Posted by Tom Allinder on Wed, May 26, 2010
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For the last couple of years, I have been writing, making slideshows and videos about corporate websites and the importance of being found. While advertising and direct linking from news releases is somewhat effective I feel that using all the principles of
inbound marketing is far more effective.
What prompted me to write this blog was a question I was asked over the phone by a representative of several publicly traded companies.
“Tom, what difference does it make if a company website can be found or not? The link to the website is right there in the news release; why does the company need to be found?”
Immediately, I could feel the adrenaline coming on… that is what happens when someone tees the ball up really high for me with such an easy question.
So here were my points:
(I decided to handle
news releases first since he mentioned it last and as you know, news releases are a great passion of mine- a soap box subject) News releases such as they are written by 99% of the companies out there are targeting traders and not investors. Traders do not give a hoot about company websites. The link to the company website is usually at the bottom of the release and few people ever get that far.
The next point I covered was: A company’s website is the first and often only impression that a prospective client, customer or
shareholder will get regarding your company. Why not make it a really good impression?
Finally, my strongest point of all:
If your website is not findable and is not getting visitors, are you not missing out on a great opportunity?
Does it not make sense:
The more traffic you get to your site, the more likely you are to get customers, clients and yes, if publicly-traded, shareholders?
One of our client companies here at InBoundMarketingPR was averaging only 4 visitors per day before we started with them. Their website grade was 17. Now their website grade is 90 and they average over 100 unique visitors per day. Now I will ask a dumb question: Do you think they are better off now?
In fact, this company has been contacted by many owners of high traffic sites for interviews and discussions of their products. They have started selling their products through their website.
OK one last chance to get it: If you have a store and you have 4 people a day come in and look around is it even worth keeping the lights on? Another store has 100, 200 or even 500 people coming into the store each day… which store would you like to own?
How is your website doing?
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Posted by Tom Allinder on Thu, Mar 04, 2010
I have spent a lot of time talking to company management teams about their most underutilized asset which is their own web site. I have also expounded on their second most underutilized asset which is press releases; a great way of doing inbound marketing. Private companies can put out press releases just like public companies can.
The case can be made and is made by saying that public companies use press releases to drive interest in their stock. What about private companies? Does it matter? I think the point of press releases for the most part is being missed…
My renewed interest in white papers has brought me to this blog as a way of laying out how it works.
What is the Point?
Let me break this down and try to make it simple:
Onsite Search Engine Optimization (Onsite SEO)- all the things you can do to make your site as marketable as possible. Altogether, about 25% of your website grade
is made up from onsite SEO items.
Offsite Search Engine Optimization (Offsite SEO) – let’s just call this inbound links (or back links etc) to make it simple. This is the biggest part of the grade.
So let’s say your site is perfect with regard to onsite SEO; how are you going to build your site’s authority through Offsite SEO (inbound links/back links)?
How about… press releases?
There is really no better way to get started building inbound links (Offsite SEO) to your site than the press release. You may have a great blog and site but you need to get inbound links in order to “be found” so that others will link to you just because your content is remarkable.
If you want a big bang, you can use a larger wire service like Market Wire, Business Wire or PR Newswire. But, you do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on press releases… Just make sure you can use ANCHOR TEXT
to build inbound links to your site. I am using a service right now for our press releases that costs $12 per release. Every release we do results in more inbound links to our pages. There are even FREE services you can use!
It is a time consuming process but beats a PPC campaign
to hands down!
Posted by Tom Allinder on Tue, Feb 23, 2010
When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), your local SEO expert is likely still using meta-tags for your SEO. This is a very antiquated method of doing SEO because most search engines ignore them. You should still put your keywords into the code of your site but they are far from the most important aspects of Search Marketing.
Here is a good way for you to find out how good your SEO is: Go to HubSpot’s Website Grader and put the url in of your site. It only takes a couple of minutes. You will instantly see where your site is deficient.
If you are not an expert in websites or do not know what many of the items on the report mean, there is an explanation that can be looked up right from the report. The last thing you might want to do is take this to your old SEO/web expert. They are likely to steer you down the old road to nowhere; a place you have already been if you are reading this.
If you spend enough time on this site and my other websites, you will see that I am a shameless promoter of HubSpot and their resources. Awareness of modern marketing methods is severely lacking at the small company level in this country and around the world. All the tools you need to greatly increase your company’s visibility on the web are readily available.
As time goes on, I will be publishing my own resources on this site. So, check back soon; some new tidbit of useful information will have shown up!
Posted by Rosemary Sorg on Wed, Jan 06, 2010
Evolve comes from the Latin word, evolvere, meaning to develop, work out (socially, politically and literary philosophies). It's interesting to me that the word "social" is mentioned in context with evolve. We all know how important social connections were in 2009. For example
YouTube,
Twitter,
LinkedIn,
Wikipedia,
Facebook and any discussion forum with good content and enriching debate. If you weren't on these sites you weren't part of the eloquent conversations taking place! But these "social" tools aren't meant for just personal involvement alone, they are also being used for company evolvement.
