Mastering Online Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a vital part of any online business and must be handled carefully. Very often, the business owner himself is going to need to create that content because it’s hard to disseminate information if it’s not coming in the right voice.

I’m going to talk about outsourcing and getting a SEO quote in two different ways. Number 1, I think people outsource the wrong things way too soon. One of the first outsourcing things is, I’m going to rush out and get a VA, a virtual assistant, somebody who is going to help me with all these things.

If you’re starting up a new business, you need to be in the fray for a while. That's why you need to learn SEO techniques. You need to understand what your clients are saying. You need to understand what all the people you’re interacting with are saying and doing. You need to become an expert on your business before you ask anyone else to run it for you in any way.

You need to do that first. Hold out on outsourcing those kinds of things for a little while and make sure you know what you’re doing. Before you outsource your social media to someone else to do, you sure better make sure you know what your voice is and how they need to talk.

You can’t teach people to do what you haven’t done. If you’re going to actually bring someone in to do the writing, create the videos, all those kind of things, they’d better know what your voice is and you’d better know how to tell them what that voice is and how to get it and what to say and all of those things.

The other side of outsourcing is outsourcing the technology component. If you don’t understand how to install a WordPress blog, build a website, set up social media pages, build a Facebook fan page, all those things, if you don’t know how to do that, outsource that. You can get it outsourced for next to nothing. You go to scriptlance.com or elance.com. I’m sure there are some specific to Australia that I don’t know about that you can go to and you can get these people in India, in China, in Romania, in Russia to do these things for you for nearly nothing.

The last full website I had built was about seventeen pages. I provided the copy, and that was it. They did the graphic design for me and I had it done for less than $300 and under two weeks.

You don’t need to do everything yourself. But do not rush to outsource. Wait until you have a little bit of cash behind you, and your business is starting to flourish, and then think about outsourcing.

The New Rules of Internet Marketing

The process of persuading someone to buy from you is something that needs to be considered by any internet marketer. I have written and sold a book, but I’m not necessarily going to get rich from selling a book so that feels like that first step. I learned this through these podcast interviews. Obviously I endeavor to give out great content and then people take the next little step, which is yes, I’m happy with what Dave’s putting out. The next little step is buying the book and gradually you’re getting them to make bigger and bigger commitments.

For me the book, learn SEO step by step, is the top of my funnel. Really social media is the top of my funnel. That’s the free line for me, so that everything that I give away on social media is free and then when I get them to engage and buy the book, I know that’s the first step to establishing a profitable following.

There are two different groups of people for me, the SEO company and wordpress direct review. There are the people who haven’t bought from me yet and there are the people who have bought from me.

The people who have bought from me have moved further down into the funnel. They buy the book, they’ve become more interested in what I do. They’ve given me an initial early yes, saying yes, I trust you, yes, I’m compelled by what you say, I want to read your book and I want to see if my experience with your book matches my expectation. When experience meets expectation, then they move further down the funnel.

They may buy a set of DVDs like my Renegades of Persuasion for $200 or they may buy another product or a tele seminar I’m doing or something like that for $100 or $200. They may come to one of my live events for which they’re going to pay anything between $1000 and $2000.

Each time they make that purchase, they become more valuable to me and they move further and further down the funnel. They are not just valuable in the sense that they’ve spent more money with me, but valuable in the sense that the deeper they get into my funnel, the more religious they are in their willingness to help me spread my message.

These are my true believers. These are the people who are going to go out and defend me at all costs whether I defend myself or not. These are the people who are going to go out and tell their friends and family to buy this product or service. These are the people who are going to get their colleagues to do it, these are the people who are going to come to my events and be my evangelists. Those people have tremendous value to me and they’re to be protected with great vigor.

It’s funny how you can already start to see the parallels drawn between that and what happens in a cult. You get those few key members who are the ones who are really strong believers and I think Cialdini talked about the idea of looking around to other people to get cues about how you should be responding.

As I start to build this up, I try to help cultivate that and help that propagate that. Here’s one of the biggest fallacies of word of mouth marketing. Everybody says word of mouth marketing is the best marketing I can get. But word of mouth marketing works both directions. If people don’t understand what they should say about you, they’ll say anything about you. My focus is to get as many people as possible who will take my message and repeat it verbatim as I can. I’m constantly telling people what are good things to say. Of course I’m not going out and being that blatant about it, saying, please say this about me.

What I’m saying is, here’s the message I repeat over and over again so that you understand it and then that’s the message you’ll repeat. People parrot what they remember. So we want them to remember these certain things about me.

When you’re looking at building up this group of true believers, you want to give them things they can talk about, so that they can go out and tell people the best and most relevant things that will get those people to jump into the top of your funnel and hopefully dive in deep and grab a book or grab a book and tape set early because they came in with a recommendation.

