Finding the perfect partner (Outreach 102)

Outreach 102

• Technology
• Is Your
• Friend!

Click to watch the Screen Cast

http://screencast.com/t/s33bDxdYfy9

In last week’s outreach 101 newsletter we talked about dating, well – we talked about guest blogging and how you go about getting your content on someone else’s website. Today we’re going to use a screen cast to show you how easy it is to find people willing to accept your content.

The Tech

We need to install a few plugins and change some settings to your browser – don’t be afraid – it is really simple. First off – if you’re not using Google’s chrome browser – go get it and install it. Chrome is much faster the Internet explorer and Firefox and comes with all these useful little plugins that make your life easier.

Once Chrome is installed go and install 2 plugins:

• Scraper plugin for Chrome
• Seomoz / seo-toolbar

Search settings

Once you have those installed, you need to change some of the default search settings. So – search for something – anything just so you can arrive on the search results page – I searched for bananas. In the top right you see the settings icon – click on that – select search settings. Then select "Never show instant results" and then move the results per page up to 100.

Doing the search

There are lots of little tricks that you can use when searching – the one we’re going to deal with is to use a command that searches for the keyword we’re interested in – but also searches for keywords within a url. The logic here is that if websites want people to write for them – they’ll probably have a page called write for us – or words similar to that.

So – let’s say I’m an employment lawyer and I want to see who out there is accepting articles, here’s a few results – let’s say I work in Insurance – a lot more here – what aboutnon-profit – plenty here – look at this for real estate!

And you can play with the inurl text – some people have a guest blogger page – see here – if we swap write for us withguest blogger – we get additional sites.

The plugins

Once you have scraper installed – you can go to the first result on the page – hover over the title and right click – and choose to export this to google docs. You can then easily copy that and paste it into an excel spreadsheet..

Domain Authority

The final part of the puzzle is to rank the domains by Domain authority; the higher a site’s domain authority – the greater the value of the link that you get from it. The SEO moz toolbar is now showing information about that search result – including the Domain authority.

So – this is the only manual bit of the process – but just add a column to the spreadsheet – and then add each results DA. You can then sort the spreadsheet to display the highest domain authority first and voila – in less than 5 minutes you have a targeted list of people who actively want to hear from you, sorted by how effective each site is.

Easy wasn't it!

If you’d like some help setting this up for your business, reply to this email and book a session.

You're not Kevin Costner (Outreach 101)

Outreach 101

• You're not Kevin Costner
• Your website isn’t a baseball diamond in a wheat field in Iowa
• And clients aren’t ghosts!

Click to watch the Video

http://youtu.be/wzf5oUOwPSM

Build it and they will come (not!)

The idea of build it and they will come is all very well for Hollywood but you’re going to have to be a little more proactive.

Guest Posting

The most effective way of getting your ideas in front of a new audience is to guest post on another more popular website. I’m a huge fan of guest posting:

• The site owner doesn’t have to come up with a brilliant article that week
• The site readers get a new perspective
• You get your name and ideas exposed to a new audience

It’s just like dating

So how do you get someone to agree to publish your post – well, the analogy to use here is the dating world – seriously – guest posting is just like finding a new girlfriend or boyfriend – there’s a few basic steps:

1/ Take care of you first

You’ve got to look the part – if you’re presenting yourself as a writer then you need a good looking website with plenty of recent great posts. A potential partner won’t look at you twice if you’re a bit shabby, unkempt and haven’t produced anything of value for months.

2/ Find the appropriate partner

Sure it would be awesome to get a guest post on CNN or on Seth’s blog, but this is like trying to date a super model – it’s not impossible but will require a crap load of time and money to get in the game. Start off with someone more in your league – if you’re a 7 shoot for someone who’s an 8.

3/ Listen to them

Yes guys – I’m looking at you – before you make an approach, listen to what they’ve got to say – really - read their blog, understand their audience, and treat them as a valued partner, not just someone who’s going to give you what you want. Last week’s article on RSS should help you here

Find out if they have a policy on guest posting or if they’ve accepted them in the past.

4/ Flirt with them

Don’t go overboard and send a Tiffany bracelet before you’ve even met them – that would be weird, but over the course of a month – maybe re-tweet one of their articles, like them on Facebook, best of all, add a comment to one of their blog posts – but it has to be a really great and considered comment – no sycophantic “great post Brian” bullshit – you’ve got to add value.

5/ After flirting ask for a date

After you’ve swapped a couple of tweets and maybe a few comments and they know who you are, now is the time to approach them with an idea for a guest post. Remember, it’s about them not you – you’ve got to show them that you understand their audience and that you have something that they will benefit from.

Finally, if they turn you down – hey – there’s plenty more fish 1n the sea; as your mother no doubt told you – it’s their loss not yours!

If you’d like to jump start your web traffic, reply to this email and book a session.

WTF is RSS?

