Generating Endless Blog Posts

Generating Endless Blog Posts

by Daniel DiGriz

Do you have a blog or a business site that needs one, but don’t know what to write about?

• Got writers block, and you didn’t even sign up to be a writer?
• Stumped on what to do next and tempted to copy material? (don’t!)
• Need to breathe life, excitement, and interest that grabs attention into a blog?
• Want to use your blog to engage in social media, but everything you write sounds like a sales pitch?

This is the book for you. With more than 122 different blog ideas, you’ll have enough to write a post every three days (for maximum search engine optimization), and then recycle the technique with different content the next year, and the next, and so on. This book provides you a methodology for never running out of fascinating blog posts that anyone can write easily.

[Purchase information coming soon]

Core Navigation – What Belongs and What Doesn’t

The core content on a web site (the information needed to make a buying decision – any information integral to the sales process) belongs in the web site’s core navigation (the links in the top or top side portion of the web site). The original business web sites that started kicking up in about 1994 had the following five core content pages, usually:

• Home
• About (us)
• Services or Products
• F.A.Q. (frequently asked questions)
• Contact (us) or Order Form

These were, after all, the pieces needed to make a sale. You looked at the HOME page for the core marketing message and marketing differentiators. You looked at the ABOUT page to decide if you trust the company or want to know more about who you’re doing business with, before you give them your business. You looked at the SERVICES or PRODUCTS page to make sure you were getting the right product or service, to narrow down choices, or see if there might be a package deal or additional incentive. You might glance at the F.A.Q. if you were hesitant to contact the service provider or order the product, to see if your concern or objection is answered there. And finally you used the CONTACT or ORDER link to go forward with the service or product. The marketing piece (web site) was driven by the sales process.

As other content pages were added, they were generally moved to secondary navigation. For instance, you might add a photo GALLERY. It’s not really crucial information to help you make a buying decision. It’s fluff – maybe beautiful fluff – maybe even effective fluff – you might get a lot of contacts that mention it – but you still, usually, don’t put it in primary navigation.

By primary navigation, we usually mean the first top horizontal row of links or buttons – buttons are kind of old fashioned these days – like knobs on a car stereo – and they have lower search engine optimization (SEO) value than plain links. By secondary navigation, we usually mean either the left sidebar (occasionally a right sidebar) or the second row of horizontal links. Some sites have a third row or additional column (tertiary navigation). Some have dropdowns (hierarchical navigation – pages and subpages, categories and subcategories). Some have other forms of navigation altogether, for highly specialized sites. Wikipedia, for example, is primarily search-based navigation – something that’s less effective for a service-based business site, but which works fairly well for a product-based site like Amazon. In all, though, most navigation schemas follow something like what you’d find in a book – whether it’s using a table of contents, an index, tabs, markers, or what have you. The rectangular screen, book-like approach is actually a tried and true way of ordering navigation and content that’s been the standard since we stopped using scrolls.

As time went on in the web world, though – as we moved from thousands of sites to hundreds of thousands – some pages became more common in primary navigation, and some pages less so. This happened slowly, because people tended to copy one another’s standards. When there were very few business web sites, business sites had certain things, so people assumed that all business web sites should have them. Some of those decisions made less sense as the web developed. The best example is the LINKS page. You still see one on some sites. For more personal brands, or social startups, that can make sense. For the average real estate agent though, for example, it usually doesn’t. First, those links pages became popular before search engines like Google. Why do I need you to tell me how to find the local school district, when Google can do it instantly? Businesses wanted to be your one stop shop – your portal for all web-based information – so these pages often grew out of control.

But quickly, there came to be much better portals out there, both in terms of richness of content and in being maintained and remaining current and comprehensive. If you want a portal of say community links in Albuquerque, NM, constantly adding to – let alone maintaining all those links as they change (so they don’t get broken and you look unprofessional) – can be a hassle. Besides, precisely since the spurt of search engines like Google, you actually lose SEO value for having a lot of external links on your site. You’re giving away your search engine “juice” – your search engine value. When search engines see a site that has a ton of external links, they rank it lower, not higher – worse, it can get treated as a portal site  – a site that’s chief value is links to other sites – something the search engine itself already provides – and ranked very low. LINKS pages are a vestige of the past, when there were fewer indexes, guides, portals, and less effective search engines, not to mention social bookmarking sites that, for a lot of internet uses, make even those things superfluous. If you see a Links page on another business site, don’t rush out to copy them. Unless it’s highly unique, just chuckle and don’t try to ‘compete’ with that.

A new link (or button) that has popped up in primary navigation in a lot of effective business web sites is (our) BLOG. That’s because, as we’ve said elsewhere, dynamic (constantly growing) content can have much higher search engine value than static content, if you do it right. That’s true precisely because the fascination of reading a web site just because it exists wore off long ago, when we passed the threshold of business sites being uncommon and interesting to sites being ubiquitous and largely boring. In a world of gazillions of web sites, we want fresh, original, frequently updated content. It’s like when balsam shampoo came out. People rushed to buy it – there were only a handful of shampoos at the local grocer then – remember Prell?, and this balsam stuff was all new. But now there’s an entire aisle dedicated to shampoo, and frankly no one cares if it has balsam or henna or whatever. Instead, you’ve really got to be part of the ongoing popular dialogue – natural, organic, phosphate free… No one had heard of a blog in 1994. To this day, some small businesses are unaware of the marketing value – they’re not part of the cultural shift – the new ongoing discussion among their target clientelle, which itself is shifting underneath them. It doesn’t matter if your 20 clients over 50 tell you they don’t use Facebook – your 2000 prospects that are using Facebook are going to be that next wave of clients, unless you ignore them – that’s how attrition will kill a business that doesn’t adapt.

Or businesses copy dynamic content, but badly – sometimes literally, plagiarizing blogs right off the web – which actually hurts their SEO – it’s like feeding yourself poison. It’s as if you could tape record a conversation with your client and just put a cassette deck in the lobby with that dialogue on a loop. How effective is that? Not without barbed wire and sodium penethol. Internet marketing stopped being just a collection of gimmicks when having a web site stopped being just a gimmick. The new internet marketing is all about being genuine and open (remember that friend or relative that wouldn’t “go online” because a virus might leap off of the internet and destroy his computer?) and about communicating – not just speaking “at” them. If you’ve got armloads of expertise, insights, and advice, and you can listen to what your clients and prospects are struggling with, don’t fully understand, or want to think about – then you’ve got the makings of internet marketing success. You have the core – all you need is the technique, and a little consulting time with a group like ours can get you the rest of the way.

