The major search engines are placing more emphasis on content, not so much on tricks and behind-the-scene tactics, to rank web sites higher for keyword searches.

Let’s say you are a metal-stamping company, and your prospective customers are searching for “flat springs.” It’s all well and good to have text, meta tags and even photos with alt tags about flat springs on your web site, but it’s even better if you have written a blog entry, produced a video, sent out a press release, even recorded a podcast about these parts.

It takes time to create all this content. Part of the solution is to have a plan in place that maps out goals and a schedule for online content. How many videos will you produce? When will you produce them? How many podcasts, blog entries, press releases, articles, etc.?

Another part of the solution to make content generation easier is to re-purpose. Once you write the article, re-purpose it for the press release. Use the same content to write the script for your podcast and video. Re-purpose the article content again and again by creating several blog entries from it.

Make sure your SEO supplier has content creation built into the services they provide to get your website ranking high and qualified visitors coming to your site.

Photo from Flickr, Some rights reserved by James Cridland

I got an inkling that all was not right in the web development and SEO world in 2008. I went out to bid for a client of mine – a manufacturer of green industrial lubricants – and got bids for a new, optimized web site that ranged from $2,000 to $20,000. Hmmm – that’s too big a range! That’s a red flag of a fragmented industry – or innocent business owners being ripped off on their Internet marketing!

Then again in January 2010, I requested bids for a client that needed a web site update and ongoing SEO. I got bids for $4,000, then $7,000 for the update alone. Hmmm. I called my web dev/SEO guru  and asked, “Mark, if I’m not mistaken, to update this site we need to do steps 1, 2, 3 and 4, test everything and then flip the switch, correct?” He said, “Yes!” I said, “How much would that cost?” He said, “$400.” Eeeesh! A 10 x markup from the other guy? Are you kidding me?

I started directed successful web site and SEO in 1998 (among other marketing), when I first worked on a client’s web site. At that time, there were very few SEO experts out there. I rolled up my sleeves, learned SEO,  instructed the web developers involved with my clients, and we got fantastic results. From this experience and in part because I spent 14 years in the software industry prior to founding New Incite, I understand SEO and web development technology!

In 2005 I placed more emphasis on positioning and marketing my B2B CMO for Hire services. I said, “Now there are more good SEO companies out there, I can partner with them and focus on  strategic marketing, marketing planning, execution/project management and results tracking!”

But now in 2010 I am seeing SEO and web development practices that aren’t right, and I’m going to continue to blog about them and consult with my clients to protect them and save them money. There are too many new web development and SEO companies who got into the business because they saw the need, but:

• They see web dev and SEO as a money-making business only – not a win-win for both their company and their clients.
• They learned SEO when they got in but they haven’t kept up with best practices and they’re still proposing old tactics – I kid you not!
• They’re specialists in something else (graphic design, IT services, publishing) and have added or moved to web development and SEO as a cash cow that they pay lip service to but are not experts in!

So, share your war stories – have you or your clients ever been ripped off on web development or SEO?

Photo on Flickr – Some rights reserved by superk8nyc

As a B2B marketing consultant, I’m often asked what day of the week is the best day to send promotional email. In earlier days of B2B email campaigns, the school of thought was that the best days were Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday. On Mondays business people are overwhelmed and had a email inbox full of spam from the weekend. On Fridays people have their mind on the weekend and didn’t have as much time to read email.

Then, in 2008, Morgan Stewart, research director at ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, was quoted in Fortune magazine in an article titled “Sunday is the New Monday.” Stewart said “The best day to email is when no one else is doing it.” The article went on to say that Sunday was a day when business people have the time and space to read email, often from their smart phone.

Both arguments seem logical to me. Mondays and Fridays are not the greatest for email. I receive fewer emails on Sunday, and I notice Sunday emails more than the emails I receive on weekdays when email volume is higher.

However, the best answer to the question, “What is the best day to send B2B marketing emails?” is specific to your particular target market(s). When I was President of the Institute of Management Consultants Southern California, I noticed that we got more responses to emails on Friday afternoon. That’s often a time when consultants are in their offices finishing up from the current week and preparing for the next week. Clients usually don’t want to see us late Friday afternoon.

