His message offers a very practical social networking idea that utilizes the power of LinkedIn (LinkedIn, for those who may not be aware, is a social networking site for business professionals, but in other respects is similar to MySpace and Facebook).
One of the distinguishing features of LinkedIn is that it enables one person to recommend another. Recommendations are sort of endorsements based on your experience with that other person. Because it is a business professionals' group, LinkedIn members are evaluated by the number and quality of their recommendations.
That said, here is the message Larry sent to me:
Gaining credibility and developing messaging "allies" are critical factors in reaching Thought Leader status. Here's one technique you can do today to help in both areas:
Go into your LinkedIn account (if you don't have one, go to www.linkedin.com and get set up asap) and endorse some of your contacts work with a SINCERE recommendation that comes from your heart. (Do NOT blow smoke...this is a blunder many of the uninitiated make that will completely backfire on you.)
Don't ask for permission and don't tell them after you've done it. Once you've done this a few things will happen:
1) You will be elevated in their opinion of you 2) You will activate the reciprocity principle and they will feel like they "owe you one" 3) Many will likely reciprocate and endorse you, giving you genuine testimonials that you can use in your marketing to demonstrate your competence and expertise 4) This endorsement of you, by them, activates the commitment/consistency principle where they will be more and more inclined to recommend you to others because they've already gone on the record stating something positive about you 5) They will be more likely to become a messaging ally of yours and spread the word about you
Make this a regular practice. Do a few of these every day and see what happens after a month. Report back into the group with the results.
If you are on Facebook, I encourage you to join Thought Leadership Marketing Group. I also urge you to visit Larry Genkin at http://www.thoughtleadershipmarketing.com/.
The most glaring problem I see on the business (or charitable) websites I visit is the lack of a form, clearly visible on the home page, to encourage visitors to opt in to an email list. The owners of these sites, frankly, are failing to take advantage of one of the best assets for putting up a website at all.
When I give talks to business people, one of the caveats I preach over and over again is that the most important reason to even have a website is to build an email list of qualified, interested prospects who willingly volunteer to receive information from you.
It is NOT enough to put a lame comment like “For more information call 1-800-XXX-XXXX.” Folks, it is not going to happen. They are not going to initiate contact, you have to do it. So give your visitors incentives. Bribe them! Give them self-serving, “what's in it for me” reasons to fill out a little form on your home page that asks for their names and email addresses.
So here are ten, plus one, reasons why your site should have a clearly visible place for your visitors to opt in to receive informative emails from you:
An opt in form enables you to build a list of people who have an interest in what you offer. Direct marketers have long quoted the mantra, “the money is in the list” for good reason. A list of interested prospects or repeat customers is the most valuable asset any business can have.
An opt in list allows you to target people who have given you permission to market to them. Read Seth Godin's modern classic, “Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers” which introduced the worlds to the concept of getting prospects to opt onto your list by providing free information that solves problems specific to your target market or helps them achieve certain goals that are, again, unique to your targeted prospects.
The people on you opt in list have self-selected themselves as your target market. This means you will no longer have to use the shotgun approach of trying to advertise or send direct mail to huge numbers of people. Seth Godin calls this getting prospects to “raise their hands” and identify themselves as people have needs your product or service can address.
The people on your opt in list WANT to receive your messages. As long as you don't bombard them with sales messages and provide them with a lot of useful, helpful information, they will continue to look forward to your emails.
Since most autoresponders require the person to confirm their request before they receive your information, you avoid accusations of spamming them.
Speaking of autoresponders, they are a software program available for minimal cost that sends out your emails automatically. The visitor fills out your opt in form, next receives an email that asks them to click a link in order to confirm that they wanted to receive the information, and then they are sent a second email with the requested info. Then they will receive your pre-written emails with additional information at regular intervals. This means your entire marketing program can be put on autopilot by using opt in forms and an autoresponder.
Sending out emails to the people on your opt in list is free. In an age when advertising and other forms of marketing is simultaneously becoming more expensive and less productive, email marketing to people who have requested your information is a true bargain.
An opt in form allows you to have repeated contacts with people who would otherwise be one time visitors to your website. Let's face it, a website is like a screen door on a submarine. Most visitors come to your site for about a minute and then leave. Very few people will buy on their first visit to your website. But if you get their attention and give them and incentive to opt in to your list by offering them some very useful information, you can nudge them again and again (again let me repeat that this works best if you continually give them useful information along with your sales and marketing messages), until they buy.
