are thousands of ExpressionEngine developers out there who have the same need for their clients, I posted the PDF to our blog and included the working files so they could rebrand it for their clients. Then I sent this link with a description to a variety of social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter etc. and I posted it to the official ExpressionEngine forum.
The bait worked. Within about a week or two, several prominent bloggers in the EE community wrote posts about this Client Guide, praised Headspace for providing it free of charge and linked to our site. Those links continue to drive traffic to our site and our ranking for “web design halifax” has stayed consistently high, within the top few results on Google.
White Hat/Black Hat
This type of online marketing is slow and deliberate, but if you stay committed to it, you will see great long term results. This style of White Hat SEO differs from what is called Black Hat SEO which is about nasty things like keyword stuffing and getting links on paid directories which may give you a quick boost in rankings, but will go down just as quickly and put you at risk for penalization.
Closing
As you can probably tell, SEO is a broad and deep subject with several sub specialties within it. There are internet marketers with broad general knowledge about the topic as well as highly priced specialty firms who focus on only one aspect of it, such as on-page optimization, copywriting or link-building.
If you are new to this topic and looking to get your website rebuilt, hopefully this will help you in knowing what questions to ask a design firm. Even still, if you are a business just looking for how to improve your ranking I hope this series gave you a good foundation of knowledge to begin exploring further. A great resource to begin learning more is SEO Moz.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.
Posted On October 19th, 2010 Author Kyle Racki
Filed Under Business, Marketing, 0
This is part 2 in a series of blog posts. The last post dealt with the question: How do I get on Google? This part deals with the question: How do I optimize my website?
The next question lies around optimizing your website for search engines which is sometimes called “on-site optimization”, in other words, optimizing the code or content on the site itself, as opposed to other tactics which I’ll get into later.
Content and keywords
When a user types in a keyword, they are looking for content. Google bots index the content on your website and makes a judgment call on how relevant your content is. Relevancy is the key thought to keep in mind because it’s what Google bases all of it’s decisions on.
So for example, if you are trying to rank well for the key-phrase “dry-cleaning in Halifax”, you would be sure to have a decent amount of content that describes your service and uses one or two combinations and variations on the words “Dry-cleaning” and “Halifax”. The content should be descriptive and helpful for a user who comes to the site, so avoid the temptation to overstuff your content with key phrases that is only going to turn away visitors and may get your black-listed from Google.
The choice of keywords is important, because many keywords are too competitive to even try to rank for. If you are expecting to be #1 for the term “computer” you might as well give up before you start. It is too broad and general, there is too much competition with deeper pockets. It also isn’t likely to get you customers either because a user may be looking to buy a computer, get a computer fixed, or looking for how to fix a computer. You would end up driving users to your site who immediately leave because it’s not what they are looking for.
But if you choose something like “computer repairs dartmouth” then you are likely to have fewer competitors vying for position, and as an added benefit, you will convert more users because the term matches what they are looking for. This method of choosing niche phrases based off of broad terms is called the long tail search.
Pages not websites
Next, keep in mind that Google ranks pages, not websites. This is why searching for a term like “Stephen Colbert” in Google will bring up the Wikipedia page for Stephen Colbert, and not the Wikipedia home page. So you don’t need to spread the same keywords across your whole website, just on the page you want visitors to arrive on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). As an example, the Headspace home page ranks well for “web design halifax” but our development page ranks well for “iphone app development halifax”. Using a sub page to rank for a particular keyword is called a search engine landing page and it’s the most effective way to drive traffic from different keywords to your site.
Other things to keep in mind
The scope of this article does not include listing all of the ways to optimize your website, but keep in mind that content is the #1 priority as I already mentioned. You also need to pay attention to properly formatted HTML (Title tags, clean semantic structure, avoiding placing content in image tags and Flash) This is where an internet marketing professional can help.
Ignore Meta tags
One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it is about meta tags. For those who don’t know, these are tags in the HTML that can contain keywords. When SEO was in it’s infancy, including keywords in meta tags helped make a difference in search rankings, but since it has been abused and people have “stuffed” these tags with inappropriate keywords, Google has placed little to no value on the content contained in these meta tags. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to include a few well chosen, appropriate keywords in there, but make it last on your list of priorities.
The same goes for alt tags (text in images) which are primarily useful for making your site accessible to blind users, however Google does read the content in these tags which can help images on your site show in Google’s image search results.
The last part of this series will deal with the question: How can I improve my ranking and get closer to #1?
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