Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Blogging.  If you talk to the internet marketing snobs they’ll tell you it’s “so 2007″.  If that were the case, there wouldn’t be so many that are still so successful.  Sure there are other newer, shinier mediums, but a good blog still holds a tremendous amount of value and can be a great business and relationship builder.  The real question is, how do you make a good one?

I think I can speak a little bit from experience, as:

1. We’re a small business
2. I’m a blogger
3. I consider my blog a moderate success (though I really wish I had more time to devote to it…but see number 1 for why I can’t)

Most small businesses lack the resources of their larger contemporaries, which adds some significant challenges to creating a successful and beneficial blog.  I’ve created a short checklist that helps me, and will hopefully help you either create or transform your blog as one that people can truly find value in.

Don't put a stinker in someone's inbox.

1. Create quality content.  Too often small businesses will have a couple of ideas that are worthy of a post, but the majority of their blogging is filler.  Don’t make your blog a one hit wonder, think of your blog as an album.  Nobody will buy an album if there’s only one or two good songs.  Assume that every reader will sign up to your RSS feed, and if your post isn’t something someone would take the time to open and read then don’t write it.  Nothing’s more annoying than getting a stinkbomb in your inbox or Google Reader.
2. Be unique.  If you have an idea for a blog, spend some time researching to see if it’s been discussed before.  Do a quick search or two on the topic and if it’s been done, try to add a unique spin to it.  If you want to get some attention, link to the other posts as well, and you can get some exposure by showing up in their trackbacks if the other blogs have them enabled.
3. Involve others.  Once you’ve established your blog and have a bit of an audience, offer others the opportunity to do a guest post or co-write a post on a topic that they’re passionate about.  These people will likely help promote their appearance on their blog or other social media avenues as well.  The more popular your guest, the better off you’ll be.
4. 

   100% of people like graphs. It's a law.

   Make it look good.  Like it or not, credibility often comes with appearance.  So making your blog have a professional look goes a long way to getting people to spend time reading your work.  Furthermore, add relevant images to your blog.  People like visuals - especially graphs.

5. Create a schedule and stick to it.  One of the hardest parts about maintaining a blog is maintaining a blog.  It takes time.  I’m guilty of falling off my schedule from time to time as well, but I try to tackle a blog topic or two each weekend.  It’s always nice to have a spare topic that’s not time sensitive to post when life doesn’t allow.  If you have a team, this gets even easier, as long as each member knows when they’re expected to add a post.  Create a schedule and stick to it.  Reward yourself for sticking to it if you must (I would blog for a Klondike bar.)

If you need motivation or need to sell other members of your team on blogging, keep in mind some of the key benefits:

1. A blog lets you casually articulate a position on a topic or better explain products/services without heavy handed selling.  It’s a great way to tell a story and to personalize your business.
2. Fresh content makes search engines happy - green content shows your site is active and constantly adding relevant content to your blog/site’s theme.
3. Your blog is a great opportunity to build links (which will help your overall site’s ranking as well).  Publish an RSS feed and promote your blog in blog directories and via social media to get yourself noticed.  Once you have an audience and great content, links will follow.

Another great resource for blog beginners is the Clear Writing Checklist - which offers some technical recommendations for selecting colors, images and fonts to make your blog all it can be.  I definitely recommend checking that out.

Any other recommendations are certainly welcome in the comments.  Happy blogging!

There are plenty of web awards out there, and even some locally here in Lansing.  But we at Netvantage wanted to have a bit more fun with it and let the general public vote for their favorite websites.  With that in mind, we cooked up the Lansing Web Awards, our idea for a web 2.0 take on local web awards.  So while this isn’t the most scientific approach to choosing the best website in the greater Lansing area, we think it’s a great way to get local businesses and the general public thinking about the web and the many great websites established by local businesses.

So if you’re a local business or just a fan of a local business’ website, check out the Lansing Web Awards page and tell your friends, and have your friends tell their friends!  The winners will get some fancy hardware, and as much publicity as we can generate for them.

Further, we finally had a chance to use our green screen for something (there is no truth in the rumor that this entire contest was created so I could finally do something with the green screen), so check out this extremely fancy video we put together.

So, if you like this idea, feel free to share it via facebook, retweet it, or write it on a piece of paper and send it via carrier pigeon.  The more people that get involved the greater success this will be.  Thanks!

I don’t like when things don’t work.  A month ago Comcast decided to create a firewall to block our office from using a service we use every day.  It took three days of emails and phone calls before I finally got it fixed.  We didn’t do anything wrong, Comcast’s firewall just went haywire and decided to ruin our day.  The fact that it took several days to clear up was just ridiculous…

So while I’m no fan of Comcast, I just got flat out annoyed by their most recent addition for customers - the Comcast search redirect!  If you navigate to a down page with no 404 or a dead site you get:

Comcast's latest attempt to annoy me.