Continuing this last thought, opt in marketing defeats the hazard of one-shot marketing. Most people will not decide to buy on their first exposure to an offer. They need repeated exposures to absorb all of the benefits you offer and to develop a belief that your claims are true.
Opt in marketing can position you and your company as experts if done right. Offering free information puts you in a whole different category of people who want their business. Both the initial piece that entices them to opt in, and the ongoing emails that give you additional opportunities to communicate your message to them, show them that you are capable of solving their problems or helping them achieve their goals.
BONUS REASON: Perhaps the best reason of all for having an opt in form on your website is that your list building efforts allow you to build a relationship with your prospects. Over time, you become a known and trusted source and advisor. Because you take time to educate the people on your list, your credibility climbs through the roof. And nothing in business can beat a relationship built on trust and credibility.
Yesterday I wrote a case study about Grant Griffiths, a Kansas family law attorney who totally dominated his targeted keywords on Google within two years of starting his blog.
Grant's blog, Kansas Family Lawyer, put him on the first page of 12 out of 13 keywords that I looked up. Obviously as they say on those weight loss commercials, these results may are not typical of all bloggers, but it does show the potential of blogging to promote your business.
Based on this case study, here are some lessons you can apply to dominate your keywords:
Put your main keyword in your blog's title;
Put this same main keyword in your url or website address (ie http://yourmainkeyword.com);
Write articles on a regular basis (don't know if Grant Griffiths wrote every single day, but he posted often);
The titles of his articles always contained keywords;
Within these articles repeated the same keywords in the article title about 4 times out of every 100 words;
Post helpful (non spammy) comments on other related blogs. Whenever appropriate, include a link to a pertinate article within your own blog.
Use anchor text within these links. "Anchor text" refers to those blue, clickable links that do not just mention the website address but instead have a keyword. Look back to the first paragraph of this article at the blue "case study about Grant Griffiths" as an example.
You can create anchor text links with a small bit of html code. I have written a tutoriol on creating anchor text at: Anchor Text Tutorial
Also create internal anchor text links from one of your articles to another just as this article contains a link back to my previous article.
These are all basic search engine optimization techniques, but as Grant Griffiths example demonstrates, they are extremely effective.
One of the things I want to do in this blog is to pass along some of the most outstanding online marketing ideas I am able to find. One very important idea is to use blogging as a marketing tool.
Case in point: Back in December 2006 I wrote about Grant Griffiths, a Kansas Family Lawyer, who had stopped all of his traditional advertising because his marketing efforts using his blog was bringing in all the business he needed.
I was thinking about Mr. Griffiths because I was explaining to an other professional why blogging was such a great way to market just about any business. So today I did a number of Google searches to see where his blog is ranked by the world’s most popular search engine. Here are the results:
Grant Griffiths dominates almost every keyword or search term I could think of related to "Kansas Family Law." The only term I looked up that listed his blog on the second page was “Kansas Child Visitation.”
All the other searches I did had him on Google’s first page. The results listed below are all for Google’s non-paid listings. (In other words, the paid ads Google sells may be higher, but Mr. Griffiths’ blog outranks all the others on the "organic," or earned, search results.)
Kansas Family Law, #2 on page one
Kansas Family Lawyer, #1 on on page onepage one
Kansas Family Attorney, #1 on page one
Kansas Divorce Law, #6 on page one
Kansas Child Custody Law, #1 on page one
Kansas Child Custody Lawyer, #2 on page one
Kansas Divorce Lawyer, #2 on page one
Kansas Divorce Attorney, #2 on page one
Kansas Divorce Mediation, #4 on page one
Kansas Divorce Mediator, #6 on page one
Kansas Fathers Rights, #1 on page one
Kansas Dads rights, #5 on page one
Think about it. Almost anyone who searches for information about Kansas family law or Kansas family lawyers is going to find Mr. Griffiths’ site. And when they get to this site, they will find a wealth of information on the topic.
Do you think he has to convince people that he knows what he is talking about when they have read a site like his? Do you think he gets to be choosy about which clients he wants to work with? (or do you think he has to settle for the lowest paying, most disagreeable clients because he is desperate for business?)
And my personal favorite, how many clients do you think try to "negotiate" his fee down to rock bottom?
Now also take a look at the length or complexity of his articles. For the most part they are surprisingly short or easy to write.
Some are fairly long, but there is a fair amount of short articles in there as well. Many of his articles simply cite and comment on information he gleans from other sources. Some of his articles are list articles (such as ten ways to cooperatively seek the best interests of your child).
What I am getting at here is that Mr.Griffiths has achieved marketing success with blogging by simply communicating information to his readers on their level. He updates his blog regularly and he uses important keywords that he knows will correspond to the search queries his prospective clients will use when they go into Google.
