Speaker:
Chris “Silver” Smith, Lead Strategist, Netconcepts

A focused, well-written blog can get readers hooked on the blog and promote repeat visits to the website or garner subscriptions via RSS feeds and email newsletters. These recurring communications will help to tie potential customers to your site, encourage natural link building and increase repeat visits. Journalists are also more likely to follow a blog or subscribe via RSS than to visit the corporate site repeatedly. So, several avenues of search optimization and online marketing can be addressed with a single blog entity.

From the SEO benefits of business blogging to how it can help your customers, Jeff covers the basics of “who, what and when” of blogging. Read the full article at Practical eCommerce here.

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Solution: Use buzzworthy anecdotes, video and catchy titles

Results: A 14-percent increase in blog-driven sales and spikes of 1,000 sessions per day after each post that contribute to repeat traffic

Steve Spangler, famous for creating a 30-foot geyser of Diet Coke by dropping Mentos into a soda bottle, not only has mastered the art of science, but also the art of blogging to optimize natural search results and increase Web sales. Founder and CEO of Steve Spangler Science, a multichannel firm that sells educational toys, Spangler says the overall goal of his blog is to convey information in a fun, thought-provoking way. From a simple site with science toys and experiments, Steve Spangler Science has grown exponentially by using fun stories, catchy titles and newsworthy blog topics to catch the eyes of reporters, search engines and, ultimately, parents and teachers.

When he sat down to write his first blog, Spangler didn’t think he had anything interesting enough to discuss. However, after hearing that Insta-Snow, a product his company sells, was featured as a popular “stupid product” on a “Good Morning America” review of e-tailer Stupid.com, Spangler found what looked like a promising topic. According to Stephan Spencer, president and founder of Netconcepts, the SEM firm that works with Steve Spangler Science, leveraging a hot news story is one way to help drive Web site traffic. Spangler’s Insta-Snow blog piggybacked on the interest generated by the current media coverage by describing the story of a woman who got out of a speeding ticket after using the science toy. Spangler says she told the officer she had just left a science training seminar and convinced him she could make it snow. The officer told her that if she could, he would let her go without a ticket. Spangler says, “Lo and behold, she made snow by the side of the road. Not only did the officer excuse her ticket, he [also] asked for the Web site so he could buy Insta-Snow for his kids. We knew when we heard this story, it was like gold falling into our laps.”

What was it about this story that worked for Spangler’s blog? The anecdote surprised readers while showcasing the product’s usefulness or wow factor. “Myself and my customer service team are trained to know that when we hear a great story, we could be very successful by sharing it with everyone through our blog,” he says.

Another solution for increasing Web traffic via a blog is to use catchy titles to attract the attention of news outlets for additional exposure. For example, when blogging about one of his latest group trainings in Florida, Spangler planned to title the post, “Teachers perform hands-on science experiments as inquiry-based learning progresses in Bravard County.” Spencer said that to be effective, Spangler needed to find a great picture and develop a powerful title. Together, they came up with, “Parents Beware: Teachers Gone Wild.” Spangler says, “This was great Google juice! The search engines picked up on it, and we got links back to it from all over.” The flashy titles are fed through RSS and XML feeds to drive clickthroughs, which very quickly becomes viral marketing. Spangler also participates in media activities that drive traffic to find him through search engines. For example, each week his relationship with NBC/Channel 9 in Denver provides video clips placed both on his Web site and on YouTube. According to Netconcepts, these have trememdous viral reach, as well as support both link building and search placement.

In addition to using his own blog to fuel SEO results, Spangler also leverages blog interaction to drive clicks and links via social networking. He helps teachers develop their own science blogs for interaction with students, which often leads them to link to his blog in their postings. Again, this link activity and the blog visits that are a natural part of the blog development process for teachers and students all lead to better SEO results for Spangler’s site.

For small-business owners trying to increase Web traffic and generate more sales, Spangler says, “Two things are of utmost importance: 1.) Make sure you have something to say and [that] someone wants to hear it. Find some niche area on the Web where people are talking about what you are merchandising, or thinking about merchandising, and talk to them directly; 2.) Always ensure your blog features your own distinct voice. When starting a blog, a lot of business owners will see it as almost a diet pill. To stay with the same metaphor, a diet requires exercise, eating right and hard work—not simply a pill.”

Adding a blog isn’t a quick fix if there are holes in your business or marketing strategy, he points out, “but if hard work is put into it, and it is given a chance to develop and find its place in the online community, the results can be breathtaking.”

