Content is King

Most SEO companies demand content, and lots of it, in order to generate the high search rankings that are their ultimate goal. You can buy content, hire freelancers, or hire full time staff, but are your long term goals being met by all this content being spread across the "interwebs"? What exactly are you accomplishing?

In the short term, this plan can be effective, but in the long term, you may end up driving untargeted traffic that only wastes bandwidth. For example, one company I worked for targeted the keywords, "signal enhancement" and a majority of the content generated focused on these keywords. Because "enhancement" can be paired with other words, most notably "pen*s", we drove a lot of traffic from the search engines for "pen*s enhancement".

Watch for any keywords that may be paired with porn or gambling casinos, as they can unfairly keep you from generating the rankings you desire. Most blackhat SEO companies utilize similar word pairings to drive traffic to their sites from unsuspecting surfers.

To battle this, a company should put in place a content strategy plan, along with an editorial calendar, that focuses on your entire set of keywords, from top ten to long tail, to ensure that your content is written FOR the user, not the search engines. It should meet BOTH criteria - keyword frequency and information for the reader that is engaging, informative and serves their needs.

Ultimately, it's your visitors that are important. You need them to pick up the phone or place an order online in order to drive revenue. Keep this in mind as you build your content  and your content will drive the right traffic to your site, keep them engaged, and act.

Do You Have A Case of the Mondays? (NSFW)

I love istock. Yu Yu and I were looking for royalty-free images for a logo she needs to develop and we stumbled upon CSA Images. As we were reviewing these, we decided to come up with some captions for a few.

NOTE: We're using low-res comps because this is just for fun. We highly encourage you to visit istockphoto.com, which has a wealth of amazing images, illustrations, video available for download at very reasonable prices.

"And this is how we plan to screw over the employees."

"Why yes, I DO lead the Marketing Department. How did you know?"

 "Why yes, I did overdo the Xanax today... why is the wall paper moving?"

"Hey! You're zipper's open."

Man: "Honey, I have to confess. I'm a teabagger."

Woman: "Oh, honey, I love the Tea Party, too!"

"I hope he doesn't discover my balls are tucked in."

"Oh no, I think they know I peed in the office coffee this morning..."

Enjoy.

Improving Market Share Through the Development of an Interactive Online Presence (Part 2)

PHASE TWO:


Internet Marketing:
Consists of traditional search engine marketing, traffic analysis, link exchanges with high ranking related web sites, posting and linking back from related web sites, online advertising, etc.

Blog Marketing:
The purpose of the blog is to update visitors to the site on a regular basis. The blog should encompass more than company-centric content and more on your industry as a whole, broadening your SEO capabilities, enabling RSS registration, and providing a web destination that is empirically recognized as the place to go for information on industry-related topics, segmented by your company’s main product offerings.  Short articles of interest to visitors, links to other sites of interest, comments and responses to industry announcements, etc. should be scheduled on a at least a weekly basis for B2B marketing, with a higher frequency for consumer marketing.

Explore rich media such as webinars, video demos, films, interviews of your staff - humanizing your company, providing faces to go with names, goes far when engaging your customers and prospects.

Let's talk a second about content. It can be re-used, but it has to be done smartly. What I've done in the past is have different copywriters re-write the same content for different purposes. A blog post can be extended to become an article for distribution. An article can be augmented to become a white paper. Short paragraphs from any of these items can be linked to the rest of the content on most social media and blogs. Think about how you can reuse what you already have.

Email Marketing Implementation Strategy:
Persuasively written personalized email campaigns are far more effective than traditional direct mail campaigns. Opt-in email newsletters are an inexpensive yet highly profitable way to contact customers and prospects on a regular basis to announce company news, product launches, staff introductions, industry-related news, job openings and more, without the high cost of printing, postage and labor to process a printed newsletter version. This process describes a one-to-many distribution method. Before the internet, it was always a many-to-many distribution which resulted in people having different versions of their latest contact with you. Now, you have control of who sees what when. You can even have a membership-driven pre-announcement version for those who pay for the privilege.