Find out the best day and time to email by trial and error or by primary research. Use a program like Constant Contact that tracks the email “read” time and day to find out what your target prefers. You can also simply observe when you get the most replies to your emails. Interview your customers, prospects and colleagues to understand when they review and read email. If the answers allow you to identify a better day of the week for email, send your email on that day. Then track the results to see if there is an improvement in responses or email reads and click-throughs.

What have you found from your B2B email marketing campaigns? Have you been able to identify a day on which your email read and/or response rate is higher? What day is it and whom do you target? Please comment below….

Photo by Stefan Baudy on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Just as technology emerged in the movie industry to make 3D movie production  more cost-effective, so too has it  emerged to provide B2B marketers with a 3 dimensional, not 2 dimensional, platform to provide compelling information about products and services and engage the people who like them.

People buy from people they like. This has been true well before use of the Internet . Remember the boring person who spits when they talk and who cornered you at the cocktail party? Your eyes glazed over, and you excused yourself to refresh your drink (and wipe off your face). What about when you got the overly assertive (aggressive?) sales pitch at the lunch that was intended to “get to know each other?” You looked for the first excuse to leave early.

Now, in social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, people choose whom they want to follow. Most people want to follow people who are interesting and have relevant stories to tell. They do not want to follow people who only post business pitches. They especially don’t want to follow those who repeat the pitches, over and over again!

How do you get people who wear 3D glasses to follow you?

Be Interesting in Your Social Networks.

It’s more important than ever to be interesting. Don’t copy “stuff,” but do create original materials. Don’t push your features and benefits out, but do tell a story that has some emotional context. And, yes, even your software product or your black box network router has a story, because it has changed the way people do business and made their lives better. Even better, get your customers to tell people online how your product or service changed their lives.

Be Your Brand Online

It’s also critical to know whom you want to personify online to represent your business. Don’t merely express your individual opinion online when you are marketing your products or services. Be your brand. Spend some time figuring out what your brand is (if you don’t know already). Then represent it creatively and “engagingly” online, and your customers will represent it as accurately as you do.

At Marketing Profs 2009 B2B Forum in Boston, Jay Baer said, “Be 3 dimensional in your social networking. Save the 4th dimension for Facebook.” (In my opinion, you could let loose a 4th dimension on Facebook, but set up your privacy settings so that your work connections don’t see that)

By all means be interesting and market in 3D. Don’t be 2D! What do B2B marketers think? Are you 3D or 2D? What are the obstacles to being 3D in your marketing?

I don’t know about you, but one of the challenges for someone new to blogging is researching and  writing entries without spending tons of time. I’m pretty conscientious about my blog entries. I don’t want to put out only my opinion nor do I want to generate fluffy or light blog entries. I want to reference other opinions, videos, blog entries, etc. so that readers get value.

Last month I live-blogged at a conference. It was challenging, in that I wanted to finish a blog entry in the one hour 15 minute time slot each speaker session was allotted; yet I wanted to offer some depth. At this conference, which was the Confab conference for consultants, the seats with plugin access for laptops were in the first three rows. I tried to sit way over on the side so as not to annoy anyone with my blogging activity.

Live-blogging forced me to more actively listen for the nuggets and take-aways from each session to put into the blog, and to listen for a way to “net out” the session – that is, to find a way to quickly characterize the speaker, their comments, the audience Q&A. As the session started up, I entered in the session title, speaker info with links to their sites, took notes, wrote up my blog entry while paying attention to the ongoing presentation and discussion.

Throughout the conference I completed several entries. On the flight home, I thought that if I had queued up the speaker info, links and session titles in advance I could have focused more on content during the session. Back in my office, I researched live blogging, and, (no surprise) found that others had had the same experiences and put together very helpful information, including the tip to set up blog entries with session basic info and links in advance!

