If I had the time I'd prepare a professionally produced training video on search engine optimizing your WordPress blog/site, but I don't, so instead I'll just direct you to the video that John Pozadzides recorded of my 30 minute long presentation at WordCamp San Francisco from several months ago here, or simply watch the embedded video below:

Enjoy! Feedback is welcome.

Being a CEO is a tough enough job without having to worry about blog traffic on top of it all (ask me how I know...) A corporate blog could be a tremendous publicity tool, though, if properly executed. On the other hand, it could end up being a PR disaster if you say something that harms your or your company's reputation. I think maybe a combination of lack of time and fear of posting something dangerous is behind many a CEO's apprehension toward company blogs. The reality of corporate blogging, though, is that it doesn't take a lot of time, and the success stories far outnumber the horror stories.

Take Jonathan Schwartz, for instance. As the CEO of one of the IT industry's intellectual blue chips, he's attracted widespread attention for his corporate blog commentary on industry current events and company and product news. Originally he intended to foster a method of communicating with the IT marketplace -- his customers, partners, competitors, and fans (yeah, even a behind-the-scenes company like Sun has fans in the computer technology world) as well as the more than 32,000 Sun employees as well. In one of the tech blogging world's most innovative moves, Schwartz also offered a free $5000 Sun server to bloggers who wrote the most compelling reviews of the machine's performance -- positive or negative. At the time, the claim was that the Sun T2000 "Niagara" server was the fastest on earth, and certainly had the most performance per watt of electricity consumed. In order to get the word out about this new machine to as many people as possible, he didn't spend millions on a traditional advertising campaign. Instead, Schwartz posted the offer on his blog, then had his salespeople send out free servers to tech bloggers and other interested potential customers for a free 30-day evaluation. If you didn't want the machine at the end of the 30 days (and you didn't win the monthly contest to be the blogger with the most compelling T2000 benchmarking blog post), all you had to do was box it up in its original packaging, and Sun would pay return shipping. In essence, if you wanted to play with the machine, you had nothing to lose. Schwartz rationalized on his blog that the cost of the free servers he gave out -- even to people who didn't win the contest and wouldn't send the machines back to Sun -- was negligible considering the value of the press and blog coverage he got as a result, and he reported on his blog a few weeks later that this effort was especially effective.

Another interesting CEO blogger success story is Steve Spangler. As the founder and CEO of educational toy cataloger Steve Spangler Science, Steve expanded his business though non-traditional marketing methods. His online science experiment videos and blog posts about teaching science to kids has elevated his fame to new heights. Gradually, Spangler found himself on local, then national television talk shows and news programs such as the Ellen Show, teaching people to see the world through an adventurous scientific lens. He even got chosen as one of only 204 nominees for Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People" of 2007. Steve credits his blog for a lot of this online buzz and media attention. Aside from having a lot of fun, what do you suppose all of this has done for sales at SteveSpanglerScience.com? Let's put it this way: Steve's blog accounts for 12% of online sales!

Still not convinced? Here are some of my own reasons for having a CEO blog:

• Search engines -- Google in particular -- love blogs. So anything you have to say or sell in your blog will rank better in the search engines, all else being equal.
• If you have a good blog, you can get readers hooked and coming back for more. What better way to burn your brand into the minds of potential customers, thus increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases?
• Having a blog helps get you links. If you are a blogger, then other bloggers think of you as "one of them." As such, they will be more likely to link to you and to give you favorable coverage on their blogs. It is also more likely that you will be on their radar because bloggers are more apt to follow your company's movements by subscribing to your blog's RSS feed than by subscribing to your email newsletter or periodically visiting your site.
• Having a blog helps get you press from the mainstream media. Journalists read blogs, and are more apt to solicit interviews from you if you have a popular and/or interesting blog.
• A blog builds your credibility and can position you as a "thought leader" in your niche. For example, a blog about stamp collecting (with interesting trends, news tidbits, insightful commentary, etc.) would position an e-commerce shop selling collectible stamps as a credible, trusted expert source for stamps.
• A blog can help you get invited to speak at conferences and to author articles. Speaking engagements, even when they're not paid, are a huge opportunity for networking and publicity.

So what are you waiting for? If you want to get started with a corporate blog, get your IT department to look into WordPress, b2evolution, Compendium, Movable Type, Drupal or whatever blogging software looks interesting to you. If you're on a shoestring budget or don't want to make a significant investment into corporate blogging, you could look into a free or cheap hosted service like Blogger.com, TypePad, or Wordpress.com. Be aware that you should own the domain name that the blog is published on, however. If you don't you're wedded to that URL and blog platform forever -- or at least until you decide to pull the plug and start over from scratch with a new URL and ZERO link popularity (since with these hosted platforms you won't have the luxury of installing a 301 redirect to your new URL).

