October is here and we are rounding the last bend of 2010 and going into the final quarter of the year.  How has the year treated you so far?  Have there been new opportunities for your business in this changing economy or has it been an uphill battle?

I recently came across this slideshow from Businessweek that was originally published in October of 2008 after the initial financial fallout.  (Those of us in Houston were still dealing with the aftermath of Ike and were too preoccupied with keeping stocked with batteries, water, and learning new ways to use the grill to pay much attention to commentary.)

The businesses that survived that time came out on the other side stronger than ever and are still successful.  These are a few common characteristics of the survivors:

• They stayed lean.
• They shied from debt.
• They innovated.  They didn’t stick to a losing ship and old business model but adjusted to the new times and new economy.
• They were aggressive about going after new business.

October Marketing Monday

This is a reminder that the Marketing Monday for this month will be on October 11th.  While this meeting will still be an open exchange of ideas, I would like to focus on discussing ways to generate business throughout the upcoming holidays.  For some of you in retail, this may be one of the busiest times of the year.  For others, your customers may be going into hibernation.  Let’s brainstorm ways to end the first decade of the new millenium with a bang.

More on Business Blogging

Thank you for all the wonderful feedback on the “10 Steps to Success with Wordpress” report.  I’ve had several questions come up regarding it that I wanted to cover a little more.  (If you haven’t already downloaded your copy, you can do so here.)

It isn’t so much that a “blog” is some sort of magic bullet that will instantly help your web site rank better.  There is no “magic bullet.”  It is that a site that integrates a blog format lends itself to two factors that the search engines, especially Google, love:  timeliness and what I’ll call “slurpiness.”

Google likes content that is current.  Maybe you have a particular page that has ranked really well for one of your keywords for several years; however, you noticed that over time it has lost ground.  One possibility may be that a competitor is working on overtaking you, but another possibility is that Google just doesn’t see that page as “fresh” as it used to be.

Your web site is a like a garden.  To be successful, it takes constant maintenance and nurturing. You need to be either adding new content directly to your site or content pointing back to your web site on a regular basis.

Now for the “slurpiness.”  Sites using blog or content management platforms are typically designed to structure content in a logical manner.  Rather than having a big ugly mess of pages all over the place with junked up code and orphan pages that some static sites morph into, content is ordered in a hierarchy.  (That isn’t to say you can’t mess up a blog or CMS structure, you just have to work harder to do so.)  Google loves organized content that make it easy to identify “authority hubs.”

Also, these types of sites make it extremely easy to get your sites crawled by the search engines with autogenerated HTML sitemaps, XML sitemaps, and RSS feeds.

Your site can’t be ranked if it can’t be found.

So having this delineated content structure is one thing.  The other, as I mentioned in the report, is getting your site as interlinked as possible on the web.

The “Cool Kids Club” of the Internet

Do you remember in high school those kids that everyone knew?  The ones that someone would mention later and people would say, “Oh So-and-so, I went to school with them.”  And then there were the kids that you see in a photo and not only can you not remember their name, but you don’t remember them at all.

That is what the internet is like.

Google likes the Cool Kids.

Yes, it’s true.  Think about what the World Wide Web is.  It is billions of independent sites interconnected by hyperlinks.  Search engines send their spiders from site to site traveling through the links.  In Google’s eyes, the more “votes” or links to your site, the more important your site is and the higher it will rank.

So in the diagram below, if your site is sitting there all by its lonesome with no link love . . . chances are very good that you aren’t going to fare very well in the search engine rankings either.

However, the more sites that start linking to you, particularly sites that have something to do with your industry, niche, or topic, the more importance Google will place on your pages.

So the tips I give for interconnecting your web site are just the basics . . . the very minimum . . . that you should be doing to promote your site.

A Real Life Example

After I sent out that report, my friend Eden started a blog to support her eShop for custom children’s items.  We had talked a little about blogging before, but the plan in the report inspired her to get going.