—Kate DeBevois

1. Allowing title tags to be auto-generated (from the post title, category name, etc.). Every category page and most permalink pages (i.e. post pages) should be hand-crafted. Don’t just let the blog software reuse the post title or category name with your blog’s name tacked on in the front. Why? Because an ideal post title is seldom an ideal title tag. Optimizing your post title or category name by working in synonyms, multiple verb tenses, etc. into it can ruin its punchiness and thus its reader impact. For example, “Marketing on MySpace” makes for a great post title but “Social Media Marketing on MySpace, the King of Social Network Sites” makes for a title tag with broader keyword appeal.

   How would you accomplish this? If your blog is powered by WordPress, then you can use my WordPress plugin called SEO Title Tag. It even offers a “mass edit” administrative interface for making bulk edits across dozens or hundreds of pages at once. I am not aware of a similar plugin for Movable Type or other blog platforms, but perhaps this article will spur someone on to write it.

   If you don’t have the time or resources and wish to continue with auto-generated title tags, you should at an absolute minimum hand code the title tag on the home page, and then on the rest of the blog place the blog name at the end of the title tag rather than at the beginning (or remove it altogether). This will give you more uniquely focused title tags.

2. Letting pages get indexed that should never be indexed. Some pages shouldn’t be allowed into the search indices because they are either basically content-less (like the “Email this page” form or “Enlarged photo” pages) or because they are substantively similar to other pages (like the “Printer-friendly” pages). Peruse your indexed pages in Google using the site: query operator and look for which pages don’t deserve to be there. Then disallow them in your robots.txt file.
3. Having multiple homes for your blog. Does your blog have what search engine geeks refer to as “canonicalization” issues? If you can get to a page by multiple URLs, then the answer is “Yes.” For example, ries.typepad.com and www.originofbrands.com and originofbrands.com all lead to the same page.
4. Not using “optional excerpts” to minimize duplicate content. This may be known by other names in other blog platforms, but in WordPress the optional excerpt on the Write Post form is where you can define alternate copy to display everywhere but on the permalink page. That will make the content of the post unique to the permalink page, reducing the potential that you’ll lose rankings for duplicate content because the post would otherwise be included in its entirety on numerous pages, including archives-by-date pages and category pages.
5. Not using rel=nofollow to strategically direct the flow of link gain. Some internal links aren’t very helpful because they have suboptimal anchor text (e.g. “Permalink” and “Comments”). Some external links just leak link gain to nobody’s benefit, such as “Digg this” links.
6. Over-reliance on date-based archives. Most blogs organize their archives by month rather than by keyword. That’s a shame because the anchor text of links is so important to SEO, yet these date-based archives tend to have terrible number-based anchor text. Organizing your blog into categories is a step in the right direction, but implementing tagging and tag clouds across your blog is a much more search engine optimal approach. Then you can ditch your date-based hierarchy, or at least rel=nofollow all those date-based archive links.
7. No stability in keyword focus on category pages. When categories have been selected - at least in part - because of keyword research, then your category pages can be of great SEO benefit. But in order to really give those category pages the best chance at competing for their targeted keywords, the pages need stability in their keyword focus. However, in most cases the keyword focus jumps all over the place as new posts make it into that category page and old posts fall off. Using “sticky” posts which stay at the top of category page regardless of the age of that post will give you the opportunity to incorporate keyword-rich introductory copy into the pages. For example, the sticky post on the Politics category page at businessblogconsulting.com sets the stage with a keyword-rich, relevant and useful introduction to the posts within that category.
8. Suboptimal URLs. The most optimal URLs contain relevant, popular keywords and a minimal number of slashes, without any question marks. If using WordPress, be sure to change your “Permalink Options” to use rewritten URLs rather than the default of post IDs. If using TypePad or Movable Type, change from using the default of underscores to hyphens instead, as hyphens are preferred from Google’s standpoint. TypePad and Movable Type also tend to truncate URLs mid-keyword. Consider for example the post on the TypePad platform titled “Hotels, Hospitality and Social Media” which converted to a URL of http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing/2007/08/hotels-hospital.html. Note how the URL was truncated and the works “hospitality” and “social media” were lost. If using WordPress, make use of the “post slug,” to custom write the filename of the post’s URL and eliminate throwaway words from the URL such as “the” that appear in the post title but add no value in the URL.
9. Only one RSS feed, and it’s not even optimized. Each category on your blog should have its own category, so that people who are mostly interested in just one topic can subscribe to - and hopefully syndicate - the category-specific feed. Same thing applies if you have tag pages hosted on your blog. Tag-specific feeds are great for users and for SEO. Optimized RSS feeds are ones that are “full text” not summary feeds, have more than just ten items (e.g. 20 or 50), have keyword-rich item titles, incorporate your brand name in the item titles, include important keywords in the site title, and have a compelling site description.
10. Offering suboptimal podcasts. If you are publishing podcasts on your blog, be sure to optimize the ID3 tag, include show notes with each podcast, create show transcripts (hint: CastingWords offers inexpensive podcast transcription), and ensure you have a presence in podcast directories like iTunes.
11. Putting your blog’s URL or your RSS feed’s URL on a domain you don’t own. Does your blog’s URL contain blogspot.com, typepad.com, wordpress.com, etc.? If so, please repeat after me in a Homer Simpson voice: “Doh!”. This is a disaster waiting to happen. What happens if you want to move to another blog platform or service provider? You won’t be able to 301 redirect. The best you can do is put up a “We’ve moved” post then abandon the blog. Like what my daughter had to do with her Neopets blog when she moved it from neopetcheats.wordpress.com to neopetsfanatic.com. Another mistake is using Feedburner without using their MyBrand service - which means that all your RSS subscribers are subscribing to a URL you don’t control. You’d be in a pickle if you ever wanted to change from Feedburner to another service. After Google acquired Feedburner, they made the MyBrand service free. So there’s no excuse for not using it. I use MyBrand with my blog, so my feed URL is http://feeds.stephanspencer.com/scatterings instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/scatterings.
12. Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally. It’s not uncommon for bloggers to use “here” or “previously” or similar suboptimal phrases as anchor text within post copy. Resist the temptation and use relevant keywords instead.

