Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing & Web Development Services  

I think David has a lot to say that companies desiring an Internet presence really need to hear.

One area we deal with is designing and developing web sites… We are an SEO firm, but we also know that if a site gets loads of traffic but doesn’t convert to buyers, the SEO efforts are essentially wasted. That’s one reason we believe that the content on a web site is absolutely critical – having the right topics covered, in enough depth, easily accessible, and working toward our clients’ goals for lead generation or sales.

Here’s what David has to say:

“Unfortunately, the vast majority of sites are built with the wrong focus. Yes, appearance and navigation are important: Appropriate colors, logos, fonts, and design make a site appealing. The right technologies such as content management systems make sites easier to update. But what really matters is the content, how that content is organized, and how it drives action from buyers.”

I couldn’t agree more!

Buy the New Rules of Marketing & PR book

Read David’s blog

Earlier this year, Google started mandating that merchants provide attribute information for products submitted for Google Base and Froogle. (Basically, attributes are descriptive fields like color, brand, size, etc.)

The announcement had e-retailers scrambling to find ways to get their attributes into their data feeds so they wouldn’t be dropped from Google shopping sites.

Now online retailers can stop guessing at how to do it – there’s an interactive roundtable scheduled for Orlando April 26-27, 2007 sponsored by Channel Intelligence, the data feed optimization industry leader. Read more about the Product Attribute Summit here.

In addition, the company had conducted a webinar on product attributes that can be accessed for free (requiring minimal information for registration before download).

You can imagine they were quick to offer solutions that encompass product attributes. In fact, their technology optimizes product feeds for many other factors, too. If you sell products online, I encourage you to learn more about their solutions here:
www.channelintelligence.com.

Last week I attended the “Ecommerce Search Marketing 2007 Research Teleseminar, 7 New Charts & Campaign Samples” sponsored by Marketing Sherpa. (You probably already know I’m a big fan of this organization – I just love how they provide concrete examples of what’s working in online marketing and what’s not.)

I was glad to hear SEO recommended so highly for ecommerce marketers. It feels like it’s finally becoming a part of the mainstream marketing techniques for larger ecommerce operations who previously expected that everyone would surf right over to their site because of their brand name and paid search advertising.

Well, with PPC costs rising, the new customers that can be acquired by optimizing your product and category pages to show in natural search results is getting the recognition it deserves. We’ve been offering this for a while through our search engine friendly ecommerce site development services.

You can actually listen to the seminar online now. Also, while you’re at it, why not pick up a copy of their Ecommerce Guide for 2007, too: http://www.EcommerceGuide2007.MarketingSherpa.com

You know that your site content can help with SEO and that it also plays a huge role in getting your prospect to take the action you want them to. But how do you know WHAT content will get you the greatest mileage?

The OMMA Magazine in my mailbox yesterday put out some interesting data by Knowledge Storm and Marketing Sherpa about the pass-along effect of different content items. Here are a couple interesting figures:

Case Studies
marketers offer: 80%
prospects pass along: 45%

Analyst Reports
marketers offer: 37%
prospects pass along: 47%

Product Literature
marketers offer: 76%
prospects pass along: 49%

Industry Articles
marketers offer: 37%
prospects pass along: 50%

White Papers
marketers offer: 75%
prospects pass along: 72%

What’s this mean for you? As you are building your optimized content, consider how it can be repurposed to be offered in other forms that may be meaningful to your audiences. Perhaps the informational content on your site could be organized and edited into a white paper that can be downloaded and passed along to reach more people virally.

- Getting Your Press Release on Page 1 of the Search Engines Within 2 Days -

Includes links to the press release distribution services used and the actual press release copy submitted.

Over my copywriting career I’ve been commissioned to write many press releases. In fact, writing a press release to announce myself as a new hire was my first ever assignment as a new ad agency copywriter in Florida.

Now that I work exclusively with the company SEO Advantage, Inc., I’m very excited about using online press releases to help our clients gain additional exposure in the search engines while promoting their announcements online.

I’ve outlined below the steps I took to get search engine exposure for our latest press release announcement, so you can see that immediate results can be yours by only investing in a copywriter that understands SEO and finding a few key distribution outlets.