And he did all this in a relatively short period of time. I wrote my original article in Deccember 2006 and he started his blog sometime in 2005 (I'm not sure exactly when in 2005). That means he started dominating the Google rankings in at least 24 months.
Something else. Griffiths has aparently taken a sabatical because his blog has not been updated since late 2007. Nevertheless, that blog still dominates all those keywords even without additional writing on his part.
How can you or your firm imitate what he is doing? Simply create a blog and update it regularly. Use the keywords the customers you are targeting will also use when they use search engines in both the titles of your articles and repeated in the bodies of the articles themselves.
Within a few months, you should see your site climbing the search engine ranks for the keywords you are focusing on.
It is no secret that one of the most effective ways to optimize a website is to include your targeted keyword in your site's domain name.
For example, if one of your business' targeted keywords is "accounting software," you may want to have www.accountingsoftwaresolutions.com as your domain (by the way, I just checked and this URL has expired so you could grab it now if you are quick enough).
Unfortunately, most of us do not have the luxury of re-naming our websites just to target one keyword, no matter how valuable that specific keyword may be. Most businesses either already have a website or they must target many keywords.
But to continue the accounting software example, if I were in this business I would still be very interested in grabbing such a domain name because there has to be a lot of people who log into Google and type in "accounting software" as their query.
The solution, is to set up mini-sites, or as a recent article on Dosh Dosh calls them, "Mini-Funnel" Websites. These Mini Funnel sites are actually "slave sites" that exist to answer a single, specific question or keyword and direct search engine traffic to a master site.
They get searchers because these mini sites are set up to grab one keyword and then re-direct these visitors to another site that may target many other –related- keywords.
Maki (the author of the Dosh Dosh article) uses an interesting example a site called, Is Barack Obama a Muslim, which the Obama team set up during their campaign. This site was a one-page site that has the word "NO" printed in big black letters against a stark white background. Visitors who clicked the word "NO" were directed to an article on www.barackobama.com that addressed smear email campaigns.
For example, the site Is Barack Obama Muslim, which leaves out the word "a," produced even better results than the previous example:
"This particular one ranks the highest on both Yahoo and Google for the ‘is barack obama muslim‘ phrase, taking the no. 1 spot and even outranking Obama’s own official website. This appears to be the most established version of the three; Yahoo site explorer shows that it has 10,762 incoming links."
There was even a version of the site that uses the word "muslin" instead of "Muslim," to accommodate people who may misspell the word when they type in their search engine query.
The lesson here is that mini sites, which target single keywords, can drive massive traffic to your main website. Look for search terms related to your business and set up one-page sites that answer the visitor's question and then provide a link for more information to your main site.
This will allow you to benefit from traffic coming in from many, many different search terms.
The following article is a reprint of an article I recently posted on my other blog, Dynamic Copywriting. I thought it was relevant to this blog because it shows mistakes I made when I frist started blogging. I think my readers on this site will find it helpful because I learned a lot of lessons along the way that I wanted to pass along.
Finding and using the right keywords is an absolute essential to success on the internet. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of any other aspect of web marketing that is more important.
Which brings me to the purpose of this article. In one respect, I am slightly hesitant to post it because it chronicles my own mistakes when I began writing this blog (dynamic copywriting) several years ago. So in that respect, this article is a bit of a cautionary tale.
On the other hand, it is also instructional because it gives me a chance to explain what I learned from my mistakes and the things I know now about using keywords in web marketing.
When I started this blog back in 2006, I began with the primary goal of attracting more copywriting clients. I considered myself a generalist and was willing to take on any and all copywriting assignments.
In my naivity I thought I knew all I need to know about using keywords. My one and only keyword at the time was "Freelance Copywriter." Every post I wrote for this blog began with the title "Freelance Copywriter Secrets ___" and I also sought ways to insert the phrase several times in each article.
So as a result, I was tremendously excited when a few months later I found myself on the third page of Google when one did a search for "freelance copywriter."
I assumed that I was well on the way to conquering the search engine mountain and I just knew that it was only a matter of time before I was at the very top of Big G.
Well some of you can no doubt guess the rest. I never did make it to the front page of Google for my one and only keyword because there is so much competition for that phrase.
I knew nothing (at the time) about long tail keywords. I didn't know why all websites should target several related keywords instead of just one.
But I have learned. I learned that long tail keywords (ie search terms that are four or more words long) are easier to conquer than short, highly competitive keywords.