See Bruno Giussani’s Tips for Conference Bloggers. Bruno is the European Director of the TED Conferences. I also got value from the PDF that Bruno wrote with blogger Ethan Zuckerman.

My blogging is becoming more efficient through learning from those who have walked through the learning curve before me! This blog entry took me about thirty minutes, which is probably a record!

What have you learned about live blogging? Or about blogging in general? Please comment below.

In my last blog entry,Trust: Get It, Measure It, Grow It Online or Offline, I wrote about what I learned in reading the books Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith and The Trusted Advisor by David Maister et al.  The exercise made me think of an issue I’ve seen on a lot of web sites: the position of the About Us page.

I take note when an About Us page is the first one on a web site menu. To me, putting an About Us page first tells me at a glance that the site creators either don’t get basic marketing principles or just have an “it’s all about us” attitude. They are not putting the needs of visitors who come to their site first.
As an example, let’s say a visitor comes to a site about a manufactured product. What is first and foremost on their mind? Do they want to read about the history of the company or the bios of the people who work there first? No. They are asking in the short time they have to decide if they are in the right place, “Is this product what I need?” and “Does it have new features that offer me benefits I haven’t even thought about?” They might also ask, “How is this product different than that of the competitors?”

When you design your web site (or your presentation or your brochure or any other marketing materials), put yourselves in the shoes of your target audience(s). What pain do they have that you solve? How can you make a difference? Providing answers first for the needs of your potential customers increases trust, gives them the feeling that you care, and grabs the attention of your prospect. It increases your trust quotient by decreasing the selfishness factor in the trust equation mentioned in the book Trust Agents and originated in the book The Trusted Advisor:

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Selfishness

It’s only after you capture the attention of a potential customer because you have what they need, that they will wonder about you and your company. “Do I want to do business with this company?” “Can I relate to the people who work here?” Answers to these questions can increase your credibility, but you may never get the chance if you appear selfish to begin with.

I just finished reading two books about trust, Trust Agents and The Trusted Advisor.  Reading these books was very meaningful for Jennifer Beever the marketer who does social networking and wants to establish a better presence, and for Jennifer Beever the CMO for Hire and B2B marketing consultant who wants to add more value for clients. Here are some of my takeaways from the books.

First I read Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. This book discusses why trust is important for social media – a must read if you’re thinking of getting into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogging, and a great read if you’re already into these networks and activities or even if you consider yourself an expert.

What I liked about Trust Agents is that the authors talk the talk about trust (it’s been studied and written about before) and applied it very well to social media. I follow Chris Brogan online and know that he walks his talk; I’m sure his co-author does as well. In their book I got my first exposure to the trust equation (I’m a geek; I love stuff like this):

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Selfishness.

With this equation you can actually measure your trust quotient with clients and/or perhaps calculate a social media average score for yourself (if you’re self-aware and honest). This algorithm discussed by Brogan and Smith is from The Trusted Advisor, by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford. More about that book in a bit, because when I saw the equation I realized I had Maister et al’s book on hand and queued it up as my next read.

Back to Trust Agents – if you stop and think about it, as the book authors obviously did, we follow people online if they are credible; if we can rely on their reliable information and presence manifested in frequent and regular posts; and whether or not they intimately engage us as people, not as sales targets. Speaking of sales, what about that selfishness factor? We see selfish a mile away (or thousands of miles away) in social networking. My favorite quotes from the book Trust Agents are:

• “Be in the relationship before the sale.”
• “In social media, human is the new black.”
• “Be worthy of being liked.”

I love the chapter on “Make Your Own Game” in Trust Agents.  It’s a motivating section that gets you thinking about how, by tinkering with what is (software, systems, social networks and more), you can come up with the next ‘what could be’ product or service. Very fun to think about.

Next I read The Trusted Advisor. In this book, Maister et al tell you not only why and how, but they give you behaviors to adopt and exact questions to ask to begin to grow trust with clients. Part way through the book I could tell it would be foundational knowledge for going forward as a consultant. The book expressed what I believe I want to embody in my consulting practice, but I didn’t realize that some of my behaviors and thoughts didn’t support my intent.