The Art of Persuading

When someone is starting to create a business online, it is important to first build a strong persona. Start with that persona, create the information and be ruthlessly consistent about it. When I have a new client who’s doing this, this is what I tell them. I learned this from the podcast interviews I listened to.

In order to create a strong and compelling persona online whom people will come to trust, you will need to submit to a program. This SEO course tells you to do this as well.

For the next ninety days, you have to write a blog post every day. For the next ninety days, you have to create at least two videos a week. For the next ninety days you have to create at least one audio a week. For the next ninety days you have to tweet at least ten times a day with something that is interesting and compelling. For the next ninety days you have to ask at least two powerful questions that people might have that would lead them to ask more questions about your product on LinkedIn. I learned this through the SEO training I had.

When we start with that process, that seems very overwhelming to a lot of people. They say, oh, I can’t create content at that level. Well, if you can’t, you need to back up and regroup and decide what it’s going to take to do that, or maybe you’re in the wrong business. The reality of it is, what most people feel when they say, oh, that’s too much information, I don’t know if I can do it, is they’re not prepared for it. I learned this through the market samurai review.

So step number one, even preemptive to starting that strategy obviously is to sit down and say, ok, I need to create blogs over the next ninety days, I need to create twenty-four videos. So what are twenty-four topics, questions, concerns, interesting things people might have about my product or service that I can talk about, that I could create videos about?

When you break it down into those simple topics, I can talk about these twenty-four things, I can have an audio around these twelve things, I can write blog posts on these ninety things, you’ve suddenly got something that’s very interesting.

What I’ll let them do in the last twenty days of that is, they don’t have to write blog posts that they’ve necessarily created themselves, they can respond to other people’s blog posts. They can begin introducing other ideas into their blog.

Initially we want them to do that and there’s a very specific reason and focus for that. What we’re trying to do is dominate the keywords in a category. All of the blog posts that we’re writing, we’ve done our keyword research ahead of time, so that we know these are the keywords, these are the key phrases people are searching for in order to find our product or service.

Those keywords or key phrases are going to end up in the headline of the blog post and they’re going to end up in the blog post body, so that we have more and more relevant, valuable links back from the search engines. That is one of the most overlooked things that people do, but that’s the real reason for having such an aggressive strategy.

Once that first ninety days is up, you’re going to let up a little, but for the next year or for the balance of nine months, you’re still going to post at least three times a week on your blog. You’re going to be doing video at least once a week, you’re going to be doing audio at least a couple of times a month, you’re going to be tweeting every day, Facebooking, all those things that are required in order for you to dominate the search and to dominate the top of mind awareness in the category you’re trying to create.

How To Build A Website

Persuasion is obviously a big part of what I do, selling, using social media. Everybody talks about the idea that social media isn’t the platform for selling, it’s that interaction and relating to your customers. However, I find that sort of a funny argument really because social media is simply another messaging distribution outlet like radio or television or print or anything else. That isn’t the most interesting thing. I learned this through these podcast interviews.

What is interesting is they make a distinction between having an interaction with your client and selling. You can sell through the SEO basics. The best sales people, the best marketers, are the people who best interact with their clients who provide people with valuable information, who cause them to be polarized who cause them to be interested or intrigued and then talk about solutions to problems they’re having and all those things.

I think where some people get mixed up is, if you use social media as a tool to shout at people, to try to interrupt them for their attention and get them to pay attention to a sale where you’re asking them to buy now, now, now, then they turn on you very quickly. You can get unmixed up by getting a SEO quote. That’s where people have made the mistake. I found this out through Jeff Johnson traffic voodoo.

It’s not the fact that social media isn’t a tool for selling, it’s a great tool for selling, it’s a great tool for distributing your message that influences people highly. It’s not when you use old techniques of screaming at people, of trying to interrupt them, of spamming them, all those things. That’s what turns people on you very quickly.

To launch any product and then sell it successfully, you can make the process quite a structured thing where you very much look at, I’m going to make sure I do x number of Twitter posts, I’m going to make sure I make a few posts on a blog and x number on Facebook. Or it may be more as people interact, you then interact where the attention is at that time.

I like to use a combination of the two approaches. I have a very specific strategy for how much I want to interact, what kind of videos I want to create. I put videos up on Veeple for example. That’s the clickable video and it has analytics on the back end so I can tell immediately what people are interested in. If they click through to something I talk about in the video, that lets me know they were interested in this or they weren’t interested in it. I can create more of what they are interested in and do less of what they aren’t.

Those kinds of things allow me to be very targeted and specific in what I am doing. I have a very specific process for making sure I tweet on a regular basis, I update my blog on a regular basis, I Facebook on a regular basis. All those things that really work, I do. Pre tele seminars are also sometimes appropriate. All of those kinds of things allow me to be very methodical in my process and to make sure that I reach the sort of mind share that I want to.