Good luck and good blogging!

I went off the radar for a few weeks. Apologies for that. I have a lot going on in my life right now - not all of it good - that is taking up a lot of my time and headspace at the moment. Plus I've been traveling a lot. I just got back from a 10 day trip to the Bay area for 3 conferences -- FooCamp, Ypulse, and BlogHer.

It was my first FooCamp (I'm so psyched that I got an invite!). For those of you unfamiliar with Foo Camp, it is the predecessor to BarCamp with the word "Foo" an acronym for "Friends of O'Reilly." Besides being a huge fan of O'Reilly since about 1994, I'm co-authoring an O'Reilly book with Rand Fishkin and Jessie Stricchiola called The Art of SEO and I've spoken twice at O'Reilly/CMP's "Web 2.0 Expo" conference. So yes I'm an unabashed "Foo". FooCamp is invitation-only and limited to several hundred people. It's an "unconference" -- where the program is developed and presented by the attendees. The more proactive you are at Foo Camp (in terms of sharing/participating), the more you'll get out of it (and the more likely you'll be invited back again). It's completely free - free to attend, free food, free drinks, free "lodging" on the grounds - just bring your own tent. And yep, a lot of folks brought tents and camped out on the lawn. Some folks slept in the office buildings on the floor in sleeping bags. I'm not into "roughing it", so I stayed at a nearby Holiday Inn Express. My older two daughters got to hang out at the Holiday Inn while I went to the conference, which was pretty boring -- so they told me... about a MILLION times! Arrgh. Gotta love teenagers. Speaking of my teenagers, the middle one (who is 15) drew this flattering illustration (on the left) of me wearing a Foo Camp t-shirt. She finds it quite hilarious that I wear a T-shirt in public that says "Foo Camp." Of course I live to embarrass her (or so she thinks!).

Foo Camp attendees run the gamut - entrepreneurs to authors to venture capitalists - but they can all be described as leading thinkers and innovators. It was a real treat. I got to meet a lot of amazing people. Way too many to list. But here's an example: the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. Dries blogged about his Foo Camp experience. Nobody has a bad time at Foo Camp.

After the Foo Camp weekend came Ypulse, a youth marketing conference. It was excellent. If you market to kids, tweens or teens, you should have been at this conference (so go to the next one!). My oldest Chloe was a speaker on the "Totally Wired Superstars" panel with other teen entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed the conference, but Chloe was in heaven -- she met directors (Chloe wants to be a director), journalists, folks from Disney, Seventeen.com, MTV, and her hero, Ashley Qualls, the teenage "MySpace millionaire".

Then a couple days later came the BlogHer conference, a conference focused on the women blogger community -- a powerful and diverse voice in the blogosphere that includes "mommy bloggers", foodies, political bloggers, techies, etc. It was my second BlogHer conference. I went last year too, when Chloe spoke. This time we just attended. Chloe did manage to get on the local (Bay area) news (see the video here) - she was interviewed as an attendee.

BlogHer was great. I did sometimes feel like the "token male" in the audience, because women so outnumbered men (I never felt unwelcome though, just to clarify!). Instead of feeling out of place, a male could look at it as an opportunity. For instance, I remember a guy telling me at last year's BlogHer how he loved coming to their conferences because "it was like shooting fish in a barrel". Ha ha! I presume he was single, but I probably shouldn't assume that.

Now I'm back and it's back to the grindstone. I have articles to write, the book to work on, conference presentations to prepare for, a ton of emails to respond to, and personal crises to deal with. *deep sigh*

Rock on.

You gotta check out this WebProNews video interview at ACCM 08 of Steve Spangler - the science teacher turned catalog company CEO/Emmy award winner/keynote speaker/toy inventor:

In the video, Steve talks about how his Mentos + Diet Coke experiment turned into a YouTube sensation and how he was able to leverage it for his own marketing purposes. Steve is a client of ours and he even mentions Netconcepts (thank you Steve!!) as his experts behind the scenes helping him, which was really cool to hear.