For the past several years, she’s designed custom homecoming mums out of grosgrain ribbon.  If you’re not from the South (which I am not,) it’s a little hard to explain the hype.  Think of the biggest corsage you’ve ever seen, then think of something five times larger, and then add four feet of ribbon and a couple pounds of trinkets, stuffed animals, pictures . . . and then the girls wear this for homecoming.

They are ENORMOUS and a VERY BIG DEAL in Texas.

Normally mums are made from florist ribbon, but Eden designs them with grosgrain ribbon, does custom embroidery, blings them out, etc.  So if you want one that will last, or just want to one-up your rival . . . this is it.

So anyway, she decided she wanted to get a little more exposure for her custom mums and decided to target “high school homecoming mum” after she read my keyword tips in that report.

She started writing posts about homecoming mums and each post linked back to her shop mum page.  I was really impressed with all of the different post topics she came up with and how interesting they were to read.  I actually sat and read all of them.  She’s a great writer.

Now keep in mind she didn’t start writing these posts or even put up her mum product pages until August.  The first couple of weeks she called me and said, “It’s not working . . . it’s not working.”

Sometimes you can see quick results, but most of the time . . . it just takes time.  After a couple of weeks, her site started moving up to page one.  (This, by the way, is a pretty fast response in rankings.)

Today, she is the #1 result in Google for “high school homecoming mum” searching without quotes and without a location modifier.

When I asked her about it, “It’s addicting, it makes me want to write more.”  Having conquered mums, she’s now working on writing about her custom children’s fairy costumes.

Bloggers’ Breakfast

Which is a good segue into a reminder that the next Bloggers’ Breakfast will be this Wednesday, October 6th.

Next Steps

There’s a lot of hot air when it comes to promoting sites on the internet.  I know most of you get bombarded with “hot offers” on a daily basis.  But really, this is what it boils down to:

I get asked all the time, “Why isn’t my site ranking for XXX?”  When I look at their site, they have nothing on it that talks about “XXX” and absolutely no links pointing back to their site.

I think the average person would be shocked to know just how much effort it takes to rank in the top three of page 1 for competitive keywords.

In other words, if there is money in the search traffic, don’t expect to fall into a top spot by accident.

I use articles, press releases, social networking, social bookmarking, 2.0 sites, have memberships to a few proprietary networks, and a couple of other things I’m not going to share (I can’t spill all my secrets.)  I also have been building my own authority site network.

One expert that I follow and respect calls it building a “link mountain.”  I think of it more as an iceberg.  Your actual site itself is only a very small portion, the very tip, of what it takes to build up rankings.

After reading this, if you’re thinking something like:

“I barely even have time to brush my teeth let along blog.”

or maybe . . .

“I would rather run naked through Town Center during the 4th of July festival than have to write something people will read.”

. . . Don’t worry, I have a solution for you.

Up until now, I have customized promotion services for people on a case by case basis depending on where they were at, what they needed, and what their budget was.  This worked, but it made it a little difficult to give an on-the-spot quote when someone asked me “what would you charge for . . . ?”

So I spent some time looking at everything I do for my own sites, looking at what most people needed, and then prioritizing from there and put together some ongoing service packages.  These range from a very affordable weekly content and basic promotion service to keep things fresh on your site and a steady flow of links coming back in, to a more aggressive show-no-mercy campaign.

If you wanted to get more information on these service packages on my web site . . . I’m sorry . . . the information isn’t there and won’t be for several reasons.

For one thing, I’m not going to lay out my strategy for anyone to come and copy.  This is for both my clients’ protection as well as my own.

Second, getting campaigns for new clients online and going takes time and I would rather focus on working with people who have already expressed an interest and my current contacts than a random person.

But I will say the packages start at much less than a Yellow Page ad and have a much better ROI.

So if this is something you are interested in, just give me a call or drop me an email.

I hope to see you at one of the upcoming networking meetings!

Carla Alvarez
Legacy Marketing Services
www.legacymarketingservices.com
713.289.0819

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