Marketing can send email messages in any format including text, html, embedded graphics and attachments. Monitor and analyze your email campaigns with reports to learn who reads the emails and who clicks through to your web site.

Email Alerts and List:
Using an email marketing tool such as Relevant Tools, you can send email alerts to all the registered users informing them whenever a bulletin or announcement is uploaded to the site. This can also be used for regularly scheduled email newsletters directed to different target audiences, such as prospects, press/media, Spanish speakers, etc. This will cut down on costs and help in the timely broadcasts of information to those who request it. The list should be updated automatically as soon as a visitor enrolls to receive the email.

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT:

Three Types of Social Media
1. Publish
2. Share
3. Network

Social Media: The Publish Construct 

Everyone can publish anything for everyone
• Publish everything we have anywhere we can
• Monitor what others publish, promote it
• Empower your customers to publish
• Monitor What’s Published
• Promote Flattering Content
• Empower Customers to Publish 

Social Media: The Share Construct 

Anyone can promote anything to everyone
• Monitor what’s being shared about us
• Find where our audience hangs out
• Promote our content and other content
• Produce content our audience will love and want to share 

Social Media: The Networking Construct 

Anyone can connect with everyone from anywhere
• Make friends
• Find your existing connections
• Network through groups
• Add to your email signature, blog articles, bio or profile…
• Be helpful
• Answer questions
• Share interesting content
• Make connections

Activities:
• Join Social Networks
• Develop consistent, in-depth profiles
• Meet people and start conversations
• Answer questions – help others
• Ask questions – trust others’ advice

Become a Real Member of the Community:
• Add value to the community
• Ask and answer questions
• More effective than live cocktail parties
• No boundaries of time or space
• Other people can listen in easily

Measuring Results
• Blog Subscribers & Visitors
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Inbound Links
• Facebook Fans & Activity
• Retweets

Other Metrics to Pay Attention To:
• Video views on YouTube
• Friends on Facebook or LinkedIn
• Votes for blog articles
• Posts in forums
• Questions answered on Yahoo Answers

Online Advertising Campaigns Deployment Strategy:
Plan and implement an online marketing strategy to generate targeted traffic to the web sites. There are many aspects to online advertising from simple banner ads, Google Adwords, to rich media placements. Identifying the correct sites to advertise on is key.

Evaluate not only the unique visitor numbers (to maximize exposure to your market), but location, if you are focused on a particular market. Review "real estate" - when negotiating with a site, check what ads sizes and locations are available and whether sub-pages would be preferable. Ad management and rates are all over the place. Test lots of ad sites AND A/B test ads to see what drives traffic. Is it an offer for a free white paper? Is it a free 90 day trial of your online service? Testing different approaches is crucial to find out what are the emotional touchpoints that will drive click-throughs to your web site.

Online Advertising Campaigns consists of the following fundamentals:
• Online Advertising Campaign Management
• Advertising Creative Concept Development
• Media Buying / Placement Services
• Adwords/Adsense
• Pay per Click (PPC)
• Cost per Action (CPA)
• Banner Advertising
• Web Site Sponsorships

Link Building Implementation Strategy
Generating quality back-links from websites, blogs and other online destinations to drive traffic to the website and increase Google PageRank. The trick to making this a long term, qualified traffic growth strategy is to links between high quality, relevant sites between your web site and other industry related sites, authorities, etc. Usually calling this page "Resources", and be genuine that these links ARE actually resources, can drive cross traffic between your sites for mutual benefit.