Also in the video Steve shows off his cool flaming wallet, and how he is privileged to receive "special treatment" at airport security because of it. Um, yeah, that's not the kind of attention that you want, Steve

What you don't see in the video is that Steve also has a flaming business card holder. It's hilarious when he whips out one of his business cards and he has to put the fire out on the flaming card before he hands it to you. I'd LOVE to have one of those card holders and then troll the trade show floor and then hand over a flaming card to overaggressive, hard-selling vendors - but WITHOUT putting the fire out! hehe

I'm here at ACCM in the session "Increasing Web Sales on a Shoe String Budget". Here's the session description:
As the cost of doing business online continues to increase, small businesses must be strategic and creative in how they expend limited funds and resources. This session will discuss ways to maximize your conversion and average order size without breaking the bank on expensive bells and whistles. Using solid web design, studying metrics and trends, taking advantage of strategic cost effective marketing and using strategic catalog mailings are all part of the frugal marketer’s playbook.

Mike Feiman of Pooldawg is up first. Pooldawg (a Netconcepts client, btw) was founded in 2003 and sells 2100+ pool cues. Pooldawg uses Google Analytics. Number of visits doesn't really matter, it's all about what they do while on your site. They are focused on visit length, visit depth, bounce rates, conversion rate. Have about 3000 pages total, fully indexed by Google, each page is a potential entry page. Very important to present a consistent feel throughout the site. Pooldawg buys PPC. Don't get caught in bidding wars. Focus on the long tail. Drop keywords that don't perform and focus on conversion and cost per action (CPA). They buy ads on Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing. By chasing keywords they cost per conversion skyrockets. "billiards" as a search term converts poorly. Long Tail is where it's at. Brand names + pool cues convert much better and are cheaper. They constantly evaluate keywords, trying to get them to perform by ad copy tweaks and landing page tweaks etc. and if they still don't perform, they drop them from their PPC keyword list. Mike says: I'm willing to pay $1 a click if it's costing me $5 a customer, but not $1 a click if it's costing $40 a customer. People who use their internal search convert at 4x higher rate than those who do not. Signed up with Celebros and conversion jumped from 4x higher to 6x higher. Look at the results for searches coming through and if the results are poor, do something about it. Added a "Related Searches" tagging feature, thanks to Netconcepts, put them on the product page, and people use them. That creates more pages for Google to index, and they're seeing search traffic already coming in directly to these pages. They just launched this but it's already returning ROI. Only 10% of visitors are using the internal search. It's really about taking advantage of their current customers rather than throwing money at getting all new customers. In terms of guerrilla marketing... Participating on message boards is hugely valuable to Pooldawg. They talk to the board leaders who then communicate to the forum users, sponsor the message boards. With blogging, they haven't quite found their voice yet. They write articles internally and get them syndicated. One of their most popular articles is "the Anatamy of a pool cue", get tons of traffic to that page and it converts really well, so the ROI on the hour it took to write the article was great. Before site redesign done by Netconcepts, only 30% indexation in Google. Now 100% and they rank really high. Affiliate marketing is great for low cost customer acquisition. 6-8 % of total sales. 1000 affiliates, and only 100 really drive any real revenue for Pooldawg. 49% of traffic from natural search, 9% from paid search. 85 of their Top 100 terms are in the top 5 rankings in Google, 80 of the Top 100 in Yahoo. Natural search is very cost effective. Give users engaging tools and content. Pooldawg is building a very nice library of proprietary content - over 100 articles - will be adding video too. They partner with trusted names and steer away from the shadier players in their market. Sponsor the WPBA, BCA, GenerationPool.com, AZBilliards.com - associate themselves with trusted names.