Now, I understand the practical nature of this for the average user, but as an SEO I actually like getting the dead page.  I can quickly grab the URL without getting redirected and research it for any number of useful search marketing tasks.  Fortunately, there’s a link in the upper right hand corner to disable this error message - which can be easy or difficult depending on the availability of your myComcast username (good luck with that), and then you’ll get to deal with Comcast customer service!  Have fun with that…

Perhaps my favorite part of search engine marketing is the chance to educate people about it. I never thought much about becoming an academic, but I really have taken a liking to teaching people about search marketing. This evening I had the opportunity to speak to a packed (okay, partially filled) auditorium of college students from the Michigan State Marketing Association, and it was a great experience.

I’m very interested in learning how the generation behind me thinks about search marketing, and how they consider it in comparison to other media.  I threw out the concept of a revolutionary product during their lifetime, and we ended up talking about the Ipod.  Showing my age, I told them that I still owned a Walkman when the Ipod was launched…allowing me a miserable 30 or so minutes of music before I had to flip the tape over - a serious inconvenience mid-workout.

Once they got done laughing at my caveman-like ways (and I didn’t even mention that I was still sporting my sweet Sony Walkman at the gym in 2005) I asked them, “How would you let the world know about this revolutionary device?”  After a minute of coaxing we started talking about traditional ads, and then using demographics to hit our target audiences, etc. etc.  And they were right, this is a great way to build awareness.  But as our discussion went on, I made the point that this was a major departure (not to mention a much more expensive one) from the old fashioned Walkman and the CD player.

Don't act like you're not jealous.

So while the billboards, magazine ads and radio/tv spots can start the buzz, people want to inform themselves before they buy.  Especially in an age when information is so readily available.  And that’s the main point I wanted to get across to these young marketers - information is cheap now, and you need to stay on top of how people are getting their information to be successful.  Search is a key element in that right now.

In my Walkman example I talked about marketing “noise”.  You may have seen the commercial by watching the game, but if you don’t remember the name, how are you going to search for the Ipod the next day?  Would you type in “digital Walkman”?  “Digital music player”? In these situations, if your product’s not there, then you don’t exist.  Herein lies the importance of search marketing, at new product launch and onwards and upwards throughout the product life cycle - you simply HAVE to be there.

I did a lot of talking tonight, and maybe the point wasn’t as refined as it is in the above paragraphs, but I kept the students awake and interested it seemed, and I hope they took away some of the points I tried to make here, because I sure had a blast talking to them about Netvantage and what I do for a living.

Another 1am blog, and in the words of the Ice Cube, whose tape was in my Walkman, “Today was a good day.”

You can’t pinch your pennies enough these days, or pinch them at all if you’re working with a broken hand as I am…ANYHOW, I figured it was about time for another quick hitting edition of SEO On A Nickel - so all of my penny pinching fans feel free to rejoice! No lengthy diatribe, typing with one finger doesn’t lend itself to verbose blogging.

What I want to cover today is extremely important. If you’ve never really laid out a strategy for your SEO work, or you’re just getting started, it’s extremely important that you assess your current state, and the state of those pages occupying the SERPs you desire.

There are some sweet paid tools that will do this for you - like SEOMoz Labs’ Linkscape Visualizer. This very succinctly details how you stack up to a competitor.

We've got a ways to go to catch SEOMoz...those rascals!

If you’re not familiar with SEOMoz, they have their own metrics (thus the names), but the basic concepts from this can be done with other tools to give direction to your SEO efforts.  Some things to look at, and the tools to compare them:

• Inbound links - Yahoo site Explorer is the easiest tool for this task.  Look at the link profile of the ranking page, as well as the domain.  The page may have few links, but might be ranking out on the strength of internal links from a very powerful domain.  Also, be sure you compare apples to apples, having 50 links from the same domain is far different than 50 links from unique domains.  If your links all come from only a few sites, you’ll want to add that to your list of priorities.
• Trust - This is a bit more difficult, but if you have MORE links than a competitor, trust could be an issue.  Link Diagnosis will show you the Google PageRanks of sites linking in.  If you have a bunch of PR1 and PR2 pages and your competitor has a few 5 and 6s…it’s time to get some more authoritative links.
• Internal links - Site Explorer works well for this task, too.  Are you getting the most out of your own site?  Sometimes just by optimizing internal links you can make a major move.  If you see a target page is lacking in internal links, start there.

Essentially, if you perform the above tasks and make yourself a checklist, you can figure out your greatest deficiencies before moving forward.  If you’re trying to save a few bucks in your marketing efforts, this will definitely be a step towards efficiency.