Then as people interact, I make sure I interact with them as well because the best way to get people to talk about what you’re doing is to have a conversation with them that’s interesting and compelling to them, so that they’ll then report it to other people. That helps increase my following base. Then the day that the product is released, it helps increase the number of people who retweet or talk about it in social media blogs or create their own videos or review the product, all of those things.

Getting Backlinks To Your Website Is Now Really Easy

Listen to the Robert Somerville Interview with the tons of other podcast interviews that you can find on this site.

David: I’m keen to get your idea of what you’d say is the biggest factor in ranking. I know it’s always hard to say one single thing is the biggest. There is on page, there is off page…

Bob: Back links. Back links are the sledgehammer of SEO (search engine optimization strategies). You can rank for anything if you’ve got enough back links. However, Google is of course, over time, making it harder and harder for people to get easy back links. I learned this as I was selling a website on flippa. A lot of the leverage strategies we had in the past, reciprocal linking, buying back links, these strategies are losing favour in Google and therefore they’re no longer available to us. They’re not considered to be linking strategies that meet their terms and conditions. So it gets harder and harder.

They’re after quality relevance over the longer term. I found this out through the wordpress direct review. My personal view is that you still need to focus on your back link building. What you want to be doing is closing the loop, making sure that everything is consistent. Let’s say you want to rank for a particular keyword, then it’s in your interests that that keyword is in the url or the domain name or the page that you’re trying to get ranked for that keyword. It’s in the title, it’s in the description, and the anchor text of the link is consistent with that keyword so that you’ve actually got internal consistency in the eyes of Google.

It’s knowing what you’re doing to maximize the probability that the spiders will give you a high relevance score for that keyword and therefore increase your authority in the SERTs.

David: I think that makes perfect sense with the off page and on page. You mentioned some of the things as far as the on page. Obviously the single biggest ranking factor you were saying was the back links. Then it is important to close the loop. For your on page, what do you see as the key things? You talked a little bit about the title. Are there other areas you think, yes, these are the single biggest on page factors?

Bob: The single biggest on page factor is the keyword’s preferably in the domain, but if it’s not in the domain, it’s at least in the url. That’s the single biggest on page factor. The next biggest on page factor is that the keyword’s in the title. Those two alone, are by far and away the two biggest on page factors.

David: The other thing as well, clearly getting links is the biggest factor for getting a website ranked. It’s important, I think, to build up a variety of links because that’s what happens naturally and you don’t necessarily want to go for one particular method. I’m interested to ask, if you had to pick one method for building links, and only one method, and I’m not suggesting that people should only do this, but I’m interested to know where you think the best biggest bang for your buck is on getting links?

Bob: Article submissions. It’s a no brainer.

David: With the article submissions: to a particular site? Ezine is the granddaddy.

Bob: What I always do, I treat EzineArticles very carefully because they have a human moderation process. So if I’m having an article written, I’ll create a variation of that article which I’ll only submit manually to EzineArticles. Having then got through their approval process because that can take, as you’re probably aware, anywhere up to a week or ten days, once that has been accepted and is live on the EzineArticles domain, I will then submit to the other article directories using an automated service.

But I won’t do that using duplicate content, I’ll attempt to spin that, to create sufficiently unique variations. So each article submission is at least 30% unique.

Start submitting articles, and your website will soon have a very acceptable number of links.

Promoting A Web Site: Promoting Your Business Online

Listen to the Robert Somerville Interview with the tons of other podcast interviews that you can find on this site.

Bob: When promoting a new site, you need to go through a three phase process. The first phase is to get initial attention on your new content. That includes social book marking, submission of the RSS feed of your blog to various RSS directories and aggregators, directory submission and search engine submission. You can do this by getting a SEO services company.

Once you’ve completed that stage, your main site will have anywhere from ten to fifteen or so links. You can get that information from your SEO guide. Hopefully, depending on the competitiveness of the keyword that you’re targeting, you should be on page two or page one of Google for your respective keywords. Now that’s not going to be enough to get you any significant ranking over the longer term. It’s not going to be enough to sustain that ranking either.

At this point I would suggest moving into what I call phase 2, link building activities. I learned this through the Traffic Evolution Review. We are still using leverage. Because you’re applying leverage you’re only getting low to moderate authority links. The sort of leverage I suggest in phase 2 is submitting keyword optimized content to either blog networks or article directory networks. There are services now that you can use to automate this process.

I myself use Article Marketing Automation from the PLR Pro guys for submitting to blog networks. I use Unique Article Wizard to submit to the article directories.

