Copywriting Webinars

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:

• How to write messages that are opened and read
• How to create subject lines that are the best they can be
• Best practices for your call-to-action and value proposition
• How to balance text and images
• When to use Text or HTML
• Whether your email is compliant with CAN-SPAM legislation
• Whether your messages will get past spam filters

The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.

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Everyone seems to be in a frenzy to get links to their sites. Usually for the wrong reasons and from the wrong sites. Terms like Link Popularity, PageRank, Hubs, Authorities, Hilltop, Sandbox, Anchor Text, etc. are being bandied about and discussed ad nauseam. Marketers obsess over concepts like link leakage, bleeding PageRank, nofollow tags, triangular links, link architecture, link equity. There are many companies selling linking services that are absolutely 100% worthless.

Get past all the misinformation and disinformation and join two of the top-most experts on link building, as they share their favorite tips, lessons learned, tools, and success stories.

This seminar will be rich with case study examples.

This seminar is for you if you:

1. Know that you’re missing out on key linking opportunities, but you just don’t know which ones and how to find them
2. Don’t have all the answers on what it takes to get coverage and links in the right places from the right people
3. Don’t have a current linking strategy or have one with holes

Successful link builders take an active role in the process. They don’t just sit back and hope that links happen. They make them happen! Take the first step by registering for this virtual seminar today.

You will learn:

• To build a comprehensive linking strategy (including: portals, blogs, feeds, niche venues, vertical search, authority sites, e-newsletters, zines, awards, mailing lists)
• How to get the best anchor text that you can
• Holistic linking
• How to receive online publicity
• How to purchase links
• How maximize on-site and off-site link architecture
• How to mine and analyze competitor site links and industry-specific links
• The biggest link building mistakes and myths
• To generate buzz
• How to write and release effective press releases
• Link building in blogs and RSS feeds
• How to the right people with the right message
• How to optimize your link architecture to get the most out of your inbound links

The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.

ABOUT THE PROF EXPERTS

Eric Ward founded the Web’s first service for publicizing Web content back in 1994, and he still offers these services today. His client list is a who’s who of online brands. Eric is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, The Link Exchange, Microsoft.com, Rodney Dangerfield, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, the AMA, and The Weather Channel. His services won the 1995 Tenagra Award for Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web’s 100 most influential people by Websight magazine in 1997. Eric also wrote the Link Building column for ClickZ, the NetSense column for Ad Age magazine, and is a 4-star speaker at major industry conferences.

Stephan Spencer is founder and President at Netconcepts, a 9-year-old, multi-national interactive agency specializing in search engine optimization, web redesign, usability, e-commerce, website auditing and email marketing. Clients include Verizon, REI, Gorton’s, Cabela’s, InfoSpace, The Sharper Image, Wella, Northern Tool, Sara Lee Direct, Midwest Airlines, Guild.com, and MP3.com. He has contributed to magazines such as Catalog Age, Unlimited, Building Online Business, and NZ Marketing. Stephan is a frequent speaker on Internet marketing topics for organizations such as the DMA, the AMA, Internet World, and IIR.

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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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Links are the currency of the search engines. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts will be in vain.

Link building is arguably the most difficult, most misunderstood, and most poorly executed aspect to SEO. Join SEO and link-building expert Stephan Spencer as he guides us through the quagmire and shows us the way to great search engine rankings.

You will learn:

• Google’s PageRank scores: red herring or useful metric?
• What makes a link valuable or not
• Creative strategies for building link-worthy content
• What works when approaching webmasters with link requests
• Pitfalls to avoid if buying or bartering links
• The phenomenon of Google bombing and making it work in your favor
• The role of authorities, hubs, and topical relevance
• How to leverage blogs and the blogosphere for link building
• To get your content successfully syndicated onto other web sites with RSS
• How to capture the link gain (PageRank) of your affiliates and your advertising

The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.