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

Spangler works with Stephan Spencer, president of Netconcepts, an e-marketing services firm that specializes in natural search, to develop and optimize his blog. Here, they share a few lessons they have learned about what information to post and how to go about doing it so your blog becomes more than a one-way conversation:

Tactic #1: Give your blog a singular voice with a personality, says Spencer. “Your blog has to be authentic or other bloggers will figure it out.” If your blog is supposed to be from the company president, then he had better be the one who is writing it with his own words.

Tactic #2: Feature real-life customer stories, especially if they are funny, says Spangler. For example, he has blogged about a customer who used his fake snow product to get out of a traffic ticket, kids’ science projects and other types of customer testimonials. Sometimes these posts are simply text, but people often send him photos and even videos.

Tactic #3: Connect your products to interesting stories. The speeding ticket story gave Spangler the perfect opportunity to provide a link to his Instant Snow product page. Or simply develop intriguing stories around your products. To spark readers’ imaginations around Halloween, he offered a list of spooky experiments to try, some of which tied in to products on his Web site.

Tactic #4: Pay attention to your blog post titles. Catchy titles get picked up by news aggregators, says Spencer, and give your blog wider exposure. Spangler has scored news time with headlines like “A Meteor Hit My House” (about how to use a powerful magnet to find the mini meteorites in your rain gutters) and “Parents Beware: Teachers Gone Wild” (about teachers trying out science experiments at a teaching convention).

Tactic #5: Invite guest bloggers who have something interesting and pertinent to say. But don’t abdicate your responsibility to communicate with your readers by featuring a constant rotation of contributors, says Spangler. If there is someone else in your company who has great ideas to share, then give this person his or her own blog. And don’t forget to leverage the blogging relationship by linking to your guest writers’ blogs, Spencer adds.

Tactic #6: If you are short on writing time or stumped for ideas, consider developing a series of podcasts by conducting taped (audio or video) interviews on the top cool trends of interest to your audience or some other list-oriented topic. Then, you can break up the interview into individual segments to be doled out on whatever basis you normally post, Spencer explains. This technique also works great when the blog writer needs a break for a vacation or to accommodate a packed travel schedule.

For more blogging ideas, visit Spangler’s blog at www.stevespangler.com and Spencer’s blog at www.netconcepts.com/tag/blogs

Already, YouTube has launched careers, such as that of YouTuber “Brookers” who was hired by Hollywood celebrity Carson Daly because of her zany videos. YouTube has also brought international fame to previously unknown bands such as Sick Puppies, a band popularized by the hugely popular and inspiring “Free Hugs” video set to the Sick Puppies song “All The Same.”

And then there are the hugely successful commercial viral campaigns, such as Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?,” the brilliant video series on various household objects that are run through a Blendtec blender—including marbles, rake handles, and even iPods.