Example Link Exchange Acceptable Link Guidelines*:

• Page on which link exists must be cached by Google.
• Page on which link exists features 150 outbound links or less.
• Page (or Home Page) on which link exists has a PR3 or above.
• Site in which link is placed features no more than 25,000 links.
• Site in which link is placed is not blacklisted or identified as a SPAM site.
• Links must last a minimum of 90 days. Obviously, you are looking for maximum life span.
• Links should be on domains that are registered in the locations of interest (India for domestic marketing, international sites as targeted by your marketing plan.).
• Link page should not have junk links or unrelated links.
• Site in which link is placed should be theme-based and not a directory.
• Linking sites should have different class C IP addresses.
• Linking domain should not be redirected to another address.
• Page where our link is located should not redirect to a different domain.
• There must be a direct link to our site in spite of having certain redirects.

* These are the minimum criteria. The criteria may be changed as needed.

These two blog posts detail the very basics of internet marketing. If you have specific comments about your particular industry or have specific challenges you'd like me to respond to, please let me know by sharing a comment below.

Why HR Needs to Understand Founder Exit Strategy

Exactly what is “Founder Exit Strategy”? Long ago, I discovered that being successful meant always planning all activities with a focus on what the entrepreneur plans to do with the business in the end. Does he want to take it public? Is she planning on a short exit through selling the organization? Do they plan to bequeath the business to their heirs? This is what I call founder exit strategy.

Each department should be responsible for their part of meeting that goal. HR should work closely with Marketing to share resources, cross-team, to strategize on what activities can be done to acheive the exit strategy. Let’s say the plan is to go IPO. Are there external funders or other stakeholders that need to be advised? Will the company need them to achieve their goal? If so, what VCs or other funding resourcers do we want to attract? What messaging will attract these VCs? What sort of personnel will be required and how do we want to attract them?

Brainstorm ideas, prioritize those to focus on the short-term, new initiatives to test as resources become available, and develop a complete plan that addresses the needs of all stakeholders. You may also want to transform the work environment to facilitate the implementation of the plan. Team growth or decrease may require changes to the floorplan configuration for more conference and meeting spaces, or an expanded space for R&D, training venues, modernization, for examples. Marketing can work to ensure that the space conveys the same attributes which align with branding and messaging. For example, you can’t have an internet company in an office that looks like a bank. Dress codes are different as well. The HR policy makers may be persuaded to add word-of-mouth benefits, like being a pet-friendly office, or “ties not allowed” – something interesting that becomes a potential conversation starter or a mnemonic.

What other ways do you see synergy between marketing and HR? Leave them in the comments below. Cheers.

Improving Market Share Through the Development of an Interactive Online Presence

PART ONE:

Internet Marketing encompasses a number of discrete disciplines ranging from SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Link Exchange, Blog Marketing, SMM (Social Media Marketing), and Online Advertising, among others. Before anyone embarks on this effort, your existing web sites should be carefully evaluated to see if tweaks to the existing site are enough or if your site will require a complete redesign  to maximize the return on investment.

Imagine you're having a dinner party. You're investing in invitations, calls, maybe follow up calls and reminders to ensure your guests will arrive. But once they arrive, there's nothing for them to do, there's no food or liquor (the horrors!), and maybe they keep trying to open doors that go nowhere. Not a nice experience. Are you doing this to your prospects?

As part of this process, establish a baseline of analytics. Big word - basically just means data. You don't need a lot, but these are pretty important to establish before you launch anything new.

IMPORTANT BASELINE DATA TO COLLECT:

• TRAFFIC: Total unique visitors
• TIME ON SITE: This is the metric that Facebook is famous for. Time on Site shows visitors are reading and engaging. You want this as high as possible.
• % INTERNATIONAL: % of visitors from specific regions - base this on where your business focus is.
• % BOUNCEBACKS: To determine the amount of traffic that showed up, realized your site wasn't what the were searching for and left. 
• KEYWORDS: Self-determined. Where do you rank when searching for your SEO keyword terms via google, bing, yahoo? Cross match this with what organic searched are actually driving traffic, but eliminate all keywords built on brand or company names (for this purpose).
• FB FANS: # fans who've liked your Facebook Page. You could also mention #messages by non employees to measure engagement.
• LI MEMBERS: # members to your Linkedin Group and/or Profile.
• TWITTER FOLLOWERS: # members to your Twitter Profile, and sweet fancy moses, make sure you get some sort of twitter verification service to keep spammers out of your follower list. You want real traffic from real people.
• SMM TRAFFIC: By reading your analytics, you can determine the source for traffic by searching for facebook, linkedin, twitter, and the rest of the social media and web sites. Interestingly, Stumbleupon comes up higher than you'd think. You might want to invest some time there...Break these out by site.
• BACKLINKS: You want to know who and what quality sites are linking back to your site. This gives you credibility to search engines.

