by Jennifer Laycock
One of the things you should be doing on a fairly regular basis for your web site is running a quick check on your keyword phrases so you can make tweaks to your copy. Just because a word or phrase was popular when you first optimized your site doesn’t mean it is now and regular keyword research can help you spot “holes” in the search results that you can fill by creating new content.
It’s important to run at least some basic keyword research updates every now and then so you can lay out plans for new content and make edits to old content. While you’re at it though, it’s also a good idea to review your content for your sales message.
Sometimes we get so comfortable with the way we do things, or the messages we send that we lose sight of how we’re coming across.
Drew points out what a subtle tweak can do to your message in a great post over at Small Business Branding.
He writes about how each and every time he stops by his dry cleaners, the ask him if he’s “just dropping off.” He isn’t, and always has to tell them he needs to pick items up as well. When he says this, the employees at the dry cleaners never fail to give off an air of frustration.
Drew says:
…the message they transmit is “it’s kind of a pain to have to get your stuff for you. I wish you were just dropping off.”I never leave feeling as though they appreciate my business. I leave feeling bad that I inconvenienced them.
Imagine how different it would feel if they approached the counter with a “do you have an order to pick up too?”
Tiny tweak. Major difference.
So the next time you run a round of keyword research and head back to your web site to tweak some copy, why not take a few moments to read it for message too. As you coming across in the manner you’d like? Is your copy open and inviting?
Is your copy leaving visitors with the tone and information you both need and want them to have?
If not, it might be time to do a little rewriting.
Free White Paper: How to Optimize for Google
A free 10 page white paper on how to optimize a website on Google the right way - so the website succeeds.
Read the rest here:
Tweaking Your Copy for SEO Purposes? Tweak it for Message too!
by Jennifer Laycock
One of my favorite tips when I’m talking about bloggers is sending folks off to Technorati to do a topical search in an attempt to build a new pitch list. It’s easy for marketers to focus in on finding the topical bloggers who focus on our vertical. Unfortunately, this can lead us down too narrow of a path and causes us to miss opportunities to expand our reach. That’s why it’s essential to look beyond the most common stops when building your pitch list.
When it comes time to build a pitch list, most people have a few sites in mind. Ones they already know are worth talking to because they’ve spent a little bit of time in the space. Once they get those first few sites listed however, they need to go out and do some research to find a few more.
For your average person, this means heading to Google.
First Stop: Google
Google is pretty much the granddaddy of all starting points when you’re searching for anything online. Why should sites to add to your pitch list be any different?
Let’s say you were trying to promote a new blues CD from an upcoming artist. A natural inclination would be to go out and run searches to for things like “blues blog.”
In fact, here’s what I get when I run that very search on Google:
If you go and visit any of those sites, it quickly becomes clear you’ve found the bloggers who spend the greatest majority of their time talking about the blues. In fact, if you visit some of the blogs on the list, you’ll find they write almost exclusively about albums. This makes them prime fodder for any pitch list you want to put together to promote that new CD.
That’s fine and dandy and it’s a good start.
The problem is, too many people stop here.
You need to keep rolling…
Second Stop: Blog Rolls
One of the easiest ways to build out your pitch list once you’ve found a few blogs is to browse through their blog roll for additional sites. The people who blog about a topic tend to be pretty immersed in that community and they tend to gather their favorite sites into lists called blog rolls.
These lists tend to appear in the sidebar navigation and often feature a nice mix of popular and niche blogs.
The great thing about using this method is you can often find newer blogs that will soon build up strong audiences, but are still relatively unknown. Bloggers tend to pick up new blog URLs by watching commenters or running their own topical searches, so chances are, they’re way more adept at finding good options than you will be.
Another benefit of working through a blog roll is the fact that you can reach the people who influence the blogger you are trying to influence. I wrote about this concept a few weeks back in my post on “Turning the Gears in the Viral Machine.”
Spend some time reading the blog of the person you’d like to reach. Chances are, you’ll notice a pattern in terms of smaller blogs they tend to link to or quote on a fairly regular basis. Then, focus on going after THAT blogger. Chances are, getting coverage from them will give you an even better shot at a pick-up than a direct pitch would have.
Why?
Because this type of indirect pitch uses the foundational principle of viral marketing to actually launch your viral marketing campaign. When a bigger blogger picks the story up from a trusted source, the story has credibility. When they pick it up from a smaller blogger, they still get the “ego” benefit of having been the first to share it with the masses. When they do the right thing and refer back to the original poster, they strengthen the relationship from both sides and make future interactions even more powerful.
Most companies that build pitch lists are going to do a pretty good job by working their way through the first and second stops listed above. You’ll have a nice list of recognized and authoritative blogs you can make contacts with and that will reach your target audience. That’s a good thing.
That said, there’s a common problem with using this approach. The biggest one is that the sites you find using this method are the sites everyone else is finding using this method. That means there’s a good chance you are competing against a lot of other companies when you try to get their attention. It also means you are limiting your outreach to the audience that is already most likely to find and buy your product on their own.
After all, a blogger who exclusively writes posts about blues albums has a pretty good shot of writing about the new album you are promoting, even if you don’t end up pitching it to them. That’s why I like to add a third level to any pitch, one that goes outside the super focused niche blogs and reaches a more diverse audience.
Third Stop: Related Searches
Sometimes, there’s a strong benefit to pitching complimentary bloggers rather than topical bloggers. If you do your searching right and pick the right types of sites, you can end up getting some nice exposure to an audience that probably wouldn’t have a shot at hearing about you otherwise. While the overall conversion rates and engagement rates from these types of pick ups is obviously going to be lower (because it’s simply not as targeted), it can be a very nice way to test out some new audiences.