There are certain things you need in your core navigation (primary or secondary), and they haven’t changed all that much. You still need the basics we bulleted up above. For instance, your About (us) page and Contact (us) page should generally be prominent. For examples, see [these sites] or [these].

There are times, however, when you break the rules. Generally, hiding the CONTACT page is like hiding a lamp under a bushel. If you want to maximize people’s ability to interact with you, you make it easy to see and click from the top of the site (core navigation),  you have links to follow you or add you to social networks (like Facebook and Twitter), and you have a lead capture form on nearly every page. Commonly, sites that don’t do this are sites that sell products, but don’t want to field a lot of customer service calls – they want to funnel you to online or automated help solutions or a support ticket system, but aren’t wanting to consult with you personally about a service they’re offering. Amazon is, again, an example. But a real estate agent who buries the Contact page is likely to chase away clients who want to be represented by an agent. Same with attorneys, psychologists, personal trainers, accountants, or anyone else who provides a service or acts as agent or advocate for you.

Likewise, the ABOUT (us) page: Companies that put it at the bottom of the site, or bury or hide it, are usually either so well known that only researchers are looking for the info (like Walmart) or so transactional that the most important thing is to get a line of products visible for purchase online with a price, a search feature, and a buy now button (like Amazon). For Amazon, again, primary navigation is about searching for products, not about getting information. A company that’s a new startup or is trying to greatly increase their contacts and interest from internet marketing, needs a prominent ABOUT page. They can always move it to the footer when they’re a household word. But even product-based sites often need a prominent ABOUT page if they’re unknown and need to garner trust for the sale. Remember, core navigation is about providing any information needed to complete the sales process. When I’m about to buy my favorite Red Bush Tea from a web site I’ve never seen before, I read the ABOUT page before deciding to order.

Footer navigation (as opposed to core navigation) became essential as legal concerns and misunderstandings (and even abuse of the web) abounded. In the footer, it’s common to find a general “legal statement” or “terms of service” (TOS) or more specific Privacy Statement, Copyright Statement, Credits (e.g. “Powered by Market Moose”), or an alternate Contact option (e.g. Webmaster’s e-mail address or “Report Site Problems”). Today, you might see something like “Open Trouble Ticket” or “Support” (though having a more prominent Support link – e.g. in core navigation – can help the sale by emphasizing that support is only a click away). There’s not one right answer – for example, another theory suggests making the support link less prominent, to avoid suggesting that it’s a common need. But companies often find themselves shifting from one marketing approach to another (e.g. as clients complain about not finding the support link). There’s a doctrine of navigation, but it’s not a collection of absolutes. As we said, you will sometimes find the About (us) and/or Contact (us) links in the footer, if the company is a household word, is primarily product and online ordering driven, or wishes to avoid personalized contacts and consultations.

A Site Map is another excellent piece (with high SEO value) to find in the footer. It’s a good marketing help, too, so it’s nearly impossible for a determined site visitor to get lost. All navigation should be recapitulated in the site map. In some sites, membership or an account is required to view certain pages, so you might want the site map visible only for those who are logged in.

One secret is that if you have a flash-based web site, your core navigation buttons are likely invisible to some search engines or, if you’re using graphic buttons, they have much lower SEO value than text links, so a common search engine optimization technique is to recapitulate the entire navigation scheme as text links in the footer. It can look a bit cluttered, but that’s a trade off – in addition to the heightened SEO value, it’s actually excellent if the site visitor has a broken flash installation, is using a currently non-flash device like an Apple Ipad, or just has a weird-sized device that might cut off or otherwise interfere with your core navigation. It’s more insurance against a determined (to buy or contact you) visitor getting lost.

Remember, not everyone is like we are – some need a brief summary of all the core elements on the home page (who, what, where, why, what now?) and will make up their mind about you right then; others need more detailed information to support them in the sales process, and will utilize more secondary pages. The most effective sites have universal appeal not because they satisfy one presumably shared personality, but because they cater to the breadth of different buyer types out there. The biggest mistake with navigation is to assume that buyers only need what I need. Once we assume that, we’ve stopped listening to what the effective conventions really are – they’re aggregate feedback from gazillions of buyers on how they actually think, what they really want, and what they need to make a buying or a contact decision. Approach your navigation as if most of the world is not like you (a conceit we can all fall into, to the detriment of our marketing). Instead, make your navigation appeal to all kinds of people by being well-ordered and easy to use (even if it seems clear and simple enough) and thorough (even if you really think most people won’t click on most links, because you wouldn’t). Guard always, in internet marketing, against seeing yourself as the client base. If you go by the common 4-square personality charts, you’re only 25%  – you’re the minority. Most of your site visitors don’t think like you, decide like you, or buy like you. Get them all – make your navigation personality-proof.

Navigation is a core marketing feature of your web site and is directly linked, therefore, to both the sales process and to search engine optimization. Intuitive navigation – focused on usability, visitor expectations, and business conventions – is a key component of the web site as a marketing venue. If your navigation is cluttered, highly unusual (without a highly unusual purpose), or ill-conceived, overhauling the navigation is just as important as any other SEO or marketing task on your web site, and should be a significant part of any web site build or web site overhaul package. You wouldn’t outfit a NASCAR vehicle with confusing or cryptic controls – it needs to be something a driver can settle into and navigate easily and ‘instinctively’. The demand for rationally ordered navigation, with a reduced learning curve, is actually increasing as technology devices become simpler to learn and use – e.g. the Apple Ipad – and as standardized devices (whether hardware like smart phones or software like instant messengers and e-mail) reach near total saturation of the market. Pay attention to your core navigation – of course, we’re here to help also.

Market Moose Internet Marketing – Solving Problems As Technology Changes.

Site Navigation Theory Made Simple

Web site navigation can make or break the best web site, the best content, and the best intentions. At first glance, the single most obvious sign of a web site that has not had a professional treatment is the navigation. There are a number of basic things that navigation theory can lend to your site build that will help make it a winner.