ESTABLISH MEASURABLE GOALS:

Examples:

1. Drive traffic to the web site, increasing unique visitors by 10% each month. (EX: Month 1=100, Month 2=110, Month 3=121)
2. Drive international traffic to the sites, to ultimately eclipse domestic traffic. Increase international traffic by 10% each month.
3. Decrease the bounceback from 78% to 45% of visitors within six months.
4. Increase the search keyword universe to include organic search terms beyond branding – 2 additional non-brand keywords or phrases added to top 100 search terms each month.
5. Increase fans/members/followers to social media sites by 5% each month.
6. Demonstrate traffic increases from social media efforts – increase traffic sources from social sites by 5% each month.
7. Increase Google PageRank from 2 to 3.
8. Increase backlinks by 20 per month.

PHASE ONE:

Fix your web site to include add-ons that enable the company to offer interactive content and engagement activities for visitors to your web site. Any redesign should focus on the user experience, facilitating the user’s need to fulfill their information requirements and enable ease in communicating with you.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine specialists optimize sites for specific keywords and engines so that the sites will rise through the ranks and appear on the first page of search results on Google and Yahoo!.You can either hire an external SEO firm to ensure that our sites can be found on high-ranking relevant web sites all over the Internet, hire an in-house expert if you plan to drive most of your revenue from your site, or try it yourself. You'll figure out that one or the other will probably suit your needs best in the long run.

Incorporating search engine friendly design and content strategies will improve search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your web site. Optimization is the practice of refining and reworking the content and tags on individual pages and graphic files in order to facilitate a search engine’s spider software to evaluate the web sites’ contents as more applicable to certain keywords and categories.

This includes optimizing titles, meta tags, alt tags, keyword tags, comments, and file names to add an increase in rankings.  Individual pages are tweaked for more specific phrases. Keyword density is measured and improved where possible. Site architecture is structured to assist the spiders in listing every page of your site. Many other tasks are done, all with the achievement of a higher-ranking score as the goal. All pages will be optimized for search engine ranking and include google analytics for web site traffic analysis. 

When stakeholders are satisfied with work, work with your ISP to launch the site.

After this, the real work starts. The next post will introduce Internet Marketing principles. See you then.

Top 4 Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Fail

My entire career has been focused on startups and small to medium-sized businesses that are anxious to take their company to the next level. IMHO, I have been quite successful in setting strategy to ensure that we take the necessary steps to take the company to the founder's exit strategy, whether that be selling the business, going IPO, or just growing the business to the next level as a private concern. My strategies usually coincide with investor deadlines - three to five years.

WHY ENTREPRENEURS CAN BE FUN OR CAUSE YOU TO HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
Entrepreneurs are different from the rest of us. I'm not an entrepreneur, but I've co-founded a company and I understand their psyche. They're risk takers, they're willing to give up most of their life - family, reputation, money, to make their concern viable. They're focused on a particular idea that means something to them personally. Other entrepreneurs pick their moment, building a company in one direction, nimbly changing their entire strategy when they see things aren't going to be successful. They make hard decisions, calculated risks, shared their office space to make payroll, anything to keep their business profitable. I admire these gentlemen (and they've always been gentlemen for me) because I'm not that type of risk taker and I'm jealous of that, because, while I have an entrepreneurial bent, my personal situation (being a single mother, lack of financial resources - I know - all excuses) compels me to work with my heroes throughout these long years. I'm a good partner for them because I'm completely in tune with them. I want to help them succeed and have the track record to prove it. Since 1991 or so. But you have to be flexible. You have to be able to work in chaos. I am sometimes called the Goddess of Chaos. I can handle it. A lot of people can't. These guys can be ferocious, temperamental, and abusive, but also highly creative, engaging do-ers. It also helps if they have personal charm and a sense of humor. :-) They'll need it to make it past Mistake #1.