I read the chapter on client types first. The authors suggest that you identify what type of client you are working with, and then bring forth the aspects of your personality that will best compliment that type to maximize the relationship. They caution that consultants should not lie or be something they are not. Questions to ask to identify what type of client you are working with are:

1. “What is their personal motivation in the company or current situation?”
2. “What is their personality?”
3. “How does the state of the company affect their view of the organization? Of the world?”

The book is an important read for consultants and other service providers, in my opinion. My favorite takeaways from The Trusted Advisor:

• Never take on the attitude that you are the professional, and the client is not.
• A selfish advisor wants to win more than help the client.
• What turns clients off: selling, making them feel they are not important, not listening, trying to romance them.
• What clients like: consultants who make an impact, do work on spec, help them think or strategize, sit in on meetings, show how they compare in their industry, analyze their competition, stay in touch!

Both Trust Agents and The Trusted Advisor suggest the power of giving away knowledge to establish credibility, reliability and intimacy and to reduce selfishness. My next read will be David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Advertising and PR, which seems to be in alignment with some of the takeaways from my most recent reading list.
What do you think about trust? What are you reading to be a better social networker or consultant? Will/do you give stuff away? Please comment below.

This week I got a direct message as a result of following someone on Twitter. It said something like, “Thank you for following me. I look forward to reading your tweets. If you need my XYZ services, I would be happy to help. Visit my website, www.XYZ.com.”

It was nice to get a thank you, but there is a pitch embedded in it!

A better message (and I assumed it was direct) was from one of the first people I started following, Mike Stelzner, author of Writing Whitepapers. His message said, “Hi! Thanks a bunch for the follow. Have you seen this on how to get more followers (from Guy Kawasaki)? http://tinyurl.com/5vvd5u.” Now this was helpful! What I especially liked about it is that Mike didn’t even provide a link to free stuff on his site (he has lots of terrific content there) – he linked to someone else’s free and helpful content.

I read Chris Brogan’s blog this morning, in which he asked his followers to buy his new book, Trust Agents, this week. Is that a self-serving promotion? In today’s post, Chris’s tone was very hat-in-hand as he explained that he rarely asks for help from followers. In another blog post, How to Manage Twitter, he said that his ratio of promoting others’ valuable content to promoting his own stuff is about 12:1. I’ve gotten a lot of value from following Chris. So, guess what? I’m buying the book this week!

Just as in our personal and work relationships, social networking on Twitter, Facebook and blogs is like banking. The more you deposit, the more interest you will earn and the more will be there when you need to withdraw. Add lots value for your followers first. When you need to ask for something, you can ask for and receive what you need.

…And the Answers You Should Expect to Hear.
The search engine optimization field is extremely fragmented, with companies ranging from solo independent consultants working from their garages to large established organizations. The barriers to entry are low. There is a ton of information online, allowing anyone who is interested to pick up information and profess themselves an SEO expert.

I wrote about this in my blog entry SEO Industry Has Some Snake Oil, But Also Much Success. I do think there are good SEO vendors out there now. But, in the fragmented SEO industry, the wide range of capabilities and prices  make it more difficult to know which vendor provides the best value. Furthermore, SEO is a technical specialty that not many of us understand. The fact that we are dealing with a fragmented industry and uninformed buyers begs the question, “How does a lay person who doesn’t understand SEO choose a vendor?”

Below are the 12 questions you should ask any SEO vendor before hiring them. Before you talk to vendors, try to  educate yourself about search engine optimization best practices so that you can make an informed decision. One source of SEO information is Search Engine News by Planet Ocean Communications. For the past ten years, I have found this to be a great source of SEO best practices. Planet Ocean rewrites the book on SEO and publishes the results to subscribers each month. Planet Ocean provides timely information on search engine algorithm changes and how to deal with them. With their service, you can get accurate, high-level information and the ability to drill down into the how-to when you want. Even if you don’t do the SEO work, it might be a good idea to subscribe to stay current so that you can better select and then manage your SEO vendor.