Keep it Few: Generally speaking, on a business site, if you’ve got more than half a dozen horizontal (top) buttons or links (your primary navigation), and more than half a dozen vertical (side) buttons or links (your secondary navigation), you’re losing people through clutter frustration. You’re actually adding challenges to locate information. There’s some give and take, and there are lots of successful sites that ignore this rule, but they’re also doing it on purpose for highly specialized reasons.

Use Hierarchical Navigation: If you need more than half a dozen buttons each for primary and secondary navigation, it’s time to nest them with parent and child pages. This is a sign of well organized content, and it invites your visitors to think in a more marketing oriented manner.

Navigation equals Marketing: Your main navigation should have the same helpful things that a home page would on a static site: who you are, what you do, where you do it, why choose you, what to do next. Translate that into buttons and you get the classic navigation schema: ABOUT US, SERVICES, COVERAGE AREA, OUR DIFFERENCE, CONTACT US (or BUY NOW).

Use Posts vs. Pages: Lots of pages of original content can increase SEO (search engine optimization). But don’t overestimate static pages. Dynamic sites beat static sites most of the time, so a single BLOG page frequently updated with fresh, original, relevant posts is the best use of one button there is. Better yet, if you want maximum SEO burn, make the blog your HOME page. Also, a blog page has it’s own forms of tertiary navigation – tags, categories, etc. You don’t need button overload when you blog. If you’re about to create a new page, ask  yourself why it can’t be a post instead?

Blur the Boundaries: One of the techniques we use a lot is to use posts instead of pages, but keep the posts in categories – for instance, instead of using an FAQ page, we use an FAQ category and just add posts. That affords us some nifty additional features that static pages often don’t have.

Keep Names Simple: Don’t name a button or navigation link “General Information About Our Company”. Name it ABOUT or GENERAL or INFO. Or, if you need to look expansive, ABOUT US. Whether you choose CONTACT US or CONTACT is not a preference worth agonizing over. But a button called “Contact Us Any Time 24/7 By E-mail or Phone” is silly.

Keep in mind that about 25% of your audience will not make a decision to contact you without being able to research and find all of the information, in a well-organized manner on your site, that they need to make a decision. For them, navigation has got to be effectively organized into some sort of rational structure. Another 25% of visitors won’t contact you without being able to quickly access the straightforward, bottom line options they need to decide. For them, navigation has got to be simple, obvious, and meet some standard expectations.

Follow these general guidelines from web site navigation theory, and your small business web site will likely be more effective at converting more hits into actual contacts.

Market Moose helps small businesses build effective web sites, search engine optimization, and internet marketing.

How are Your Fees So Reasonable?

We bundle! We could charge more, nickel and dime-ing clients for services that really need to go together, because they affect one another directly and overlap – like someone might sell you a water pump, only to tell you later that you also need a new bracket . By bundling, though, Market Moose gets greater client loyalty, offers packages at more reasonable fees, and remains highly efficient – which brings costs down.

We keep overhead low! We’re a company that acts like a sole proprietorship. Market Moose doesn’t unnecessarily add titles and positions or insulate ourselves from the client. Daniel DiGriz, company president, gets on the phone himself, is arms deep in web building and search engine optimization, and does a lot more. Everything that can stay in-house, stays in-house. Lower costs means we don’t have to hit you with huge fees to be successful.

We work by appointment! Have you ever played phone tag – left messages – the other person is on the phone – they call you back – you’ve taken another call? We don’t chase clients around the Ma Bell network, or in between the cell towers, and they don’t have to chase us. Most of what we need to do for web sites and search engine optimization can be handled by e-mail but, for paid marketing consultations or the initial free consultation to start a project, we do what doctors and attorneys do. This respects everyone’s time, allows us to keep our other appointments, lets us take more clients at lower cost, and ensures you’re not wondering where we are and vice versa.

We stay off the phone! Any given phone call uses at least 400% more time than an e-mail. Multiply that times the number of prospects and clients, and we’d have to hire four extra people just for phones (driving up prices). Ask yourself if the phone call for something that could be handled by e-mail is worth passing that cost back to you. What we do instead, is provide the initial phone consultation free, then work by e-mail. Action items, status updates, and calendar items make e-mail incredibly effective for web-based work. For clients that prefer to work exclusively by phone, Market Moose offers that as a premium service for an additional fee. And of course, consulting is our core service, so we’re able to reserve appointment time for that, by using the phone only when it’s absolutely necessary.

We’re not the cheapest! All this said, there are people who will shave a few dollars off the price, and there are clients who’ll think it’s all interchangeable and will bargain shop. That’s not our client base. We’re not trying to be the cheapest. One of the reasons our value is so high is that we’re not really selling a list of services, even though we offer packages in that form. It’s not a sprinkle of SEO, a touch of design, a nod to marketing… We think about how it all interacts, and we offer expanded services, like consulting, to help clients develop a successful internet marketing plan that lasts. We aren’t really trying to compete on price – we compete on value. That said, due to the above efficiencies, our fees seems to be about half of what most people charge for what we’re delivering – which is freaking awesome!

Does Your Web Site Bring (and Keep) Clients?

In the old days, you’d throw up a web site because, “that’s what you do, if you have a business – you have to be online”. It’s like buying stationary used to be, or picking out china patterns. The function may be long gone (do you still use a typewriter?) but the ritual remains. And yet, some things evolve a new purpose. With web sites, for example, it used to be enough that you were there at all – that you were “on the internet”. Now, you don’t need a web site just to exist on the web – there are plenty of free phone directories for that – if all you needs is for people who know your name to look up your number.

The real purpose of a web site for small business should be to grow your business. If not, isn’t there something wrong with that? And growing your business is not just about “bringing in new clients” by itself. Sure, that’s important, but that by itself is more suitable for a drive thrrough hamburger stand. Growing your business is about a couple of things:

1. Keeping existing clients in your orbit - providing them ways to interact with you, be informed by you, receive insight, advice, and useful content from you. Share your content, bring you referrals, interact with others regarding your content, etc.