1. Writing the Press Release
First, you have to choose a topic. And it has to be at least somewhat newsworthy.

I wanted to write about our recent participation in a direct response copywriting conference. I felt that this topic supported our unique range of online copywriting services, since I don’t know of any other SEO companies that offer direct response copywriting. (See SEO Advantage’s latest direct response website created for a client in the men’s hair regrowth treatment industry.)

Once I had the topic, I wrote a standard 1-page press release.

I was aware of some of our keywords that produce good conversions for our SEO business, as well as those related to copywriting that I wanted to target. As I wrote the press release, I paid attention to opportunities to use these keywords naturally. For example, in the headline, you’ll see I began with “SEO Company” rather than the actual name of our company. (Conventional PR best practices say that you should use your company name in the headline to gain credibility for your press release – but our company is probably not well known enough at this point to capitalize on immediate brand recognition, and I knew the generic term would gain a lot more visibility.)

2. Distributing the Press Release
There are many online press release distribution services, ranging from no charge to $300 and much higher.

I wanted to see if some of the free services I hadn’t used before could pull through in the natural search engine rankings, before shelling out big bucks.

So I picked 6 distribution outlets and posted it. I decided to contribute $10 to 2 of the online press release distribution services, since I had used their free options before but hadn’t seen any search engine results. I just tested the free distribution options for the remaining 4 services.

3. Checking Search Engine Results
It was just 2 days ago that I posted the press release. When I checked in the search engines on a couple of the keywords today, there it was, right at the top!

Below are some of the keywords and the corresponding position on Google’s page 1.

… you get the idea…

Lessons to Take Away
It seems the $10 investment with Webwire did its job. Click to see how our SEO company press release looked.

Pressbox, amazingly was free! I didn’t have high hopes for it, as it was based in the UK and also the first time I used it. I noticed that my headline was automatically cut off in an awkward spot, though, whereas other services notify you if you exceed character limits. Here’s how our press release on SEO direct response copywriting looked.

The other services I used were:
PRWeb (paid $10) – Although I did not see the press release in the search engines, the small contribution allowed me to view their tracking results, which indicated that it had been picked up by 49 outlets and viewed 159 times (estimated).

PRFree – This service was easy to use, although with the free option there is no way to judge its performance beyond searching online. And I haven’t seen it anywhere yet.

Free Press Release – This site didn’t even require you to sign in – you just post it right off. You can contribute $3 upfront for premium services and to create an account but the benefits didn’t seem very compelling. Plus, the spelling mistakes are a sure sign that they may not be very diligent in their services. I don’t think I’ll even use the free service next time.

i-Newswire – Also easy to use. Paid service is just $25, and the benefits include distribution to more outlets, although I just tried the free service this time. No search engine results have shown yet for the press release.

While a press release optimized for search engines can gain placement right away, it can also stick around for a long time. Online press release distribution outlets let you link to your company website, too, adding more quality inbound links. Check back for more news on how this press release performs over the long term.

Jay Abraham regaled the luncheon audience on the last day of the 2005 AWAI Copywriting Bootcamp in Delray Beach, FL with very succinct advice and anecdotes.

Jay was introduced as the most masterful marketing mind, bar none, in the opinion of Michael Masterson (one of the founders of the American Artists & Writers Institute). Jay is responsible for the marketing of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. (Astonishingly, only the Bible surpasses this book in the number of copies sold.)

Jay’s own site has this to say: “As the founder and CEO of Abraham Group, Inc. in Los Angeles, California, Jay has spent the last 25 years solving problems and significantly increasing the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 400 industries worldwide. Jay has seen and dealt with every type of business you can imagine. And he has studied and solved every kind of business question, problem, challenge and opportunity.”

I’ve summarized below a couple points from his presentation that I think can benefit your business.

4 Opportunities for a Breakthrough in your Business
Change one of these components, and you change your results:

12 Pillars of Strategic Business Growth
Build your foundational mindset on these pillars to build your business:

1. Continuously identifying and discovering hidden assets and overlooked opportunities in your business.

2. Mining cash windfalls each and every month of your business.

3. Engineering success into every action you take or decision you make.

4. Building your business on multiple profit sources instead of depending on one single revenue generating source.

5. Being different, special, and advantageous in the eyes of your customers and clients.

6. Creating real value for your clients and employees for maximum loyalty and results.

7. Gaining the maximum personal leverage from every action, investment, time or energy commitment you ever make. (Be sure to test your approaches systematically. Testing conducted for phrases used in customer greetings in a furniture store showed that greeting the customer with the phrase “What ad brought you into the store today?” resulted in a 300% increase in sales over any other greetings!)