1. DEALING WITH EMPLOYEES
I've worked with maybe 100 companies overall, in the U.S. and India, and there is a distinct juncture where I've seen them fail, and it has to do with employees. They started their companies by themselves and did everything. They think they know what they're doing and feel they know best what is good for their company. But now that they have employees, it's not just them anymore.

They fail when they don't take the leash off their senior staff that they hire. They need to trust them to do their jobs effectively. Good entrepreneurs aren't ego driven. They hire the best, and as my first CEO said to me, "You'll get enough rope to hang yourself." He threw me into a job I did not have much experience in and learned while running. We did great work and he has always been the entrepreneur that I compare all the rest to. He was a serial entrepreneur. He wanted to sail the world with his family on a beautiful Finnish sloop call Tekla and I helped him get there. He wanted to sell the company in order to make this dream happen. We succeeded, but as all people know during an acquisition, your internal Finance and Marketing people go first. Everyone who buys a company wants control over finances and the marketing strategy. They always think they know better. I know, when this is the CEO's exit strategy, that this is the death of my future for the company and it's okay. He protected me and I survived another year beyond him. I love that guy to this day.

Entrepreneurs need to hire the best possible people as their second-in-commands across their company, Finance, Operations, R&D, Marketing. they need to trust these people, who typically are experts in their fields, with experience beyond the CEO's companies, to provide strategies for growth, containment of costs while producing the maximum return on investment. They've learned best practices. They know how to hire the right people to meet objectives. Even with an MBA, an entrepreneur can be a fool. They can be total control freaks, focusing on small purchases instead of the big picture. Focusing on introducing new product lines that that don't work with all the investment in branding done over the previous years.

2. FOCUSING ON EGO INSTEAD OF THE BUSINESS
I've had CEOs who wanted speaking engagements on the world stage that could not speak proper English in a heavy accent. They did their presentations as sales engagements, angering the people I convinced to add him to their agenda. They were unfit for this limelight, yet insisted on being the voice of the company in spite of it consistently hurting the company's image. What do you do with a boss, who was once described as "just a farmer in a fancy suit"? He's your boss, he's ego-driven, surrounded by sycophants who tell him he's always right - there is no way to constructively discuss his personal issues.

Other entrepreneurs leave people in positions that they're really not capable of accomplishing and this has to do with longevity and loyalty, which are probably the hardest aspects for a CEO. If a person comes on board as your first employee, sharing your risk, believes in you, wants to do their best, but doesn't have the experience to take the company forward, it's hard on all sides. CEOs are loathe to replace these people, but they have to consider it a business decision. Businesses have no emotions. They look at the numbers. They look at the skill sets. If the CEO doesn't have that particular skill set to mentor them in the position and the person hasn't taken formal training to move themselves forward, it's time to part ways. Many people in India rely on this, and stay successful while impeding the progress of the company.

3. SHORT TERM THINKING

Entrepreneurs are best at making it happen and sometimes, when trying to make payroll for example, they'll take on a customer that is not part of their core business. While in some instances, this can create a whole new revenue stream or radically change the company's core business, it usually backfires in the long run. It ends up using valuable resources of the company in areas of expertise that may not be on par with customer expectations. 