2. Bringing in new clients – An easily locate-able (search engine optimized and frequently updated) resource that assists prospects in making business decisions (marketing, information, navigation, resources, lead capture and conversion, etc.) – to become your clients, where appropriate – and then stay in your orbit (see #1).

If your web site isn’t bringing in clients and, almost more importantly, retaining your clients. Or if you’re getting lots of hits and few contacts (useless hits – no targeted audience), you need an overhaul. And again, perhaps more importantly, you need a little time with an internet marketing consultant to make a plan for growing your business, with your web site as one of the tools (these days, it certainly isn’t the only tool you should have in your tool belt – but if the web site is not right, a lot of the other tools just don’t work as well).

How Does Google Know if I Copy?

One of the common questions that comes up is “Do search engines like Google really know if I shoplift content from other web sites to update my own?” Another is “Out of all the millions of web sites, how can they know?”

Ask  yourself the following: if Google isn’t also indexing those sites, how would it index your site? How would such a thing as SEO exist? That’s what search engines do – they scan your site for content. There’d be no SEO value in adding content to your site, if search engines weren’t aware of it, or aware of the same content on other sites. And Google reads your site just like a human being – top to bottom, front page to back.

Here are the results you may find from lifting content:

SEO decline. This happens by rewarding the site that had the duplicate content first (it’s copy-worthy – that’s an endorsement – rank it higher) and lowering rankings for the site that had it later – i.e. lifted the content (it’s not original – no sense in presenting it high in search results). When I post, Google is usually aware of my content within seconds. I know – I monitor it. I have automatic scans in place for content theft, but still – I know that a plague falls on the house of anyone who rips it off, because of the way SEO works. [Want to see a Google example? Click the image at right.]

Legal issues. One of these days, the site owner is likely to run his popular material through copyscape.com and see who is using it without permission. [Want to see a Copyscape example? Click the image at right.] Here are the questions they can pursue: “Are you a business? How long have you profited from having my content on your site? How much money did you make in that time, and what percentage of it is due me?” If you could write stellar content and just wait for people to rip it off, you could actually make a business out of it, with a good attorney. It’s the same with multimedia content: grabbing images (photos, graphs, etc.) off the internet that have not been explicitly declared ‘public domain’ and for which you do not have an appropriate license, or are obeying the terms of that license. You’re probably exposed at that point, unless you can make a case for “fair use” – a rule which has its own vague terms, precisely so courts can apply the rule un-evenly and favor whom they wish. We’ve written about fair use on this blog, so we won’t revisit it here, but we’re not attorneys and aren’t competent to offer real legal advice, so if you have questions about it, you should consult an attorney.

Ethical issues. Keep in mind that plagiarism is plagiarism. If it was cheating when you copied that book into your essay in school and represented it as your own, instead of properly attributing it to the author, it’s plagiarism when you do it with web content. If you are going to attribute it, that’s better but doesn’t mitigate the other issues.

Public perception. When someone goes to bookmark your content in a social bookmarking site like digg.com, they will likely get a response that this is duplicate content that has already been bookmarked. This exposes you as a content lifter. Are you a business? What are the potential consequences of a client looking at your site as just a collection of things grabbed from other web sites?

Low social value. Focusing on just SEO is a common mistake of those who believe in the mythology of automatic marketing, and it misses the whole point of why SEO works the way it does. Fresh, original, frequently updated content is rewarded in search engines PRECISELY because that’s what people are searching for, want to interact with, and are responding to. If you’re just slapping in stuff you find on the web content, generally speaking, you’re not really respecting your prospects, how they think, and what they want – you’re just feeding them filler – which means you think people are basically dumb in their buying responses and will warm to any old thing. You’re trying to fool them with fake attention. It’s like a pat on the head – just a bit too patronizing – and if you think that doesn’t come through, subtly, there you go again underestimating your prospects. You wouldn’t put up with it, so why should they?

A dynamic web site is a social entity – an interactive environment. If you really don’t care enough, and don’t respect the visitor enough, that you’re just dumping things into it from other sites, why should they care and why should they stick around? Content is a social compact – you’re promising to be genuine, authentic, and alive. It’s easy to say “blogging didn’t work for me” – it might make us feel better, but it’s really the assumptions we’re acting on that make the difference. Treat people like people – talk plainly – and you’ll earn an audience. Take shortcuts, and it’s like one of those “filler speakers” for hire that will show up at your company for a fee and talk about whatever – give them a topic and a time frame and they’ll come speak “dynamically” for that 30-minutes or an hour – from puppy dogs to sales to motivation to time management. Wow. It’s like serving cheap crackers and cheese whiz at a convention. Everyone’s thinking “how long do I have to stay here?” That’s not a buyer response.

And if I seem blunt about this, it’s because you’re up against the obsolete marketing-think of our grandparents, where people would often buy whatever you throw at them, if it was reasonably new, because there just weren’t so many products on the shelf, and there just weren’t that many plumbers in our town. It was a seller’s marketplace. It doesn’t work that way any more. Look at the shampoo aisle at your supermarket and start counting. Check the phonebook – that antique they keep throwing on the porch every year – how many of your profession are there in your area? Now, we actually have to respect our audience enough to be real. It’s a buyer’s marketplace now. That’s the meaning off social media, of blogging, and even of Google, my friends. The assumption implicit in any successful internet marketing activity today is that we’re searchers, explorers, social people – instead of the web being a ‘marketing engine’, it’s a marketing conversation. It’s more like coffee hour than the sermon, more like a ball game with friends than a scorecard and silence, more like personal coaching than ‘here’s your gym badge, over there are the machines’.

I’m going to push this farther. So much of the time, at Market Moose, we’re offering a corrective – nudging people away from the pitfalls (we’ve all fallen into them – that’s how we know they’re there). But our mission is also to coax clients toward a newer, more current, more realistic vision (as in corresponds with the new reality) for their marketing. So here goes. It’s not just about your marketing. It’s about your business – the substance of who you are as a business and how your business works. I’m often hearing people say, “in my field, marketing doesn’t work” – but I notice that their successful competitors don’t think that at all. In every field, in every locale, someone is making money and being successful marketing their business. I notice that same crowd is often saying, “here’s how I work, we all do the same things, this is what I do, it hasn’t changed in 40 years”, etc. In other words, they’re not adapting or responding to the new reality – they’re telling people how it’s going to be, what they’re willing to do, and doing the take it or leave it thing. However you slice it, this is the old way and, yeah, if your business doesn’t change, you can have stellar marketing, but it’s just a facade. What’s needed is a fundamentally different approach to your own work. It’s amazing how much the new marketing then starts to make sense.