If 2009 wasn't the year you were connected, please do yourself and your company a favor by connecting in 2010. This article featured in
Entrepreneur.com says it all. It touches on important points of how social sites establish another source, an extension of your business/website. How important fans/friends/followers are because they can turn into customers, increasing your ROI. It touches on the
importance of SEO and organic traffic to your company websites. It shows how these sites become commnunities for your company helping to solidify your brand. These sites become your eyes and ears online. You can monitor who is saying what about your company and every interaction is a great opportunity and a wealth of information. Notice how the article only mentions Facebook but the same holds true for other, equally as important, social sites. As a business owner you can see the incredible potential being connected offers your company.
So, I will ask again... Will you evolve in 2010? I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we at InboundMarketingPR
can assist you with all the above services and connect you with the most powerful service your company can not afford to miss. We wish you all the best and a Prosperous 2010.
Posted by Tom Allinder on Sat, Nov 14, 2009
One of my favorite pastimes (not that I have that kind of time- really) is looking at stock promotional websites. In this post, I am not going to mention any names but… I am going to tell you how it is. Let’s get started…
Almost all Stock Promoter Sites are Billboards – Very few of the stock promotional sites I have seen have any sort of interaction between the site visitor and the content on the site. That is because the sites are built on static html and not on Content Management Systems (CMS). A CMS (because it is database driven) enables your visitors to communicate with you. Before too long, static sites will be a thing of the past. If your visitors cannot engage with you, they will not come back. And if all you are doing is pumping stocks at them, they will not come back either…
Stock Promotional Sites only have Client News Releases as Content- What is content anyhow? Content in this case is information that is updated regularly on a web site. In the case of most promoter sites, this content is static and there is no way for the site visitor or user to “share” the content with others unless they copy/paste the link into an email or forum. In a contemporary site, the content is shareable very easily through a plug-in or widget such as Share This (like we use here). A content driven site enables your visitors and users to comment on content; it increases their sense of self value when a user feels that they can be heard.
Stock Promotional Sites only Promote Stocks- What if you had something else on your site besides just stock promotions? Try covering market issues such as we do at HotStockChat.com; engaging content will build the audience so that when you do go out with a new stock to pump, you will have an audience. I had a field day and built a huge audience covering the SpongeTech thing. Think about hiring someone that can actually string sentences together in coherent and flowing manner to add some actual content to your site. Or really get creative and do videos or slide shows about stuff you know will be interesting to people…
Stock Promotional Site’s Onsite SEO is non-existent- Imagine if you were higher in the search engines, your content would be found by a lot more people right? Most promoter sites have no onsite SEO built in. Onsite SEO is just part of the Internet marketing puzzle but an important one. Go run your site through HubSpot’s Website Grader and see how it grades out and you will see what I mean. Getting your site perfect with respect to onsite SEO is a good starting point.
Stock Promoter sites are not Marketed- Without marketing in an Internet Marketing World, your site will grow very slowly even if your onsite SEO is perfect. What is marketing? It is the act of building inbound links to your site. How do you do this? Through marketing; you need to market through email but even more importantly on the Internet and in Social Media. By the way, there is far more to social media than blasting away messages on Twitter and Facebook. People are marketers, not machines. People build real, organic results for you that increase your authority. If your site’s url is showing up all over the place, you get more visitors right? Speaking of organic, a pay per click (PPC) campaign will have limited results in many cases. 75% of the “clicks” on search engine results pages (SERP) occur in the organic areas inside the top and right columns. Once you stop paying, you will drop into obscurity again. There is more on this at a previous blog I wrote.
Very few stock promotional entities can survive on their network and connections alone. Most of the rest of us have to start somewhere. I will guarantee you this: Somewhere, right now, someone is building the next big and much more effective mousetrap for stock promotion. The Internet has changed forever and the way businesses are getting things done is through Internet marketing. Social Media and the so-called “Web 2.0” (the interactive web) is community based and things will never go back to the old way. Let me give you one little tidbit of information: HotStockChat.com averages a few hundred unique visitors a day. If I put something out really hot, I can get 1000-2000 “unique” a day. In October of this year, the 5th largest referring site for HotStockChat.com was StumbleUpon. I bet many don’t even know what StumbleUpon is and some may have never heard of it. That is because we market on StumbleUpon as well as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious Bookmarks, Technorati and a few others you may or may not have heard of.
If you are not marketing your site on these social media platforms, you are missing out on a big audience. That StumbleUpon thing I mentioned has over 8 million users. If you add up the users on all the social media platforms, you will come up with something in excess of a half a billion people.
You cannot effectively build an audience by blasting out messages to the masses. You have to attract them with good content and give them some sort of reason to interact with your site and keep them coming back. Many promoters are buying email lists and building lists. There is a more effective way to do it; it takes a bit longer (yes, it takes a few months to build all those inbound links and build an audience) but an organic list built through subscribership because people like your content is far more effective and will last longer than the paid stuff. It still costs money. But, in the end, you will pay for something, one way or the other and probably sooner than later.