I saw this in action a year or so ago when I was contacted by a company that sells household products built from sustainable sources. They were fans of The Lactivist and had seen me write about organic foods and the rain barrels my husband had built for our back yard. They were looking to promote their new line of bamboo towels and blankets. Since bamboo is a renewable resource and I was writing to an audience that was interested in (but not dedicated to) renewable living, they asked if I’d like to review their product.
They sent a bamboo towel and a bamboo blanket my way and I loved them. I’ve written about them several times on the site and included them in my year end gift buying guide. Based on reader feedback, they did a nice job of reaching out to some new customers. They also caught my eye and my interest with their pitch because it wasn’t another baby product or breast feeding product. Bloggers get a little bored reviewing the same stuff over and over…it’s nice to change things up a bit.
So, continuing along our earlier theme of pitching a blues CD, you might head off to Twitter and run a search to see who is listening to the blues…
From there, you could easily run a quick scan to see which posters have a nicer following on Twitter.
You could also head off to a site like Technorati and run a similar search. For example, you could check to see who is blogging about Kingston Mines, the legendary Blues club on Halsted St. in Chicago.
The key here, is to look past the blogs that focus on your topic and to seek out influential bloggers that have overlap in interest. This way you are pitching something they and their audience will be interested in, but you won’t be pitching something they or their audience is tired of.
Mix all three steps together and you’ll find yourself landing coverage on a wide range of blogs that will give you a much better chance of reaching a vast audience and gathering some extended pickup.
Free White Paper: How to Optimize for Google
A free 10 page white paper on how to optimize a website on Google the right way - so the website succeeds.
Credit:
Dig Deep With Your Research When Building Pitch Lists
by Jennifer Laycock
I’ve been having a grand time reading through Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere. I absolutely love their annual release of information because as both a marketer and a communicator, I love to find out what sends people scrambling for their blog to share their thoughts. This year’s report is pretty thorough and has a lot of juicy bits of info that give us insight into the communicators of the web. In this post though, I want to dive into the section that talks about what gets people blogging.
When I talk about blogging or social media in presentations, I tend to include a chart from one of the past Technorati reports.
What Sparks Those Blog Posts?
This image looks at the number of daily blog posts tracked by Technorati from the fall of 2004 to the winter of 2007. The team at Technorati has gone in and added markers to let you see what world events were taking place at different points in time. In some instances, the correlation between posting volume and topic is crystal clear.
During the fall of 2005, there’s a sharp drop off in blogging activity. That drop took place in the days leading up to the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. With such a huge portion of the population either preparing for or fleeing from the storm, blogging activity fell sharply. There’s then a huge burst in activity immediately after the storm came ashore and a second steep drop off when the levees break and things go crazy.
What really strikes me as telling about the chart though, is the enormous spike in the summer of 2006. Now chances are high if I’d asked you what the hottest blogging topic in 2006 was, you would NOT have said the Israel/Hezbollah conflict. In fact, I’d wager a great deal of you had even forgotten it happened. Yet there were more than 2.5 million posts made when that happened, over half a million more than any other event so far that year.
It’s easy enough for us to write blogs off as the sites that talk about singular passions. The mother who blogs about her children, the consultant who blogs business advice, the gossip monger who blogs about celebrity romance. We see blogs as topical and focused…and to an extent they are.
What the latest Technorati data tells us though is that bloggers cover an average of five distinct topics. These topics tend to be related, but they still offer variation.
Here on Search Engine Guide, we blog about search marketing, blogging, social media, viral marketing and even a little bit of usability and site coding. On one of my hobby blogs, I blogged ONLY about bento lunches. On another hobby blog I covered topics like parenting, breast feeding, natural living, organic foods and my faith. While the most successful blogs still seem to focus on pretty tight niches, bloggers are growing and exploring and they’re starting to broaden their horizons in order to hold the attention of their readers and themselves.
Bloggers Do Not Have One Track Minds
When Technorati decided to gather data on blog topics, they found further proof that blog topics are diversifying.
Both personal and professional topics are equally popular. Forty percent of bloggers consider their blogging topics outside of these categories. “Other” blog topics include: 2008 election, alternative energy, art, beauty, blogging, comics, communication, cooking/food, crafts, design, environment, Internet/Web 2.0, Jamaica, and media/journalism.
Three-quarters of bloggers cover three or more topics. The average number of topics blogged about is five.
While few people will be surprised to see topics like technology, politics, business, family updates and gaming on the list…there were a few categories that surprised me. I didn’t expect to learn that nearly 20% of bloggers regularly blog about religion or that 30% regularly blog about music and film. I also didn’t really expect to find personal topics outweighed technology and business, but that’s likely just a reflection of the way I view the web.
Which serves as a good wake up call to those of us in marketing.
It’s easy for us to focus in on our own little niches and the areas in which we’re comfortable. Easy to forget just how many people are out there having conversations on their blogs the same way they’d have conversations around the water cooler or over coffee.
It’s something we need to remember as we look to build relationships with bloggers. We need to remember they are real people with varied and in-depth interests. We need to learn to look for cross-over in topics and we need to learn how to approach complimentary blogs rather than limiting ourselves to purely “on topic” blogs when it comes time to seek coverage.
Free White Paper: How to Optimize for Google
A free 10 page white paper on how to optimize a website on Google the right way - so the website succeeds.
View post:
Bloggers Really ARE Talking About Everything…