Ever driven up to a run-down roadside motel and heard “$79″… and when you say, “gosh that’s expensive for this!” they just repeated, “$79, plus tax, plus key deposit”. They get away with that for one reason only – there’s no alternative. The moment I open a motel across the street that’s clean, with well-lit parking, hot coffee, and a security guard, they’re gone.

The things we need to be thinking about are:

• How can we increase and maintain better communications with existing clients – communications that go beyond just the purchasing process?
• How can we begin a conversation with the public about our field of work – but, more importantly, about the aspects of it that the public is actually thinking about?
• How can we give prospects a way to stay connected to us, stay in our orbit, even before they’re ready to switch to us or include us in their business plans?
• How can we position ourselves, in all our locales, or in our particular specializations and niches, as the resident expert – the one that is the clear choice – without throwing a lot of sales language at people (“Hey, I’m the best. For quality, buy from me!” -  bleh)?
• How can I build a wider network of people (and where are they all hanging out these days?) that isn’t just people that are immediately “valuable” to me, but anyone and everyone I know, meet, or have a conversation with? – Remember the insurance agent analogy I gave in the video on new marketing.

More of us don’t want to walk in and shake your hand, we want to add each other to our Facebook. I don’t want you to mail me those mortgage rates – I want to see them by following you in Twitter. I don’t want your five page static web site that never changes. I want you to think about what I’m thinking about and give me some insight. Ever visit one of those old-fashioned personal home pages from 10 years ago – it had someone’s favorite colors, they’re favorite rock bands, a bad photo, etc? Ineffectual business web sites are still like that. Well, individuals are way ahead of a lot of companies that expect their business. Individuals are involved in constantly updated statuses and always adding funny stories, interesting thoughts, etc – to their pages (which are now in Facebook and Twitter more than they are in Tripod and Geocities). Businesses are playing catch-up. And not just in how they ‘market’, but in how they do business as a whole. Sometimes, it’s time for an overhaul not of just your web site, but of who you are as a company, and how you operate. It’s that, or join the dying part of the industry.

I have three marketing mentors – three people that, for me, have summed up successful marketing right now:

• Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People). What’s funny is that web 2.0 and social media, like blogging and Twitter, are seeing the fruition of a market based on Carnegie’s thinking. And yet Carnegie started this in 1934. What’s also funny is that it quickly got the reputation from people who hadn’t read Carnegie, of being manipulative – it was actually thought to be more ‘honest and straightforward’ to just make or do stuff and assume people would buy it, tell them endlessly to buy it by bombarding them with ads saying it’s good, and so on. Carnegie saw that stuff as antique back in its heyday. There were Mad Men and there was Carnegie the visionary. And you know his primary idea? Simple: if you genuinely take an interest in people, in general, whether or not they can do anything for you, or seem immediately ‘valuable’ (as a commodity) – if you just interact with them, meet them, add them to your social network as people – you’ll never have to seriously chase business. You won’t have to constantly pitch them on how your services are the best, etc. Again, we talked about the insurance agent in video on new marketing and those guys are disciples of Carnegie.
• Seth Godin (Tribes, The Purple Cow, etc.). I don’t even like everything Seth is interested in or talks about (some of his books are, in my opinion, overly focused on corporate life). But you can’t argue that he can really nail down the underlying ethos and thinking behind the new marketing – the new way of doing business.  Tribes is short (read it in one sitting), and really gets you there.
• Google. Just looking at the meaning behind Google’s activities tells you what has changed, often before it actually has. Google is prophetic. Google understands that we’re offloading more of our activity and thinking online – and that includes our social networking, our buying decision process, and our expectations for interaction. Google knows that documents aren’t static anymore – they’re evolving social tools. That’s why Google is reading your home page like a human being, using artificial intelligence, instead of the old-fashioned way of just picking up key words some SEO person inserted on the back end. They get it, they’re helping drive it, and the rest of us are learning from it.

Well, I think we’ve answered the key questions. Market Moose is available for consulting, including brainstorming for your business. Let us know if we can help.

Frequently Asked Web Site Questions (Part 2)

Should I have individual staff or team profiles on the site?

I think it adds the appearance of depth to your company for people who are interested in that. But people can be fickle too. So any time you feature just yourself alone, some people will turn away, because it looks like it’s just you. Any time you add more people, some people will turn away, because they’re intimidated by it being more than just you. There isn’t one right answer. You weigh your market, your target audience, and how you know they’ve been reacting to you and what they’ve been asking against both answers. For me, I do both, but I put my personal photo and identity right on the front (it’s part of my brand), and I put the staff page a link away. So I’m getting both possibilities in there. The people thinking “can I rely on just you?” can click a button and see otherwise. The people thinking “I want one human being to relate to” have that person on the front. You’re going to lose visitors, no matter what you do, but I still like that approach for me. If your clients are fairly corporate or affluent – you might also want a staff photo (together) at the bottom of your home page.  You can also add one to the bottom of a CONTACT page, if visitors are typically reaching or being assigned to someone other than you.

Staff profile pages have good SEO potential, too. If you create individual bio pages for each staff member, with photo and link to a main staff page, then add a main staff photo to that page, with 100-400 words about your staff as a whole, and do the standard ‘back-end’ SEO, it becomes a nice positive SEO driver. Plus, they don’t have to click each profile if what they’re wanting is an overall summary with the photos.

Should I have multiple blogs?

Honestly, this question is best treated as “nothing matters if you’re not consistent, original, and relevant – but especially consistent”. There’s no point in multiplying blogs if only to have two that aren’t updated frequently. Blogs don’t usually become traffic builders overnight. They do maintain SEO immediately, if you’ve had an SEO overhaul, and you don’t slack off on the blog. Once you’ve slacked off for long enough, it stops contributing, and your site starts sinking in search engine value. So, even without readers, a blog as an SEO driver to maintain and grow your rankings is key. But to build traffic flow, it needs to be continually updated (think thrice a week) with 100-400 words per post of 100% original content that is highly relevant to your locales (which must be mentioned specifically) and/or your industry. If you do that, and you’re being consistent, it will come naturally to you where and how to grow – whether that’s two blogs or just a particular focus, name, and brand for your existing blog.