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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:

1. Collect interesting articles on a particular topic from different authors, write your own overview/summary to go with it, then assemble it all into an ebook and offer it on your site as a free download.
2. Take information relating to a particular company that you would like to land as a customer and arrange it into a scrapbook, then post it on your blog and ask readers to contribute to it further. Hopefully the prospective customer will take notice of your initiative and of your interest in them. If not, bring it to their attention. (What a great, new spin on the standard “cold call”!)
3. Augment your articles, white papers, etc. with excerpted content relevant to the topic you’re covering. For example, if you wrote a white paper about “How Google Works,” add Creative Commons-licensed photos and text descriptions describing their data centers.
4. Identify keywords that you want to rank well for and create a mini library of Creative Commons-licensed content about that keyword.

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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The search algorithms of Google, Yahoo, and MSN power about 95% of all Web search queries, making high-ranking search listings in these three engines a marketer’s dream. With over 70% of search result clickthroughs going to the natural (unpaid) search results pages and the “implied endorsement” that goes with a top natural listing, it’s essential that marketers gain mastery in natural search optimization. Besides, where else can you reach such high penetration to highly qualified prospects at zero cost per click?

While natural search listings deliver untold millions in sales to some of the Web’s savviest online retailers, most Web sites are not properly designed to reach this market. How can you adjust or revamp your site so that the engines will love it?

Join Stephan Spencer, President of Netconcepts, Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, and Joan Broughton, VP - Multi-Channel Programs at REI during this rich presentation to learn the essential strategies of putting the search engines to work for your Web site. You’ll learn the secrets of how to:

• Estimate missed opportunity costs
• Sell your SEO initiative to upper management then resource it effectively
• Ensure the search engine spiders crawls 100% of your site, including dynamic pages
• Design your pages to dominate rankings
• Build your importance score and pass it on effectively using your internal hierarchical linking structure
• Check your site’s natural search “pulse”
• Avoid getting banned/penalized by the engines
• Leverage your internal site search for search engine fodder
• …and much more!

Join us for an information-packed hour of concrete advice, definitive answers, best and worst practices, real-life examples, and interactive critiques.

Watch the archived webinar

Download: MPEG 4 (68 MB)

Speakers

Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts

Stephan has been helping companies exploit commerce opportunities online since 1995. Clients include REI, Verizon, Gorton’s, Kohl’s, Cabela’s, to name a few. Stephan started Netconcepts in 1995 and grew it from a one-person Internet consultancy to what it now a multi-national interactive agency, specialising in web design and ecommerce with search engine optimization built in.

Dr Shaun Ryan, CEO, SLI Systems

Shaun Ryan combines commercial experience and academic expertise to lead a company that consistently improves the search experience of millions of online shoppers, customers of stores like Etronics, Any Mountain and Harry and David. His commercial background includes positions with NBCi and consulting to organizations like international health technology company Invacare. With a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Canterbury, Shaun was one of the founders of SLI Systems’ unique learning search technology.

Joan Broughton, Vice President of Multichannel Programs/Online, Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI)

Service to REI since 2000. Former executive at Office Depot and America Online. Currently oversees strategy and operations of REI’s Multichannel Programs and Online businesses, including REI.com, REI-OUTLET.com, and REI Adventures. Serves on the boards of the American Hiking Society and Shop.org, an online retailer association. Enjoys hiking and running.

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Imagine an online ad that costs you nothing per impression, guarantees both a local and worldwide audience actively seeking your products and services, and offers 6 times the click-through rate of a banner ad… a search engine listing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ultimate targeted, low cost and high return weapon in the e-marketer’s promotional arsenal.

Learn how to maximize your reach through the “organic” (unpaid) results in the search engines:

• Which search engines to target
• Keyword research tools and tactics
• Writing copy that “sings” to the search engines
• Benchmarking against your competitors
• Link building strategies that work
• Optimal search engine architecture
• Best practices to emulate
• Scams exposed
• Case studies - including the “inside scoop” on what worked and what didn’t
• Making your e-commerce or database-driven site “search engine friendly”
• Measuring the return on your search engine marketing investment
• Developing a search engine marketing plan
• Criteria for selecting a search engine marketing agency
• Online tools and resources

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“My job is to make my boss look good, and when SecureWorks hired Netconcepts for SEO I expected them to make me look good - and they definitely did.”

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