12 Questions to Ask When Choosing an SEO Vendor

1. Can you provide me with references I can contact about your performance, results, responsiveness, etc.?

The SEO vendor should easily give you at least 3 references. Ask the references if their expecations were met and how (timeliness, results, professionalism, ability to explain technology, etc.).

2. What methodologies or best practices do you use in search engine optimization?

You should hear that the vendor uses white hat SEO techniques, focuses on keyword analysis and content updates, manually generates quality inbound links, and uses cascading style sheets or other techniques to separate a web page’s content from its design. The vendor should NOT do black hat SEO practices such as link farming, keyword stuffing, or doorway or gateway pages.

3. What steps does the SEO vendor take to understand your business before search engine optimization?

The SEO vendor should take some time to learn about your business so they know which audiences you need to target and the best way to reach those audiences through SEO. You should get a sense of how strategic the vendor is and how much they can think outside of the box to make your SEO project a success.

4. How do you conduct an analysis to determine what needs to be done for our SEO project?

The SEO vendor should have a proven methodology including a checklist of steps they go through to anayze your SEO needs. Find out if they reverse engineer competitor sites to uncover techniques and opportunities. Ask them what tools they use for keyword analysis, and find out if they use any other automated tools to assess your web site.

5. What methodology do you use to you submit our web site URL to online directories?

Submission to key online directories should be done manually, not through automatic submission programs. The automatic programs have been recognized by certain search engines who dismiss the submissions as spam.

6. What features do you recommend we add to our web site to enhance SEO?

Current practices call for inclusion of a variety of media to improve search engine performance. This is mainly because Google places more emphasis on video, audio and blogs on web sites in search engine results.

7. How do you recommend we go about building links to our site from other sites?

There are programs that automate creating links to your web site. But the major search engines recognize when you get large numbers of links into your web site in a short period of time and will rank your site lower as a result. You are better off getting a few links from related, quality web sites each week to build your incoming links.

8. Is SEO your only service or do you have others?

Find out if search engine optimization is the focus of the vendors you talk to or if it is a sideline to other services they offer like web development and marketing. The most important factors in your decision are the quality of the service the SEO vendor provides and the results their work gets for you. But it’s important to know if SEO is the core service a vendor offers or a sideline that they provide using someone else’s automated tools.
9. How many years of SEO experience do you have?

The longer an SEO vendor has been practicing the art, the better. More years experience means that the vendor has dealt with more optimization issues and challenges and (presumably) has found solutions. SEO vendors with more experience will have a better perspective on the history of search engine optimization and understand how work-arounds to search engine algorithms are negatives once the search engines figure them out and rank web sites that use them lower or delist them altogether.

10. How do you stay up-to-date with the ever-changing search engine algorithms and techniques for optimization?

SEO vendors should have some process for staying up to date on algorithm changes and proven techniques for SEO success. The Search Engine News service that I mentioned above is one of several reputable service that you can follow. In addition, SEO vendors should be part of industry associations and professional groups (see next question).

11. From Lee Odden’s blog entry: Have you been vetted and listed in industry directories? Selection guides?

If SEO vendors are serious about SEO, they probably will have a presence in the industry and may speak at industry conferences and programs. Some directories and listings of SEO vendors include SEMPO, SEOConsultants,  TopSEO.com, Marketing Sherpa’s SEO Guide, and Marketing Profs Vendor Selector.

12. How do you charge for your services? Hourly or project? Are there ongoing costs to maintain the SEO?

Any vagueness in the SEO vendor responses about pricing or ongoing, monthly maintenance fees and length of the process should raise a red flag. It is not unusual for a good SEO project to begin with initial programming and changes and then continue for at least six months with monthly analysis, tweaks to keywords and programming changes. The analysis and tweaks on an ongoing basis should not be expensive, especially if the SEO vendor uses automated tools to do the analysis. Small keyword and program tweaks take do not take much time to do.

I hope these 12 questions help those of you who are choosing an SEO vendor. SEO vendors – did I leave anything out? Please comment using the link at the end of the page.