A more specific answer, though: an on-site blog offers the highest SEO value to your main site (having the front page actually be the blog, as previously mentioned, has the most SEO value). An off-site blog gives you an inbound link to your site (if you do it right), the opportunity to treat it as a niche site, and the ability to gain it’s own SEO and audience and funnel traffic back to your main site. The key thing is to position yourself as resident expert in a particular locale, demographic, or specialization, and continually give away value. No cheesy sales pitches. Instead, it’s your insight, expertise, information, and perspective. You’ll almost certainly get no response for a long while, and little value for a while, but if you’re consistent, the payoff can be extraordinary. Most people just can’t delay gratification that long (a month and they’re done, or maybe they give it a post per month for six months – same difference), or their faith wanes around anything technical that doesn’t work instantly, or they short change it (no prolonged consistency, no originality – they just toss some news articles at it, etc). That’s perfectly OK – the market goes to those who do it right, and stick to it. It’s a kind of natural selection. If you can do the right things consistently, and there’s a reason to have two blogs, go for it. But if it’s just going to be two things you won’t do right or be consistent at, pick one or don’t do either.

Keep in mind, too, it’s old-fashioned (web 1.0) to focus entirely on a web site in particular, anyway – blog or static. That just doesn’t work anymore. There’s a reason why every startup in existence launches into Twitter and Facebook – even before their site is built – even while they’re under construction. The goal in web 2.0 is to integrate all these things to extend your presence – your brand – your expertise where the people actually are. And then give them tons of options and opportunities at every turn to connect with you, follow you, stay in your orbit, join your tribe. You could do a 2nd blog off site, if you’re going to put the energy there too, or instead of. But you also have social media to focus on.

Should I add lots of organizational emblems to my site?

Sure, but I wouldn’t go overboard. I think a lot of the focus on external links and organization emblems is the old top-down product-driven approach of wanting prospects to become clients for the reasons we think they should, or wish they would, or is basically just “this is what I have to offer – this is what I want you to bite on”. Some of it’s fine. But again, what does web 2.0 tell us people are actually responding to? They’re responding to the resident expert in social media, and to fresh, frequently updated, original, interesting content. Emblems are static content. That’s fine, but think of your site in terms of percentages. What part of the pie is static-core vs. dynamic & social. If the static side is more than half, I’d say you’re not adding value as much as you are pushing whatever you’ve got lying around, and people won’t respond as they once did back when there were fewer choices.

Companies took a top down approach when there were only 20 kinds of shampoo. Here, ours has balsam. Buy this. It’s this, or non-balsam. Now there are 80 kinds of shampoo – an entire aisle dedicated to just shampoo. And people aren’t stuck having to pick between just whatever someone wants to offer them. So now companies have to listen and respond (e.g. organics and pseudo-organics). A lot of them won’t change their minds – they’re arrogant – so they keep coming up with some new thing that you have to have and using pseudo-science to tell you that you must have it – “ours has microbeads that are scientifically proven to…” But think of companies like Apple. They don’t say (unlike Microsoft) you have to buy our stuff, or we’ll make deals to package it, constrict your license, pay people to abandon compatibility, stop support, etc. etc. Apple just says, “here – this just works” – that’s what people are asking for in droves. They were very late, which is why a lot of us are stuck with our PCs – because other businesses – corporations – who think like Microsoft does – bought Microsoft products in droves. But once you can get outside their aegis (mobile devices, etc) – apple is king. No words over their sign – just a picture of an apple. They’re listening. People want simple.

So why should people pay you to do what you do? Because you’re a member of _______? All it takes to beat that is a) more choices and b) someone who adds value. Adding value is all about the verb. What do you do specifically that’s different than your competitor? What verbs can I expect from you that I can’t get elsewhere? That’s what needs prominence on a business web site. The emblems are fine – I don’t meant to knock them – I’ve got no problem with emblems per se. they might lend some confidence – but they’re secondary and should occupy a secondary content area – the footer – a secondary sidebar area – an ABOUT page, etc. Check your site stats: if you’re doing dynamic content right, I’ll bet the memberships section doesn’t get nearly the traffic your dynamic content does.

Should I use more photos or videos on my site?

My rule of thumb is to put one photo on any page that’ll sustain it. In other words – that it’s appropriate to have one on. You wouldn’t put one on your site map page – it would just be annoyingly in the way. But on any real content page, there should be one, in my opinion – right aligned at the second paragraph is ideal. If it’s a particularly long page, do two. One right aligned toward the top, one left aligned farther down.

Photos normally have zero SEO value in themselves. But there’s a way to embed at least three sets of tags in any photo and get great SEO value out of them. So they can have that nice, added boost for the page, if you have an SEO person put them in.

Videos can add a ton of value – especially if, instead of uploading the video to your own site, you put it in Youtube, and then embed the youtube code in your site. Youtube is, of course, the largest social network. So, if your videos are creative enough, you can really do some great marketing with them. The same rules apply to them as to blog posts, however.

Incidentally, videos and images (if you take a lot of photos) can be a pain if placed on individual pages – but it’s good form these days to put them into your blog. I’d really only recommend that if you were doing a lot of other text-based updates, and the visuals merely punctuate those or are added into them. Often, I’ll utilize a transcript of my video as the blog post, or I’ll write a post precisely in order to feature a visual image. I wouldn’t advise swarming your blog with videos and images – you’ll lose people, unless that’s precisely the blog’s theme – a vlog (video log) or photoblog. That’s fine to do, too – just remember that text, of some sort, accompanying your posts, is best for SEO value. You could also create an offsite video or photo, and use your onsite blog as a blog. Lots of options. Be sure to feature your videos prominently on your home page. I use a video instead of a personal photo. What’s the difference? A video is just a photo that talks. Also, your web site aside,  you could just use your Youtube channel as a video blog. In general, though, visual stuff – options for people driven by that – is good marketing.

Should I use social media – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc?