Steve Spangler, "Chief Mess Maker" (CEO) of Steve Spangler Science. Shows off his flaming wallet and how they took him to a private room at the airport. Steve is the originator of the Mentos + Diet Coke geyser experiment. Showing off some video of him on the Food Network, on the Ellen Show, on Denver's 9News. Hilarious! Steve originally moved from public speaking for generating revenue to the website to do so. In 2005 the Mentos geyser things started to take off. How do you leverage this into a business that supports 30 employees? How do you go from an obscure backyard demo to an Internet phenomenon in less than 12 months? (i.e. get to 2 million + views on YouTube). In 2004 he wanted a redesign with some Flash but Stephan said no he wouldn't do that but Netconcepts would create a blog instead. On June 1 2004 this amazing traffic spike happened. It was a brief mention of Instasnow and Steve Spangler Science on the blog BoingBoing. Stupid.com puts Instasnow on their stupidest products list and it gets on Good Morning America. Turned lemons ("bad press"?) into lemonade by blogging "It's great to be stupid!" The blog is a perfect place for all sorts of great stories and testimonials like how Instasnow got a teacher out of a speeding ticket. Really important to write attention grabbing headlines on the blog: not "200 teachers engage in inquiry based science" but instead "Parents Beware: Teachers Gone Wild". Not "Science project about pulling microscopic meteorites out of your gutter" but instead "A meteorite hit my house!" The blog post that really launched the whole Mentos geyser phenomenon, video news anchor wearing a beautiful St Johns outfit got covered with Diet Coke: "News Anchor Gets Soaked! Mentos Experiment Sets a New Record". Where else would he put the fact that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? called Steve and wanted to put a Mentos + Diet Coke question on air: the blog! Does the blog generate sales? Measured that and the answer is yes. Steve makes the Time 100 most influential people nominees list. Is blogging really worth the effort? It is! Currently blogging 2-3 times per week, have an editor helping find stuff to blog about. #1 in Google for "science experiments". Big spike on Cybermonday. 3,000 inbound links. 4% of total traffic is from the blog, but 12% of sales are attributable to the blog! Now Steve is looking at expanding into Twitter. Amy Africa in the audience says: "I love Twitter!" but she's being facetious. 1.8 million views on the Steve and news anchor Mentos + Diet Coke YouTube video. What should you blog if you want to make money: best-selling products, "Did you know?" product information loaded with keywords, company events - past and present, "Behind the Scenes" information, customer testimonials.

If you have been around social media marketing for any amount of time, you have heard the term "link bait." It's a great way to gain traffic, readership, and rankings -- but what actually is it?

Link bait refers to something that grabs the attention of the blogosphere and makes people want to link to it from their blogs or tell their friends about it. It really can be just about anything, however, some link bait does better than others.

Two approaches that always seem to do well are controversy and humor.

The more simple piece to write, of course, is controversy link bait. Write something that a lot of people disagree with and you're going to be talked about. Jason Calacanis is a master of this kind of link baiting. In my opinion you have to be careful how you use this tactic, as you can burn bridges much faster than you can build them.

Humor is a different animal. When you are trying to write a funny piece of linkbait, using humor you actually have to be funny -- or at least more than just mildly amusing. I saw a great piece of humor link bait recently from Jane Copland and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz: Google Search Results Missing from OneBox. I loved the search for "things rick astley would never do." It was rather clever and funny. Now if only Google would actually return those mock results!

Other ways to bait for links include -- tools (like blog plugins and browser addons), late-breaking news and scoops, original research, and photos that you've Creative Commons licensed.

My favorite keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo last week was from one of my favorite bloggers -- the Forbes columnist Daniel Lyons, aka "Fake Steve Jobs." It's an amazing story, how a joke turned into an Internet sensation and then a book deal. And the way Lyons tells it, it's uproariously funny. The 25-minute video is embedded below:

As I mentioned above, FSJ started out as a joke. "It came out of two things," Lyons said. "Really it was a stupid prank. I can't believe I'm here giving speeches about this stuff. I really thought I would do it for a couple weeks and then shut it down. But the first factor was boredom. I had this job at Forbes covering enterprise tech -- IBM, Sun, EMC -- I know that sounds like a scintillating, exciting job to deal with those guys all the time, but believe it or not it sometimes gets dull, and I had a lot of free time on my hands and not much to do with it. The other big thing was fear. Basically I saw my business getting disrupted. The funny thing about being a tech writer is we cover all this disruption and we're really fast to tell companies like Sun, "You've got to embrace the destruction of Linux," but suddenly when the cannons are turned at our own business -- at the media business -- we freak out. What will happen to us? I realized that I had to learn about the Internet, I couldn't be in print the rest of my life, and I was too young to retire."

Fake Steve wasn't always in favor of blogs -- in fact, he laments his much-maligned 2005 "attack of the blogs" piece on Forbes.com, but admits that blowback from the article caused him to see the power of blogs and bloggers.

If you're short on time, you can zip ahead to the 7:30 mark in the video, where it starts getting really funny. Lyons covers three primary points about the Fake Steve Jobs blog: why he got into blogging (fear and boredom), why he chose Steve Jobs (he's narcissistic, Apple has bad PR, and Apple fans tend to be so, well, fanatic), and why it works (it's the audience!).