“Will It Blend?” was the brainchild of George Wright, Marketing Director at Blendtec, and Blendtec’s Founder and CEO, Tom Dickson. George Wright recalls the birth of the idea: “Tom likes to run non-standard things through our blenders in the demo room to test out their strength. One day I wandered in to the demo room and saw sawdust on the floor. Tom was testing out the blenders again, this time it was a 2 x 2 jammed into the blender to see if he could destroy the blender or the 2 x 2.”

That gave George an idea: why not post those demonstrations of “extreme blending” online. The trick to creating a viral campaign George reckons is to make it funny and worth watching. They went to work creating the videos back in the fall of last year, starting with five videos: “Don’t Try This at Home Blending.” They built a companion microsite to go with it—WillItBlend.com—and sent an email to all employees to pass on the word of the videos and the Web site.

They also emailed their customer base and asked for suggestions of things to blend. At the time George was traveling and had his Blackberry; all the emails coming in were set to forward to him as well. Calls to his Blackberry wore out the batteries in a few hours, coming in from the media, print magazines, and TV. They were featured on a Today Show segment the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. iVillage Live did a segment on them too. They were interviewed by Newsweek, Playboy Magazine, and the New York Times.

Blendtec had a surprisingly low budget. It happened to have an on-staff video producer and on-staff webmaster, so development of the first five videos ran somewhere between $50-$100—including buying the domain name, a couple of rakes, some marbles, and few other supplies. So it can definitely be done on a meager budget.

George Wright advises that companies wishing to get into YouTube marketing focus on something that is fun, with either the interviewer laughing or scratching his/her head, because only then will they want to pass it on. But don’t force it. It really should be something worth watching.

George’s second piece of advice is to clearly demonstrate the product. For Blendtec, initially it was 100% about branding. After the brand awareness has been established, there has to be a need, a problem in need of resolution. George says a consumer watching a blender that is blending a rake handle would conclude that that make and model of blender would do a pretty good job at blending ice as well.

Blendtec has seen a dramatic increase in sales of at-home and commercial blenders (which are sold to restaurants and coffee shops, etc). The “Will It Blend?” campaign targeted the home market and online Web sales were more than four times greater than in the previous top-selling month. All other channels have seen big increases as well.

George also advises to make sure that the subject of the video is real: no “smoke and mirrors.” Tom Dickson is real. The blender is real. Tom is the owner of the company. He designed the machine. The experiments are reproducible.

Blendtec isn’t the only company having success with YouTube. Intuit, maker of the Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax software, are in the midst of a YouTube campaign, known as the Tax Rap. It was a pretty off-the-wall idea suggested in a brainstorming session; as luck would have it, Intuit was able to secure rapper Vanilla Ice as its front man. After that, it decided to just pull out all the stops—avoiding any corporate marketing feel to the campaign.

Seth Greenberg, Group Manager of Online Advertising and Internet Media at Intuit, says, “Rather than people making fun of our campaign we wanted to poke fun at ourselves.” They went to Vanilla Ice’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, and spent several hours there shooting. Vanilla Ice has been a big supporter of the campaign, according to Seth. What is interesting is that Vanilla ice is a polarizing figure. But that is what is making it a phenomenon on YouTube. (AdCritic.com said “I don’t know how to read this campaign…”)

The campaign has been getting more buzz offline than online. It has been covered at least 50 times by news outlets like CNN, as well as local stations. Entertainment Weekly listed Vanilla Ice’s Tax Rap as #10 on its Hit List. And it made it onto Page Six of the New York Post.

The key to the Tax Rap video campaign is not just that Vanilla Ice is the front man, but that it also encourages participation and viewer support. There is a contest with prize money of $50,000, with users encouraged to create their own rap about taxes to compete for the prize.

Unlike Blendtec, Intuit made a much more sizeable investment, including buying a Contest channel and a Branded channel on YouTube, as well as paying for visibility on the YouTube.com homepage. Those were crucial factors for Intuit’s getting over one million views of its video. Seth figures that it would have been hard to scale virally without it.

Online jewelry retailer Ice.com made its first foray into YouTube marketing this year as well with its “Mr. Cupid” interviews of passersby. Executive VP of Marketing and founder Pinny Gniwisch put some videos up of himself conducting impromptu interviews on the streets of New York City, in Times Square, on the ski slopes of Utah, and elsewhere, prior to Valentines Day. Pinny said the videos did very well for the company, which has even bigger and better plans for Mother’s Day: Those interviews feature celebrities, such as one of the actors from the hit TV show Heroes.

Speaking of Heroes, it was revealed that the hilarious viral spoof posted to YouTube called “Zeroes” actually had NBC behind it. NBC pulled it off brilliantly, but it was somewhat risky, because sometimes the community lashes out at the company behind the campaign when it is revealed as a marketing stunt.

