“We’re a search company and thought we were pretty clued up on SEO. We brought in Netconcepts, and they told us that some of our ideas on SEO were on target and others were not. They then told us about some key things that we didn’t know about. The ROI was immediate. Our only regret was not working with them sooner - they are a world leading specialist in SEO.”
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MarketingProfs virtual seminar series — online
For many of you, your email campaign lost the race even before it got out of the gate. Spam filters and email firewalls silently and unceremoniously junk your emails. Research has shown that fully one-third of permission-based emails don’t get delivered.
Even if your message gets past the filters, it doesn’t mean your email will be opened. Your recipients are brutal when it comes to slashing through the commercial messages clogging their inboxes. A split second decision will decide your email’s fate, based squarely on your From line and Subject line, and to a smaller extent, what’s visible in the Preview pane. After navigating these deliverability and openability hazards, you still have to get the recipient to comprehend and act on your message. A pretty tall order nowadays.
This virtual seminar is going to get “hands on” with reviews of actual email campaigns submitted by seminar attendees. Not all will be chosen, so give yourself the best chance of having your campaign critiqued: submit your entry early. Stephan is one of the most popularly and highly acclaimed MarketingProfs seminar leaders.
If you’ve ever wondered what you were doing wrong with your email marketing, or wondered what you could be doing better, then this is the seminar for you.
You will learn:
The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.
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“We saw an overall increase of over 300% in our search engine traffic within the first 60 days of implementation. We are extremely pleased with our initial results and look forward to expanding our relationship with Netconcepts.”
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“As a new venture, it was vitally important that clear outcomes and costs were identified and monitored. This is something I found Netconcepts to be excellent at…”
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“When a leading search engine recommended Netconcepts, I knew they were the kind of SEO experts JiWire needed to be working with.”
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In order to achieve maximum search engine visibility, you need to think a bit like a search engine when writing the copy for your website.
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In real estate, it’s “location, location, location”. In web marketing, it’s “content, content, content”. Your web content is the single most important factor for your website’s success
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Public relations in the blogosphere seems to operate under a new set of rules than traditional PR. With traditional PR you hire a PR firm that has relationships with various journalists and media. With the new PR, you start your own blog (assuming of course you have something worthwhile to say) and you work to become one of the blogging elite. The goal is to get the more influential bloggers to notice you and blog about you. You wouldn’t just leave this to chance; you’d help the process along. If, for example, you want to catch Scoble’s eye, then you would say something interesting that somehow relates to Scoble and work in a mention of his name. Scoble, like many other bloggers, follows what’s being said about him in the blogosphere by subscribing to a PubSub search results feed for the word “scoble.” If Scoble likes your post, you could end up with a mention on Scoble’s link blog or, better still, on the Scobleizer blog.
Imagine telling a PR person 10 years ago that, in the future, the way to catch the eye of various journalists is to become a journalist yourself and then write about THEM, that PR person would think you were off your rocker. My, how times have changed!
As an up-and-coming blogger, you might be tempted to brown-nose the A-List bloggers. Don’t kiss up to them, but don’t denigrate them either. This isn’t necessarily a hard-and-fast rule, just a suggested guideline. Some bloggers are quite open to being taken to task. They even encourage it.
There is a line of course that shouldn’t be crossed. Always act in good taste. Scoble himself described, during our MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit last month on business blogging, how it really isn’t a “line,” it is more like a “membrane.” There is give-and-take, and flexibility with what’s ok to say in your blog and what’s not, particularly as you build rapport with different bloggers in the blogosphere and you build up your reputation. But don’t push too hard or too often, or that “membrane” may rupture!
Now I wonder if Scoble will blog about this post…
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Yahoo’s just released a very cool new search engine called Yahoo! Creative Commons Search. With it you can search all the Creative Commons licenced content on the web. For those not familiar with Creative Commons, I’ve blogged about it before. In summary, it is an alternative to copyright, where some rights are reserved by the author, but not all. It’s as quick and painless as can be for the author: you simply fill out this form that specifies how you want your material used out in the marketplace and the license is generated to place on your site. For example, your license can require attribution, restrict to only noncommercial use, allow for the creation of derivative works, etc.
There is a wealth of content out there under a liberal Creative Commons licence that will allow you to reuse and repurpose that content in your own projects. But finding that content used to be hard work. (Actually there was previously another way to search, but it wasn’t as comprehensive, and it wasn’t from a major search engine). Now it’s just a search query away, thanks to Yahoo!
I can hear you asking yourself: “That’s all fine and good, but what use will I have with it?” Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
These are just a few ideas, and of course you have to abide by the terms of each content-owner’s license. Idea #4, for example, would be considered commercial use if that library of pages were serving as landing pages to get searchers who find you to buy something. IMPORTANT: Don’t just assume that because it showed up in the search results, it’s licensed under Creative Commons. Some plain ol’ copyrighted material will have undoubtedly snuck into the index. No search engine is 100% perfect. I didn’t have time to test it out much myself, but it seems to pass muster with Tara at ResearchBuzz, so it must be pretty good!
An insightful reader on Slashdot commented that it would be brilliant if Yahoo! took the next step and launched a Bittorrent tracker that was limited to Creative Commons licensed content, with a centralized directory-style index. Bittorrent, if you aren’t familiar with it, offers super-fast de-centralized file sharing on a file-by-file basis. It can be used to download legitimate files, like a trial version of a software program or music under a Creative Commons license. To get started, you need to have the Bittorrent software installed on your computer, and you’ll need to have somehow obtained a Torrent file for a particular big file that you want. This Torrent file is tiny, and it contains information about how to connect with others who have parts of the file you want. But where do you find these Torrent files? That’s where a tracker comes in. More on Bittorent later, in a separate post.
With that, I’ll let you get on with using this new Yahoo! engine to “embrace and extend” to your heart’s content.
Oh, by the way… If you want to learn more the fascinating story of copyright law (no, I’m not kidding! The way Larry Lessig tells it, it really IS interesting!), check out Larry Lessig’s speech at OSCON, with audio syncronized with his Powerpoint slides. Larry is the brains behind the Creative Commons and an overall brilliant lawyer/author/blogger/Stanford professor.
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“I recommend Netconcepts to any web marketer who cannot prioritize resources to search engine optimize internally. Over our 6 years in partnership, they have never steered us wrong!”
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