By doing this, you’re giving yourself the potential to acquire a hundred, two hundred, three hundred links, it’s that sort of order, to whatever it is you want to build links to.

David: When you do that, do you also build links both to your Web 2.0 properties as well as your initial main WordPress site?

Bob: Yes. Some of these automated services do allow you to spin the links. For those that do, yes, I do. I’ll always build a primary link to my main site but I’ll spin the link to a range of my secondary sites. So I’m actually using the process to build links to both sets of sites. In the end, you’re always going to get 50% of your links pointing to your main site.

David: There are plenty of services out there, like you mentioned, that do achieve those goals. I think for each one of these stages that Bob’s going through, as long as you have something in place for each one of these, I think you should pretty much be on the right track, no matter what service you use. We talked about a few. The key really is just finding a plan that makes sense for you and your budget and where you’re at. Then make sure you follow through these steps. Where do we go from here?

Bob: That’s phase 2. At this point, we’ve still applied leverage. Making a traffic submission is a five-minute exercise. Having an article written and submitting that to these various blog networks and article networks, with an hour’s work you can achieve that. Over a period of four to six weeks that might net you several hundred links, to whatever page or domain you’re trying to build links to.

Now at this point you’ll be monitoring of course your SERT positioning and ranking relative to your keyword. Market Samurai has a fantastic module now called Rank Tracker, which I was party to the development of, so that makes it very easy now to track your relative ranking in the SERTS for your keywords.

At the completion of this point, you may have two or three hundred back links but they’re all going to be probably relatively low PR links. They’re going to be 0s, 1s and 2s at best. So you’ve got a fair volume of low quality links but you probably haven’t got any decent PR links, 3s, 4s and 5s and so forth.

I don’t really know of a highly automated leverage way of getting high authority links. So at a certain point, if the link building activity that you’ve undertaken to this point hasn’t given you the ranking you desire, then you need to go into phase 3. Phase 3 is to cherry pick authority sites where you can engineer a link, simply for the purpose of getting a high authority back link.

Market Samurai has a module called the Promotion Module which allows you to find high page rank Web 2.0 sites, high page rank blogs, high page rank forums within your niche, that are keyword relevant. You can then engineer a back link from a high page rank page on that site.

Go through this three page process and you will be well on your way to promoting your new site.

The Definitive Guide to Promoting A Web Site

Listen to the Robert Somerville Interview with the tons of other podcast interviews that you can find on this site.

Bob: When we begin to promote a new site, first we get a lot of links back to our primary money site using a service like Traffic Bug. Now we have to talk about the site relative to individual content on that site. This SEO course teaches you how to do that. Let’s say you’ve published a post on that site and that post has been targeted to a very specific keyword, it’s got a very specific competition profile. Depending what that competition profile is, that Traffic Bug submission might be all that you need. But that’s probably definitely only the case if you’re looking at keywords that have got sub 5000 competing pages phrase match.

If we’re talking about the blog itself,like this SEO services site, your main site, your main ranking vehicle, what we suggest to people is they start to build a network of related sites on other domains, preferably on other authority domains which link back to that site to that blog. By this I mean creating a series of Web 2.0 sites where you can generate an authority link from that site back to your blog but you also have the potential for that Web 2.0 page to rank for the keyword in its own right. So you’ve got multiple ranking opportunities for the keywords that you are targeting.

David: Just to give a little distinction as well, you’re talking about building your own network of these authority type Web 2.0 properties because effectively you are controlling that network. It’s a similar effect but you’re leveraging off the power of these Web 2.0 properties. It’s just to have that distinction as opposed to building your own network, this might involve building more WordPress blogs through WordPress Direct or whatever and then linking those back.

Bob: Correct. Now in essence it is the same thing. The difference is the reason why you want to build pages on Web 2.0 domains is because they already have authority. The root domain of many of those Web 2.0 sites is PR6s, PR7s, some are PR8s. So even though your particular page on that domain is going to have low authority in true sense, in terms of page rank, just by virtue of the fact that your page is sitting on an authority domain means that the link you get from that page to your site, your blog, will have a higher value than a link that might come from another WordPress blog on a domain that has zero authority.

So we’re effectively borrowing the authority of these Web 2.0 domains to give us some links that have authority. This improves the potential for our blog to rank for the keyword that we’re targeting. We’re also attempting to have additional ranking vehicles in the search engines for the keywords that we’re targeting. Those Web 2.0 pages will have the potential to rank in their own right.

David: Are you looking to rank for the same keyword that is the primary keyword on your domain so ideally you want to own the top five positions for a particular keyword? Or are they going for secondary keywords or how do you do that?