I have learned that the person who does a search for a phrase like "business case study writer in Texas" is much more focused than the person who types in one or two words. I have also learned that such a person who makes that highly focused a search is probably hundreds of times more likely to do business with the companies he or she finds than the person searching with a vague, general keyword.
Moreover, Google is more likely to start moving your site up the rankings on your primary keyword when it sees that your site is optimized for other, but related, keywords.
And then there was my external linking strategy. I worked hard to write articles and comments on other blogs that linked backed to my site. But I made the following two mistakes with my inbound links:
I created links that either targeted my name or the name of this website ("dynamic copywriting"), and
I seldom linked to any place on this site except the home page.
(By the way, I am a little shocked that I am really admitting all this. lol I hope I don't lose future business by explaining what a dolt I was. But then, explaining how not to do something is often far more instructional than just telling how.)
Both of those are really bad linking stratagies. First, I would have had much more success embedding my keywords into these links, so that a person would see, for example, a clickable blue link that said "website copywriting" that would have brought him or her to this site.
That would have told Google that my site had something to do with "website copywriting." Over time, if I had furthered this technique using other longer tail keywords related to website copywriting, I would have alerted Google that this site was relevant to many different keywords.
Google is after all a computer program that searches all over the web to find sites that pertain to various topics. But links that merely target a person's name or the title of the website tell Google very little of what the site is about. Only keywords will do this job.
Secondly, Google quickly dismisses inbound links that are only pointed to the main page of a website. These links should point to specific articles within the site that are related to the inbound keyword. And those articles should likewise be optimized for that same keyword by including the keyword in the title and in several places throughout the text.
This tells Google that the site has depth and covers a variety of related topics in detail. That demonstrates to Google that such a site is an "authority site" on its subject matter.
All this is to say that I had to learn search engine optimization in part by trial and error. And I am still learning.
Of course I have been working hard to get this site better optimized, but it takes a lot to turn the Titanic around. The task has been complicated by the fact that I am no longer a generalist, but am more focused on writing web content and search engine optimization.
The lesson here for other website owners is to pay careful attention to the keywords that relate to your business. Both internal and external keyword strategies are essential to getting high rankings by Google.
I hope you find this helpful as you build and develop your own sites. I suspect I am not the only website owner that has had to learn from mistakes, but I would be interested to hear comments on what lessons you have learned about search engine optimization.
Now this, in itself, is an example of how to use Social Networking. When Michael posed this question he received many responses from all sorts of people who use LinkedIn (LinkedIn, I should explain, is a business person's alternative to sites like MySpace and Facebook). So he was getting feedback and, just as importantly, exposure, for this single question.
One of the many really insightful answers he got was from Denise Wakeman of The Blog Squad and Build a Better Business Blog. Candidly, I had never heard of Denise before or her two sites, but I am now reading both of them with considerable interest and finding them to be a wealth of top notch information.
I took you down that pathway to show you how Social Networking, whether you are using LinkedIn , Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or regular blogs, can create massive exposure. Michael got exposure (and some really good answers to his question) by posting on LinkedIn, and Denise got a new reader and a reference on my blog today.
The grease that keeps all these mechanisms moving is the willingness of people to offer good advice and ideas to others without expectation of immediate gain. Denise Wakeman's generosity has added one more link to her websites because I found her response to Michael to be so valuable.
Now I don't want to test your patience any further, so here is the advice from Denise Wakeman regarding using Twitter as a marketing tool:
1. Everything you tweet is seachable on the web. Every tweet creates a new page. This can be good and bad. Good if you're strategically using key words for which you want to be found; and bad if you aren't mindful that if you're not nice, it can come back to bite you!
2. Remember that what you tweet is visible to the public and may get retweeted. If you don't want it to be public, don't tweet it.
3. Once you get beyond a few followers, you may not know everyone who is following you. There are no secrets. I guess #1, 2 and 3 are all related.
4. Though twitter can be a time suck, it can also massively increase your exposure to influencers in your niche and be well worth the time you spend cultivating relationships and sharing relevant, useful content.
What is your opinion? Do you have any more ideas about how to use social networking as a marketing tool?
I consult with businesses on the strategic use of social media, web marketing and email marketing. I also speak and conduct workshops on social media marketing for organizations.
My team offers outsource solutions and training for companies needing to engage with their target market with social media.
Contact me at 817-501-6892 or by email at: or chbrown/at/webmarketing-coach.com.
Need a Speaker or Guest Writer?
Need a speaker or guest writer/blogger on social media marketing, rainmaking or personal branding?
Feel free to contact me either by telephone at (817) 501-6892 or by email at