8. Networking, masterminding, brainstorming with like-minded, success-driven people who share real life experiences and shortcuts with you.

9. Turning yourself into an idea generator and recognized innovator within your industry, field or market.

10. Making growth-thinking a natural part of your everyday business philosophy. (Most people don’t reach their goals because they don’t have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish or, if they do, they’re not doing anything to reach it.)

11. Reversing the risk for both you and your clients in everything you do (so the downside is almost zero, and the upside potential nearly infinite).

12. Using small, safe tests to eliminate dangerous risks and adopting funnel vision instead of tunnel vision in your thinking.

Abraham covered much more ground than I can go into here, like the 9 Business Drivers, Items You Can Leverage and Maximize, The Power of Testing to Multiply Results, 5 Keys to Winning Business Around the World, and even more. If these topics whet your appetite for more, I suspect you would enjoy his books.

Our opening keynote speaker on Thursday, Brian Tracy, also recommends books by Jay Abraham and other marketing legends on his website. (Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and business success in the world today.)

Here are a couple reviews of Jay Abraham’s services and prices:
Review 1
Review 2

Access Jay Abraham’s site
Jay’s MASTERMIND Marketing System
A newsletter produced by Jay Abraham

Saturday morning at the AWAI copywriting conference got us thinking about using stories in our copy for more selling power.

It’s a given that people like stories. It gets your audience’s attention when you’re talking – and when you’re writing.

Creating your sales message around a story can help your letter overcome the barrier of too much information, make facts easier to absorb, and make your promises more real to the reader.

7 Sales Skills to Improve On holds some great tips for everyone who has to persuade or sell. And one of the tips tells us:

“Great presentations get the prospect’s imagination involved. The best way to involve the imagination is through storytelling. Stories rich in descriptive detail get the prospect picturing them using your product and evoke that “I Gotta Have That” reaction.”

John Forde presented some of the elements of a good story:

Storytelling through Case Studies

One concept that wasn’t covered in the presentation is the use of case studies. Of course the conference was focused on direct sales letters, but copywriters often have opportunities to write many, many forms of communications for clients. One opportunity to tell a good story is in a case study.

Case studies are used often as a teaching tool. (During my MBA, case studies were a huge component.) And the reason is that people can absorb information and concepts better through real-life examples.

Here’s an article that outlines the basics you need to know about writing case studies: the 3 main sections, how to include the benefits, and more: How to Write a Case Study

You can see a short case study about one of SEO Advantage’s clients here: http://seo-max.com/case-study-waltersbuildings.php.

By the way, John Forde produces an online newsletter that I recommend to every copywriter. Sign up here: http://jackforde.com

When you read more about this speaker at the 2005 AWAI (American Writers & Artists Inc.) conference, you’re going to wonder why he would be speaking at a conference forcopywriters.

He runs a “Politically Incorrect Kick Butt-Take Names strength training and Combat Conditioning website”.

But the truth is, Matt Furey makes $7-8 million every year. On a typical day, he brings in $25,000 from just one email. And he credits his renegade style of copywriting for it.

He told us that every morning, he gets up and then just taps out his thoughts. When he writes, he writes just as he speaks, without editing. (Although he admitted he spends more time with his sales letters and other promotional materials.)

You’ll see what he’s talking about when you visit his website promoting the Chinese Long Life System

It’s not polished, professional-sounding copy. And in my opinion, that’s why it sells.

Too many business owners think that to sell, your copy has to use big words and sound like it’s been edited by an English teacher.

But the truth is, people respond much better to a message that comes from your passion, your gut. Talk to people in your online communications as if you’re sitting down over a coffee with them. Let the things that really matter to you show in your words. This is what a copywriter taps into when they write to your audience.

See Matt Furey’s site here: http://www.mattfurey.com