Rob: Again, coming back to your keyword marketing research, you identify a theme keyword, your most important keyword within your micro niche and then a handful of what we call category keywords. Category keywords are simply keywords that meet the competition criteria that you’re using to filter out your activity. They have sufficient traffic potential to justify the work that’s going to be required to rank for those keywords. There’s no point spending hours and hours targeting a keyword that has no traffic.

So eventually you’ll have a range of pages that are optimized both for your theme keyword, your main keyword but also your category keywords as well. Ultimately you want your main ranking vehicle, your blog, to rank for all those keywords and you need to get links coming in to that blog for both the theme and the category keywords.

Now every time you create a Web 2.0 property, you’re going to be submitting that to Traffic Bug as well. Every new piece of content gets submitted to Traffic Bug. Or if you are doing it manually, you book mark it. If you’ve got an RSS feed for that Web 2.0 property, you’d submit that to the RSS aggregates and directories and so on.

Web Rankings: Essential Guide On Increasing Search Engine Ranking

I heard Rich Chefron talk about this a long time ago, that just by putting out good content, and by positioning yourself as the market leader, SEO happens naturally at that point. I feel like SEO really is the on ramp when you’re first starting out, to get you to that critical mass. Once you get to critical mass you don’t need to focus on it so much, especially if you’ve got that system in place. It’s something that just kind of happens in the background. I learned this from the podcast interviews I listen to.

As far as ranking, you can learn seo step by step, and we understand the importance of getting a variety of links to the website, we need to consider where we get the biggest bang for our buck for the links we get. If I had to pick just one, and I’m by no means advising anybody to do that, I consider you get the best bang for your buck from links.

Obviously apart from great content and just getting great organically linking stuff back, apart from that, I think just looking at Article Marketing Automation Review and Unique Article Wizards are the best places to go. Had I known about these services earlier in my career, if I’d known some of these things existed, it would have been a different story. There’s some good bang for buck there. I think these services will decline in value over time, but certainly make hay while the sun shines.

Leading on from that, there are a few great opportunities for getting rankings. We all know that ranking in the long tail is really the ultimate, like the SEO training. One of the things where the continual, new, fresh source of long tail keywords every single day is in new products that are being created.

A lot of people are going to search for Samsung TV Model 1736, that kind of stuff. I know a lot of people are automating that kind of stuff, but there are still big opportunities in having a system that’s taking a lot of these new product names and just building content around them and links around them because there is such low competition.

If you can have a system which doesn’t require you or you can outsource that and leverage that up, then if you go after a specific niche in the products that way, then you can probably do very well.

The other area is just in localization. One of the massive opportunities is just targeting local markets whether at a country level or even a suburb or a state level. This is done by taking a lot of keywords that are proven money keywords and simply combining them with locality names and suburbs and that kind of stuff. It works particularly for things that people are more likely to search for that are specific to a location because maybe it is an offline business or service or something like that. I think there are massive opportunities there.

There are some changes in the search engines that I’ve seen where you can essentially type in a suburb or a postcode and say, show me the businesses or the results that are specific to that postcode. That is where SEO is going. The guys who are first to that market and start dominating there will have a really big advantage, so I think there will be opportunities in that market.

The other thing is SEO for video. Anyone who’s put out a YouTube video knows it’s essentially indexed the moment that it is published. Within minutes you will see it rank. There are a lot of big opportunities to SEO for video. The issue with video is that you are one step removed from a call to action. There are some changes to YouTube space to make it a lot easier for you to link off to your own web page over time and they will come through shortly. That will change the video SEO game quite a bit as well, so these are the major differences.

Be aware of these new developments and you should be able to do very well.

Keywords, Building Findable Websites

From the keyword research that I do prior to starting an online campaign, I pick a small subset of keywords that are tightly semantically grouped, and that have a decent amount of traffic.

Let’s consider the LSI algorithm. I learned this from these podcast interviews. LSI is a specific mathematical algorithm which absolutely Google does not use. That’s very different from the perspective of saying well, does Google consider semantic relevance of content and semantic relevance of links? Absolutely it does. You can learn SEO step by step If you’ve got a website about a whole lot of unrelated topics and unrelated content, it’s not to say you can’t rank well, but you’re going to rank less well than someone who has a very tightly themed site.

So the LSI argument out there sort of misses the point. They’re saying, do they use this algorithm? The reality is, they do use an algorithm. I’ve seen videos of Google showing semantic scoring algorithms that they’re using. So they definitely are using semantic algorithms in the background.

It boils down to quality. Google wants to serve up the best quality content for any keyword and if it finds a nice, tightly themed site which is all about a particular keyword, then it makes sense that that thing should rank more highly than something else potentially.

I select six to twelve very tightly semantically clustered keywords and load them in as my categories.