YouTube has been used for effectively brand damage control as well. For example, the CEO and founder of JetBlue Airlines recently put up an apology video on YouTube because of the Valentine’s Day winter storm incident in February—a campaign that was well-received.

One product that got some excellent brand recognition and building from being on YouTube was Smirnoff’s Raw Tea. Smirnoff produced an uproarious music video called “Tea Partay,” with preppies rapping.

Another beverage, Mountain Dew, executed a successful YouTube campaign with its videos of jive-talking octogenarian Sue Teller offering surprisingly hip advice to young viewers.

H & R Block is using YouTube to promote its Tax Cuts software. The promo to the “Me & My Super Sweet Refund” contest is the most linked to comedy video in the history of YouTube.

It’s great to get the links to the video, as it increases the video’s visibility in the search engines. However, social media expert Neil Patel notes that the problem with most popular YouTube promotions is that YouTube gets the links and the original site usually does not. That means that the search engine visibility benefits don’t usually transfer to the company’s Web site. That’s not true of a MySpace marketing campaign, however, because its profile page can link directly to a company’s Web site.

Regardless of this shortcoming, YouTube offers much in the way of brand visibility when the campaign is well-executed. That doesn’t just mean posting a great video; marketers must also know how to take advantage of the social nature of the site—to build up friends and to get on user subscription lists.

Jonathan Mendez of optimizeandprophesize.com is an evangelist for the power of tags for marketing on YouTube. His advice is to make copious use of tags on your videos (ensuring, of course, that the tags are all relevant to the content), to spread your tags out among your clips, to use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don’t use natural language phrases or waste tag space on words like “and” or “to.”

Along with all these great pearls of wisdom imparted from the above-mentioned viral video marketers, I would also interject: Don’t be afraid to make a start, even if it’s modest and has no budget behind it. You won’t get anywhere without experimenting with the medium. No risk, no reward. Who knows, it might be your inroad to Hollywood!

Speakers:
Neil Patel, CTO, Advantage Consulting Services
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates
Don Steele, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

We’re proud to call Neil one of our “Cool Friends.” Here he is being interviewed by our founder and president Stephan Spencer…

What are the most important social media sites in your opinion? And why?

There is no particular social site that I feel is more important than another. They are all important because of the varying audience that uses each social site. For example people into politics use Netscape while people into technology use Digg. Because of this it is important to keep an open mind about all of the social sites.

Which ones are the easiest to manipulate, in other words to raise your content to the top?

I have not tried to manipulate any social sites, but it seems the less popular ones like Furl and My Web are easier to manipulate because they have less sophisticated algorithms. Once they become more popular and start becoming abused more it will become increasingly difficult to manipulate these sites due to the growth of their algorithms. When it comes to social media marketing, the idea is not to manipulate the social sites; it is to add value for users by creating compelling content that they are interested in.

What is the traffic potential if you manage to get to the front page of Digg.com, or to the del.icio.us popular page, or any other site that you recommend?

The traffic that Digg drives once a story hits the homepage can vary quite a bit. I have seen some stories get only a few thousand visitors and some have received as much as 20 thousand to 30 thousand visitors.

Del.icio.us on the other hand does not drive as much as traffic as Digg, but if you get on the popular and hotlist page you can usually get a few thousand visitors.

Some of the other sites that also drive great traffic are Reddit, Netscape and StumbleUpon. With each of these, traffic levels could be as low as a few hundred visitors and as high as 10 or 20 thousand visitors. For most social websites, traffic mainly depends on the time of day the story hits the homepage and the topic of the story.

What are some of the more clever examples of companies achieving a high level of visibility on some of these sites?

One clever example that comes to mind is a “Geek’s Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips” because it did really well on the social sites and was not really related to the topic of the website.

Some of the other companies that achieve great success from these sites are all the web 2.0 sites that try to get on the homepage right when they launch.

If alpha geeks are the primary users of Digg.com, and they are not your target audience, is there still value in achieving a front page story on Digg?

There is still some value of reaching the homepage of Digg because a few of those visitors may love your site. In most cases if your target market is not tech geeks you should look at other social sites that your target audience uses. Getting on any of these can help increase your traffic, readership, branding, and links.

If it is about the links that you get out of it, what is a typical outcome in terms of the number and quality of the links obtained?

When most people judge the amount of links these social sites drive they use Yahoo. Rand Fishkin and a few others have seen up to 2000 backward links every time a story gets on the homepage of sites like Digg. Personally, I prefer using Technorati to check backward links and based on their estimates, you can usually see between 40-200 links for every successful story.