"I think what's happening in media is profound and interesting. This thing [Fake Steve Jobs] is all very wrong, obviously very stupid and primitive, right? But it's a great way to learn about how new media might work. I think the biggest change we're going to have is the involvement of the audience. Where Internet media is going to get interesting is when we start really exploiting the uniqueness in it rather than paving a cowpath. First generation Forbes.com was: take the print magazine and put it online. Hulu was: take TV shows and put them online. But when we start involving the audience, and having people form a group to entertain themselves, I think that's going to get really interesting."

I'm so sick of hearing from PR "professionals" who don't have a clue about how to pitch bloggers. It's obvious they don't even read my blog. This is spam, pure and simple. It's just the next evolution of spam - the progeny of the "reciprocal link request." I used to get those every day before I started blocking unknown senders (i.e. those not in my extensive "white list") using SpamArrest challenge-response. Frustratingly, SpamArrest doesn't keep the PR flaks away, because they respond to the SpamArrest challenge-response test, thus proving they are warm bodies.

Blogger-spamming PR flaks need to understand that bloggers will not respond positively to getting spammed with press releases. Indeed, bloggers love to out them on their blogs. (Any PR is good PR? I don't think so!) So, in that same vein, for your reading pleasure, I include a real example that just arrived in my inbox today (congratulations, Stella Parkes, if that's your real name).

The moral of the story, for those not in the PR industry: Don't ever hire a PR firm that does "blogger relations" like this. Or if you already have a firm doing this on your behalf, fire them.

Dear Stephan
Ive been reading your site and as you write about email marketing I wanted to get in touch to see whether you are interested in receiving relevant news from Epsilon International, the UK arm of the US-based email marketing business?

We aim to send only newsworthy stories for consideration and hope that getting a heads up on research findings or changes to our business will be interesting. If at any time you want us to stop then send me an email and I will remove you from our press list.

Below is a news release about a new senior hire  Jon Maddison  who has joined Epsilon as its first client services director. If this is not relevant then please let me know. In the near future we have some research findings, which may be of interest.

Thanks for your time, I look forward to hearing from you.

Stella Parkes

For Epsilon International

EPSILON INTERNATIONAL STRENGTHENS SERVICE OFFERING WITH APPOINTMENT OF FIRST CLIENT SERVICES DIRECTOR
Jon Maddison hired from Loyalty Management Group to boost senior team
www. epsilon. com/international

Epsilon International, the global arm of the worlds largest email marketing services business, has hired Jon Maddison as its first UK client services director.

[...rest of verbose and pointless press release omitted...]

Stella Parkes
Account manager
Renegade Media Ltd

PR for media and creative businesses

Office: +44 (0)1452 760 147
Mobile: +44 (0)7740 432 112
Email: stella@renegademedia.net

There are a lot of “social media experts” out there screaming that “YOU HAVE TO USE LINKBAIT!!! YOU HAVE TO SUBMIT TO SOCIAL MEDIA SITES!!!” Sure there are definite advantages to doing these things... quick traffic, a few new links, etc but… do you really have to?

I am going to have to say that no, no you do not. I hate to say it, but the overused cliche really does apply: "If you build it (great), they will come." By this, I mean if you really want a large audience of viewers that read, talk about, share with friends and really LOVE your work - you only need to write great content. Great content will be found (and linked to) no matter how you promote it.

Case in point: I was honored to discover last week that this blog has been included in the SEO category of "Alltop" - Guy Kawasaki's new site. I hadn't sought this out, submitted by blog to be included; it happened by itself.

This is easier said than done of course; you actually have to know what you are talking about and, as I have said before, you should have a passion for your writing! That is what makes people read your blog day in and day out. Striving to write better, more informative posts is what will make your blog a success. It's not the one-time traffic surge of StumbleUpon or Digg; it's the writers who day in and day out produce great content that is helpful for their readers.

Here are just a few great blogs where the authors really get that content is what it's all about: SEOMoz, ProBlogger, DoshDosh, WolfHowl. (I subscribe to hundreds of great blogs in my news reader; I wish I could list them all here!)

In my last post, "Write Like You Mean It, I wrote about how important it is to be passionate in your blog writing, if you want to attract and keep readers. I was just reflecting about this, about the blogs that keep me coming back for more. I'd have to say my all-time favorite blogger from a writing perspective is Fake Steve Jobs. Sure, he's not even real. But yet he "keeps it real". Every post is so witty, he just cracks me up. I love his creative use of language, his invented words (e.g. MicroTards, Freetards). The blog provides a little window into Steve Jobs' psyche. Well ok, maybe not, since it's actually being written by a Forbes magazine journo, but still...

Posts of FSJ's like this one are just gold. Luv it!