The first thing, if my purpose is to test the market, is to validate that there is traffic in that market. The key thing about testing is to risk the minimum amount to get a quick result back. So you don’t want to over invest in a website when you’re starting out. When you’ve tested the market you’re already in, you’ve done some AdWord testing, then you can go hard at it.

But from the testing perspective, you should be still looking to put posts of those category keywords and then, I’ll go into link building in a second, but do some link building and then just wait and measure what happens.

If there’s an action you look at the reaction and if you’re not seeing positive things then you have to start asking the questions why. At least you haven’t over invested into a market from an SEO perspective anyway.

With on page optimization for those keywords if you’re creating posts, apart from the basics of your keyword in the right places: your title tag, meta description keywords and then a little bit throughout the page, even an H1 tag, and a couple of links don’t go astray as well, there is not much more that happens from an on page point of view.

You just need to look at internal linking structure and things like if you’re using a blog to rank, things like tagging and those kind of things are really important and actually looking at site structures to get the best bang for your buck on those sort of things. Really there’s not that much to the on page optimization. It’s the internal link structure which confuses most people.

I think it’s a bit disappointing. Google is on the back foot now with no follow. No follow is still no follow. It’s just that they’ve changed the rules to prevent something called page rank sculpting from happening. So a lot of those techniques that people were using to concentrate page rank on those pages in their website are not as effective as they used to be. It was actually a nice trade off between nice good navigation for people who were visiting your website and the ability to pass page rank and guide you to pages that you really wanted them to see.

The side effect of this decision is probably going to be a lot of people are going to be going back to what happened seven or eight years ago just using a Java script link and those sort of things to try to create a set of links for navigation and a set of links for SEO. This is really sad.

Carefully select tightly semantically grouped keywords, test the market and do some simple on page optimization. Your online campaign will then be off to a very good start.

Key Step For Promoting A Web Site

When you’re first starting a new website people are often interested to find out the sort of steps you’d take to drive traffic. They want to know where to start and what is the process that you go through.

It’s sort of a mixed question, just like public domain ebooks, I could talk about people having online assets so online assets being products and content and links, the number of people on your prospect list, your customer list and your partners. The answer to the question really depends on taking a look at your own asset base, wherever you are at and looking at what’s most appropriate for you.

For me if I was to start today, I’ve got a very large data base, so my first action would be to email my database about that and drive a lot of traffic that way and then go on to talk to some of our partners promoters. The SEO training works the same way. That’s talking from me personally where our business is today.

Saying that, over fourteen, fifteen months ago, the current company I’ve got, Market Samurai, didn’t exist. The SEO course isn't new. I had one or two things on my asset list which was, I knew lots of influential people in the marketing world and so from that perspective, my first port of call was to try to do something with them that would be of interest to them that they would promote to their list and then of course be able to build my list up as a result of that.

That’s me personally as a company. I learned that from these podcast interviews. From the perspective of someone starting out with essentially nothing, no large leveragable relationships or no list or those kinds of things, I’d think of going either the SEO route or the AdWords route to start generating traffic and therefore start building a list. That is definitely where I would start looking at things.

It is important to look to what you’ve got, or what assets, leveraging off those, and work off where you’re already strong. Then look to build a list. Let’s say you were starting out or even consulting with someone, working oput where to start would be purely based on your asset base.

If you don’t know what you’re doing in AdWords, you’re going to be very poor very quickly. It’s going to get eaten up very quickly, you’re going to waste a lot of money learning to play the game unless you know what you’re doing. So I wouldn’t necessarily suggest starting by doing the AdWords thing without having a very strong training or strategy behind doing that, without buying some good course teaching you how to do it.

Saying that, though, I think there is no faster way for someone to test the market, even if they’re losing money, than via AdWords. So if you’re looking at getting your toe in the water, and I’m a big believer in testing the market, then AdWords is fantastic whether you’re starting out or not starting out and you’ve got some online assets behind you. AdWords is a very quick way to put your toe in the water.

Saying that now, with some of the SEO methodologies around today, it’s very easy, if you know what you’re doing, to actually dominate a keyword very quickly in a matter of days to weeks depending on the strength of the competition around the keyword. So it really depends on what your time horizon is to actually get a result.

So if I wanted to know in a couple of days, I’d probably go the AdWords route. If I was happy to play around for a couple of weeks and wait for the results to come in, then throw up a site to SEO some keywords to get some traffic to test the commerciality of that traffic is something I would take a look at doing.

Either of these ways would be a great place to start out with your online campaign.