Um… yeah. That’s like asking if you should market. Seriously. In a web 2.0 world, if you’re *not* using social media effectively, you really aren’t marketing at all. It’s as if you’ve chosen the corner of the map where 10% of the people are, and ignored where 90% of the people have gone. You could actually market entirely from social media without even having a web site. I wouldn’t recommend it, ideally, but I’d do it in a heartbeat if I had no money to start with, even before I’d spend a dime on a web site. The wonderful thing from a competition standpoint is that most small business people have absolutely no idea how to use social media effectively, so it’s still really wide open. That’s why some consulting time can be beneficial, of course.

First thing I expect to see when I land on a web 2.0 web site? *Prominently* placed icons that link to your social media profiles so people can add, follow, or join you. But of course, if you just create the profiles and the links and walk away, it’s not going to do much. Each social media type requires a certain amount of interaction, time, and attention to be successful. All startups go to social media now. The only people that are reticent are those who started their businesses in a web 1.0 world. In web 1.0, everyone got e-mail and a web site – but reticent web zero people said they didn’t see the need for a web site or understand the point of e-mail – they didn’t want to exchange messages online – they were worried about privacy – they didn’t believe this was necessary to their industry – and they said they’d always use just phone and fax. Those people are either not working in that field now, or they’ve changed their minds. Or else they live in a tiny and dwindling community of like-minded fellows that are holding out for “retirement”. In web 2.0 there are just as many people saying they don’t see the business potential in Twitter and Facebook (most of them claim their particular industry is uniquely unsuited – “Sure I can see it for x company, but people I don’t believe it’s going to be effective for people in my industry” (they’re quite wrong, of course – because people already are. For every industry there are three significant groups – those who are trying to ignore social media (like people once tried to ignore e-mail), a huge group of people trying to treat social media like a license to spam (they’re going to fulfill their own prophesy – for them – no, it won’t be effective), and there’s a smaller number using it very successfully in any industry. Just as with “going on the internet” was in web zero, there are plenty of people saying they just aren’t interested in changing – they’re worried about privacy, don’t want to exchange messages in the new medium, don’t want to risk negative backlash, etc. You see where I’m going.

So it’s just necessary to really shift and realize that web 1.0 is dead. Dynamic sites beat static sites consistently, hands-down in search engine results. Twitter and Facebook are the new “word of mouth”, the new “networking”, and in many ways the new “yellow pages”. I’d hate to be reduced to just hanging flyers and waiting on yellow page calls in the current environment, while occasionally blitzing people with spam. Social media offers a rich environment for marketing to anyone that can be genuine. It requires authenticity. If you can do that, you should be in social media. Short answer? Um… yeah.

Should I use a mobile (cell phone) contact widget on my site?

Only if you want prospects to text you and you plan to respond quickly. If you find either of those annoying or unlikely, no. You could also just say, on a CONTACT page, “call or text me on my mobile”, include your number and skip the widget for maximum compatibility with more networks.

Market Moose builds web 2.0 web sites, performs search engine optimization (SEO), and provides consulting on internet marketing strategy – nationwide, all industries, any kind of business or organization.

Web 2.0 Sites that Work!

Services:

Build New Site or Niche Site Overhaul Existing Site Layout, Style, Graphics, Look and Feel Navigation, Organization, Structure Content Creation, Editing,

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Lead capture Localization (target areas) Brand and Site Promotion Social Media

Consulting Training Site Maintenance Site Modifications Remote Support Internet Marketing Plan

Three ways to work with us:

1. Your site needs an overhaul, makeover, or complete build and you need a package deal
2. You have an exact list of specific items you want done & need a quote for only very specific tasks
3. You need consulting, training, or site maintenance and need to purchase a block of hours

Packages (build or overhaul a site): Dynamic content platforms for easy site owner updates. Keep your site attracting new & repeat visitors and gain ever-increasing SEO points!

Marketing Essentials – includes:
Style: Match site colors and template to your logo, if you have one – create custom color set, if you don’t. Standardize your font set and overall look and feel to create a more organic site appearance. Layout: Create a custom layout for your home page, to maximize effectiveness of placing information for SEO, and your marketing presentation. Secondary pages get standard layout. Visual Enhancement: Utilize photos and/or emblems in strategic ways on the site to help site’s marketing appeal to multiple personality models. Photos from alamode, public domain, or public licensed. Navigation: Enhance user friendliness and marketing with a rational navigation scheme, including both internal links and hierarchical navigation. Content: Create several unique pages, including your home page and core content pages, and other pages based on data collection from you. Localization: Create local content page(s) to increase search engine (SEO) and marketing value (e.g. visitor confidence in your local expertise). Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Both front-end and back-end SEO, including: multiple sets of custom meta-tags, internal links, rich-URLs, embedded search terms, keyword-rich content, and other techniques. Create search engine XML sitemap. Properly submit sitemap to search engines. Create key directory entries. Social Media: Create prominent links to your social media venues (e.g. facebook and twitter). Reference your dynamic content in other key social venues. Lead Capture: Create multiple custom lead capture form(s) for strategic use throughout the site, to help convert web site hits to contacts. Marketing: Ensure prominent placement and effective organization of necessary decision-making information to help convert site hits to contacts. Guide: Provide you with a custom, post-design PDF guide to your site’s customization, including how-to info, advice on maintaining the site’s effectiveness, and options for further customization or consulting to grow your business. Note: this package includes no consulting, training, site maintenance, or graphic design.
Essentials Plus Too – includes:
Everything in the Marketing Essentials Package Consulting, Training, Maintenance: Two hours of personalized consulting, customized training, or web site maintenance/modifications to be used any time over the year after the initial site build. Want help learning to use Twitter and Facebook to grow your business? Lock in those benefits now, so you can draw on them as you need them. Note: this package includes no graphic design.
Essentials Plus Image - includes:
Everything in the Marketing Essentials Package Consulting, Training, Maintenance: Two hours of personalized consulting, customized training, or web site maintenance/modifications to be used any time over the year after the initial site build. Want help learning to use Twitter and Facebook to grow your business? Lock in those benefits now, so you can draw on them as you need them. Your Brand: Your choice of either: a custom logo for your web site, a custom site header and background, or a flash slider using premium images or photography. E-mail Template: A custom e-mail marketing template that looks similar to your web site, for use in your e-mail marketing: e.g. e-mail flyers, e-mail newsletters, or other marketing campaigns. This helps you present a single brand image, with consistency between your web site and your e-mail marketing. Professional Imagery: We use up to three pieces of our choice of professional imagery, properly licensed, placed strategically throughout the site, to enhance the professional appearance.
Marketing Professional – premium “pro” package includes:
Everything in the Marketing Essentials Package Stand Out: BOTH a professional logo AND a custom header/background (or flash slider) Multiple Directory Submissions – inbound links from professional and other directories, carefully chosen, can not only contribute to SEO, but make you more search-able in general Online Press Release - a properly created and submitted press release can contribute especially well to SEO Ongoing Encouragement and Help: Three hours = 6x 30 minute marketing appointments – to go over your marketing strategy and help you continue to grow and succeed. Can be used for consulting, training, or site maintenance/modifications.
Web Site Launch
Just want the site turned on? No SEO, no marketing frills. You give us the basic information about your company, and we get your web site setup and running. If you’re not planning to use your web site for attracting new clientelle or growing the business right now, but do need to quickly launch a respectable and sophisticated or simple web presence and/or to take advantage of the online ordering and application(s), rate sheets, or listings features, this is the package for you. If you’re wanting to use the site to grow your business through internet marketing, go with the premium or basic package instead.
Marketing Director – custom package or consulting package:
There are two versions of this package:1. Custom Package – You direct, we build: You directly guide the project: decide, plan, and spec out exactly what we’ll do. We provide a quote, you pay, and we proceed with the work, subject to the limitations of your technical platform. Contact us for a free consultation. 2. Consulting Package – We direct, you build: For people comfortable with doing the online work themselves, but who need pure consulting on the ‘what to do’  to make it effective for internet marketing, we manage the project and meet with you by phone and/or remote media for routine consultations, as well as exchange e-mail status updates and maintain project documents for action items. If you’re technically-inclined, can do the work, and feel comfortable relying on us as the brain, we really excel at that, and can help you spend your productive internet marketing time in ways that drive business.Consulting is actually our core service. Don’t hesitate to book a couple of hours of time with us – it can be worth a lifetime of clientelle. If you’ve never done this with us before, contact us for a free consultation on how to get started with our service.