Whenever cash flow becomes an issue, many entrepreneurs cut back on marketing programs that support the sales staff. Sales is the life blood of the company. Without sales revenues no one has a job for long. Marketing needs to support that sales funnel and ensure a healthy flow of qualified prospects are coming in. Sometimes Marketing has to work smarter, think differently, approach prospects in a different way at a lower cost. Work with your marketing staff before canceling that trade show or that film piece. There may be compelling reasons to keep that in the mix, while discontinuing printing 100,000 40-page catalogs every year.

When going IPO, CEOs can focus on the short term gains in order to "make their quarters". In the States, going IPO meant a series of quarterly growth showing continuing gains. I spent a lot of time convincing CEOs that we need to take a hit now and focus on the product development before we do another marketing thrust, because "you don't want to invite people to dinner, in a dirty home with no food to offer." These CEOs ended up in difficult situations, lots of bad press, SEC warnings about their communications during the "black period", all considerably hurting their initial offering price. Sometimes they need to wait, fix what's broken, then move forward, even if it means taking a bit longer to achieve their dream.

4. KNOW-IT-ALL SYNDROME 

As I said before, entrepreneurs started their companies by themselves and did everything. They think they know what they're doing and feel they know best what is good for their company. At some point, with some companies, they've lost focus, started facing month-over-month decline, watched newcomers enter the market and gobble up market share, or the industry itself starts to change in unanticipated ways. Sometimes staffing is an issue  - too many, not enough. They come to a point where they have no clear answer and they need outside help.

I come in as a game changer. It's a tough job. Restructuring teams and companies is probably the most difficult job you can have in business. Entrepreneurs need outsiders, advisors, people not inside their company, that can look at their business without any emotion. The company will tell me their goals and challenges, which is what I have to work with, and I need to put the right people in place across the teams to ensure we meet those goals. It's never pretty. It's always tough saying goodbye to people you genuinely like and wish you had a place for. You have to thank those who accepted positions that were less than they had before and see them become stellar in those new positions. You have to strive to be the best and be that role model for your teams and respect your entrepreneur. He took the most risk. He made this happen. He's responsible for your job. In the end, if he trusts you, it can be very, very successful. It's all up to him (or her!).

Why I'm in Love with Sarah Lacy and How to Improve Pando Daily

Sarah Lacy came to India for research on her book about entrepreneurs, Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos. I was fortunate to meet her and take her to visit villages in Rajasthan where we met people who were benefitting from VNL's solar powered GSM and broadband equipment for rural networks. I think she's great and her work at TechCrunch was phenomenal. When Michael Arrington decided to sell Tech Crunch to AOL, my first thought was "Oh, no, tell me this is not true." I knew TechCrunch would never be the same.

Some time later, Sarah Lacy left TechCrunch and started a new venture called Pando Daily, which I love. It's TechCrunch, but even better. (You have to read this inspiring post from Sarah on why she started Pando Daily.) The writers and executives she's gathered together make for a formidable team and I can only say good things about their future. I joined and get regular updates in my email of valuable content that I can use in my daily life to improve the work I do. I find it that valuable. Really. 

However, I do have a few concerns. How will they monetize their valuable content? Will I pay for it? Probably not. Do I visit their site often? Not as much as I should because the emails come to me fast and furious every day and I read all the complete posts as emails. I suggest they give me one paragraph and a link to get me back to their site. Their reader comments are good though, so I tend to visit on more interesting posts to read them and engage, but there's no like button. I'd love to be able to rate great comments that add to the story. Her readers are just as valuable as her writers in many ways. It's that awesome.

I'd also like a home page that lists the latest posts. I find the navigation to be cumbersome. I want to read more, feel more involved, but I have to decide between deals, people, companies, or culture, when I want to see all. It's not intuitive...

I encourage you to visit Pando Daily today. Sign up and get the posts in your emails. They're a fascinating take on the tech world from a global view point. Because Sarah has traveled everywhere, she understands that Apple in Silicon Vally equals China and beyond and it shows. I'm a huge fan and wish her the best in her new venture.