The Difference Between SEO And Social Media

Social media today is very similar to SEO back ten years ago when Google really became huge. A lot of good companies didn’t jump into search engine optimization right away. I learned this from these podcast interviews. Seventy per cent of the clicks happened in the organic listing, thirty percent happened on the paid side. So some companies were slow to jump on the paid wagon. Good companies jumped on the paid wagon because it showed in ROI right away but search engine optimization in the middle, where seventy percent of the clicks happened, is somewhat of a black box. Good companies know the value of a good SEO course. Yet they’d put in time and effort and take IT resources off the desk to adjust their site so that they would show up high in rankings for cheap travel, for mortgage lender, whatever the main term is they were trying to go for.

But what the great companies did, they didn’t sit back and say what is the ROI of organic search engine optimization? This is why you should get a SEO quote. Great companies jumped in and said, ok, I understand this is going to be a game changer for us if we can get ranked high in these and it’s good for our brand. So they jumped in and started to make those investments. Those companies that did, even though it’s tough to track that actual hard return, they just knew if they ranked high in those organic listings that probably served them well. It did serve them well, in billions of dollars, if you ranked for cheap travel, if you ranked for mortgage returns. So I like to use that analogy with companies. Now companies say, ok, yes, everyone understands SEO. Just like they all understand these SEO techniques. Why wouldn’t you do that? I say, well, at some point in time not everyone did, and we’re at that point in time with social media. So you need to look at it across all different facets.

There are other things like for causes, tweets for a cause. They sent a tweet out in Atlanta Georgia and they got 11,000 visitors in twenty-four hours to their site, a brand new site. So they chewed that all out from scratch, 11,000 visitors just by doing that. If you look on down the line, even looking at the election here, not to be US centric, but if you look at the election here Barak Obama would never have defeated Hillary Clinton without the internet and probably not without social media. Ninety-two percent of his donations were increments of less than $100. Obama did that not because he was brilliant. It’s the only thing he had in his toolbox that he’d be able to beat Hillary with from the standpoint that she controlled the Democratic party. He had to do that strategy. It turns out it was brilliant because it showcased the power of social media.

On down the line there are those hard and fast examples, but I always like to tell companies, if you’re just looking at direct return, this stuff is so much bigger than that and you’re really doing yourself a disservice.

There are, I suppose, two parts to social media. One part is very much talking about the listen, interact, react and your soft sell. The other part is the strategic plays like a Facebook application that helped sell the Whopper. There are different examples of applications and actual strategies for using social media versus just interacting with your customers.

You want the whole strategy to be holistic in nature but there are definitely some things that you can be one-off, where you can buy Facebook ads. You can buy ads on Facebook where you can target down to, I only want to show this ad to people who went to this university and graduated within this timeframe. If you’re very savvy you can actually, if you know enough about someone, you could probably get it to where it actually served an ad only to that one person. So if you look at those things, that’s kind of hard and fast stuff on Facebook ads to where it will show that direct return and quickly do that.

What I like to argue with them is, yes, do that, but you don’t understand that the other pieces of the puzzle are much bigger than that. That’s why a group did a study and what they showed was those who was deeply and widely engaged in social media. What they saw was those companies that were deeply and widely engaged in social media on average increased their revenue by 18%. They only looked at public companies, 18%. Companies with the least amount of social activity saw their sales decline by 6%. Statistics will tell you anything you want, but I thought it was interesting that this group who had studied public companies showed that those engaged highly in it showed an increase of 18%, those that weren’t, showed a decline of 6%.

This is indeed a demonstration of the power and reach of social media.

Success With Social Media

The four steps of social media success are listen, interact, react and sell. You listen to what people are saying about your product or service, interact with those saying it, react by changing your product if necessary, and then selling it. The beauty of this is, and that is why I call it four steps, is because I call it the social media escalator. I learned this from these podcast interviews. On the flip side, your customer does the exact same thing. They listen to what they think your product and service is going to deliver, so they have an expectation set, then what they are going to do is interact with your product and service, i.e. they’re going to use it and the third thing is they’re going to react. Did they enjoy their experience based on their expectation; did it do what they thought it was going to deliver? You can get good delivery with the SEO basics.

That reaction, whether it was good or whether it’s bad is then going to determine the fourth step which is they’re going to sell for or against you using these same social media tools. If you did things properly, the first four steps, then all of a sudden you see this escalator. If you think about an escalator in a mall, then it keeps going around and around and that’s the beauty of it. Then you go from word of mouth to what I call world of mouth and you have the power that enables all that. SEO training works the same way.

It’s important to adhere to those four steps, even if you’ve been in the space for a long, long time. It’s important to revisit those. There are many SEO techniques that you can use. A lot of times when I talk to people they’ll say, oh, yes listening, we’ve got that. That is so 2007. I’ll say, ok, are you giving your CEO a listening report? Are they going to report once a week with one page that says, here’s what most people say they like about the product and here’s what most people say they don’t like about the product? Are you also doing that for your competitors? A lot of times they will say, oh yes, I guess we’re not doing that as well as we should be.