Effective SEO Solutions

Effective SEO involves front end SEO, back end SEO, & external SEO! White hat techniques. Updated for Web 2.0 & Google.

• Front End SEO: consists of strategic placement of content, judicious use of internal links, and dynamic content opportunities.
• Back End SEO: involves search terms embedded in many kinds of tags on every page, as well as XML site maps, and other techniques.
• External SEO: ranges from effective use of social media to marketing through off-site content, effective back links, etc.

You can do a lot for your site, and we can help through consulting or a dynamic site build but, for some SEO, you may want us to do the hands-on work.

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Effective Hyperlinks

Title Tag Optimization

Building Back Links

Video: 3 Things Search Engines Want from Your Web Site

In this video, Daniel DiGriz discusses the three primary things that search engines, like Google, want from your web site. These are also the things that make it most effective for internet marketing with site visitors.

Hi. I’m Daniel DiGriz, president of Market Moose. I’d like to talk with you about the three things that search engines are looking for in your website.

The first thing is original content. By “original,” we mean that it’s unique to your website. It doesn’t appear anywhere else on the Web. A lot of people think that it’s okay to lift content off of other sites and use that in their own sites. Sometimes, I’ll even see people make blog posts out of news reports that they found on The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal websites. The problem with this is that search engines are well aware that this happens. First, they detect the site that had that content the longest, or the first site that put it up, and they rank that site higher. After all, they’re copy-worthy. You borrowed their material. Second, they rank websites that have copied that material much lower. If your site consists largely of material that you have borrowed from elsewhere on the Web, you’re going to want to replace that with original content. So, the idea is for you as the site owner to contribute to the site’s content yourself, and to structure that content in such a way that it is effective for marketing and contains the key things that people need to make the decision to deal with you.

The second thing that search engines want is relevant content. By “relevant,” they mean the same things that consumers mean when they’re searching for material on the Web. If I’m a consumer and I want to find a mortgage broker in, say, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, what I’m going to do is type, “mortgage broker vancouver island bc.” If those words do not appear in the website that I’m looking for, the website is not going to appear in the search results, either. So, the idea is that the content you’re writing should be relevant to two things. First, it should be relevant to your industry. It should contain things like the types of services that you provide. Second, it should be relevant to your locale. No one goes to the Web and simply types in the words, “real estate agent.” If they do that, they’ll get real estate agents in New Mexico when they’re looking for real estate agents in North Carolina. Instead, they’re going to type in “real estate agent” or “realtor” and then a place name, such as the city and state. So, you want to make sure that the content that you are writing is highly localized (highly relevant, that is) to your locale, and also highly relevant to the services that you offer.

So, to recap: search engines want content that is original and content that is highly relevant.

Lastly, what Google and other search engines are looking for these days is content that is frequently updated or fresh. Back in the day when search engine optimization first took hold, it was all about simply being found and using techniques to locate your site, but there are a lot more websites now. Many of those websites – especially blogs and forums – are dynamic sites. They are updated all of the time, frequently changing and having additional content added to them. Search engines tend to rank those sites more highly these days. So, if you have the old-fashioned static site from, say, five or six years ago with about five pages – a homepage, a “contact us” page, an “about us” page, and a couple of others – then that site is far less likely to be found than any of your competitors that have a dynamic site. A dynamic site is one in which you are updating the content frequently. By “frequently,” I don’t mean once every six months. I mean more like three times a week. What I tell people is, “If you’ll spend five minutes daily or ten minutes every other day doing a 100-word update to your site, you are far more likely to get traffic.” If that update is relevant and original, it will make your website more attractive to search engines than your competitors’ static websites which haven’t changed in months. That’s why most websites these days have a blog component. Business websites, for example, have really launched into blogging.

To summarize, the three things that search engines want are original or unique content, content that is highly relevant from a search engine and a searcher’s standpoint, and also content that is frequently and freshly updated. Keep these things in mind, and your site will dominate your competitors’ sites in your particular market.

Thanks very much. This is Daniel DiGriz once again from Market Moose Internet Marketing.

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