On the listening side, if you don’t have a ton of budget or are just starting out, you can get by using tools like Google Alert, so you sign up for terms around your product or your brand. Those are extremely helpful. You can also go to Twitter and do a search on your product brand or the names of whatever you’re interested in, or your competitors or a name in your vertical that you think there is going to be a conversation about. So that’s the other way you can do that and pull that information in. Then there’s also the third thing you can do, you can use a tool like Technorati that’s designed to go after all the blogs.

There’s also Google Search for Blogs, so you can use that as well. So those are all free tools that are out there that over time you get a sweet spot. It’s a lot of work to listen to all that, but over time you’ll get a sweet spot, where, ok, I’m going to get the major component mainly from Google Alert and when I do a search on Twitter. If you have a bigger budget, you can go and use specific tools that are designed to listen across the web for this type of thing. A tool that is really at the forefront right now and who knows if over time it is going to remain there, but a lot of companies use something called Radian6. What that does, it not only allows you to pull in information that is being said across the web but you can also write up sentiments, was it a positive post, was it medium, was it negative? Also some of these tools have workflow capability to where you can assign a task to someone to actually respond to that person.

Those kinds of tools enable you to have these listening reports. At the end of the day, with all these tools, sometimes you have to have that final person that actually puts it together. This is fairly laborious, that executive report. It’s laborious but it’s good in that it forces someone that’s at that level before they hand it to the CEO to review and look at it, to be aware of what is being said out there.

Social Media Team

Many companies are going wrong when it comes to social media. Lots of people go wrong with SEO and they watch these SEO training dvds. I don’t blame them, this stuff is new, it’s a complete paradigm shift, on of the biggest you’ve ever seen, so I’m with them and feel the pain. Some of the places they may stumble at first, they may just assign it to interns, they’re young, they get it, let them figure it out. Most have progressed beyond that but some get caught. They either haven’t progressed from that or some of them say, let’s just give this to the marketing department, let’s give it to the PR department, or let’s just assign three people who are focused on social media. Really that’s a big mistake, because it touches every piece of the business from customer service, to customer research, to product development, to sales to marketing, to public relations. This SEO company is important too.

It really has to come from the top down. It has to come from the CEO down because it affects everyone and get everyone on the same page. Sometimes they develop strategies that are not in line with the entire strategy of the entire business.

There are companies out there doing it well. This SEO course is doing well too. I think one company that is really interesting to look at is if you look at Ford Motor Company. Sometimes when people ask me what is the ROI of social media, I’ll give some glib response like, what is the ROI of your phone? If you took that call in from your customer, do you always give an ROI of what that is? Should you get rid of your phone? Sometimes I’ll say the ROI is that your business exists five years from now. Ford is a good example because they went full on, whole hog with social media. From the top down, the CEO said, I’m not an expert on this and I’m not a digital guy but I know that it matters more what people say about us than what we say about our product and service.

They have some smart folks in James Farley and Scott Marnie and they’ve done some fairly progressive things in social media. That is what I learned with these podcast interviews. What they’ve been able to do is essentially, what is the ROI of changing the complete culture of a company like Ford? If you look at them, they were at $2 stock where now their stock is at $13 - $14. They’re the only US based automotive manufacturer that didn’t take a government loan. There are other things beside social media, don’t get me wrong. When you look at Alan Mullaly, their CEO is speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year. Those spots are normally reserved for the Steve Jobs of the world, the Bill Gates of the world. All of a sudden, if you had told me, the CEO of Ford is going to be speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, if you’d told me that three years ago, I would have lost a lot of money because I would have taken that bet every day of the week.

Now they’ve changed their culture by doing some progressive things where they give a lease of their car for free for six months to a hundred influential bloggers, and say, look, if this car is rubbish, tell us it’s rubbish. All we’re requiring you to do is write about the car and take photos for six months and you have a free lease. They do this with their Ford Fiesta, and before this product even comes to the United States, they did this internationally and all of a sudden thirty percent of generation Y is aware of the Ford Fiesta before it’s even launched in the United States.

They’ve shifted their marketing spend so that twenty-five percent of their marketing spend is in the digital and social arena, whereas most auto companies spend less than ten percent in the digital and social arena. That to me showcases the beauty of social media. It is not just a one off campaign but it is a holistic approach. Now they’ve got their product developments aligned with their marketing department because they’re taking all this information. Now they’re developing a digital cockpit so that if you’re driving you can actually verbally speak and it sends out a tweet. When you pull into your garage, the music automatically syncs in with your iTunes music at home, so it syncs up with your car.

That’s some of the beauty of some of the things that’s actually affecting how the product is being developed when you have that cultural shift. It has worked beautifully for Ford.