RSS

Makes You

Smarter!

Click the to watch the screen cast

http://screencast.com/t/psP2aI0AVWcC

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or even Rocking’ Sexy Sirens – it doesn’t really matter what the acronym means – it’s what it can do for you that counts.

RSS enables you to pull in all the information you’ll ever need without having to remember to go out and get it.

How it works

If you have a website built by me in Wordpress – you’re already using RSS. Every time you publish a new blog post, your website sends it out to anybody who has subscribed to your feed.

Readers

In order to read the feed – you need an RSS reader. Which one you use generally depends upon which email client you favor; I handle everything through Gmail and therefore use Google’s free Google Reader, but there are plenty of other free tools that will hook into Mac mail or Outlook – you just need to Google them.

Subscribing

Subscribing to an RSS feed is super easy, you’re looking for the little orange icon that you’ll often find on the blog page of a website – if you’re using a modern browser like Chrome – you can actually subscribe from the URL bar.

Let’s say I want to research mobile payment processes – I Google the search term, find the top blogs, go to their sites and quickly subscribe to their feeds. I make sure I set up a new category in my reader – and now I don’t need to remember to go to the site again – whenever they publish new information it appears directly in my reader.

Using it

Right now I’m subscribed to over 100 different channels and yes it’s kind of like a fire hose, however, I don’t read everything that is pumped out. Here’s how I handle my feeds:

First off, I categorize everything; here you can see that I’m pretty interested in Music and Marketing. Each folder might have 10 or so different blog feeds and not all of them publish at the same time – so – I generally look at the top level folder view.

Every morning I scan my feeds – I don’t read everything I just graze the titles for what might interest me. When something stands out, I can open the item and read the article in my reader without having to go anywhere. If the article resonates, I can forward it to myself or to someone else, I can curate it or share it.

Mobile

Best thing about RSS is that you can handle it on your smart phone too – there are plenty of free RSS readers for iPhone, Android and Blackberry; I use RSS+ for the iPhone but there are always new apps being developed.

If I’m out and having to wait somewhere, having a mobile RSS reader is a great way to catch up on my feeds.

Information overload

Yes you can suffer from too much information – every 6 months I cull my feeds and start from scratch again – it keeps the information fresh and stops me suffering from unread feed anxiety.

If you’d like to learn more about using RSS to manage your information flow, reply to this email and book a session.

Kaizen for digital marketing

Ohayou

Gozaimasu

Click on video below to watch

http://youtu.be/Ap9kx_gbLbQ

That is of course Japanese for Good Morning – and I’m speaking Japanese because today we’re going to look at the philosophy of Kaizen or continuous improvement.

Although it grew out of the industrialized manufacturing and engineering businesses, it is a perfect philosophy to apply to your digital marketing.

Digital Marketing – it’s like building a car!

Digital marketing is a complex function and there are many separate elements that go into implementing a successful strategy:

• There are the channels you use to communicate on: Your blog, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc
• There’s the actual content your produce, your blog posts, your tweets, your video updates,
• There’s the nature of that content – what are you actually saying and who are you saying it for
• There’s the effort to increase the reach of your content – growing your followers, establishing outreach strategies and so on
• Finally, there’s the design of your footprint – is your website converting in the way it needs to

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

At the end of the day – all this activity should lead to an increase in business but when the sales and clients aren’t coming, it’s tempting to think that well, Digital Marketing doesn’t work, but that’s like Toyota not building a car just because one area of the line isn’t set up correctly.

The underlying behavior that drives the success of Kaizen is measurement; for each part of the operation they standardize the process, measure how long it takes and how much it costs and then they work to improve that measurement.

Measurement

You can apply exactly the same principals to your digital marketing; the trick is to know how to measure each element. If you’re working with me - you already have a set of Key Performance Indicators or (KPIs.) This is a document that measures all aspects of your digital marketing; after a few months of compiling it you start to see exactly where you need to focus your energy and you see the effectiveness of your efforts.

If you are not measuring what you are doing you won’t know what isn’t working and what you need to change.

If you’re struggling with your KPI document or you’d like some help setting one up, reply to this email and book a session.

New Business

Newsletters

Drive

Referrals

http://youtu.be/VpVeKKtI0Yw

You can’t beat it when a current or former client recommends you to a colleague of theirs, but to drive this kind of behavior you need two things:

1. You've got to be awesome!
2. You've got to be memorable

Be present

All the work you’re doing with adding new content, search engine optimization, distributing out across your digital footprint is great when people are actively looking for you – but how do you stay present with a former client when they’re not looking or not currently using your services?

A Newsletter

Now I’m not talking about what a current client refers to as "adding to the blabosphere" – you can’t send out crap just to appear in someone’s inbox – if you’re going to produce something it must educate and preferably even entertain. Don’t think of it as some corporate communications vehicle – think of it as a personal message from you to your client base.

When I started this letter in August last year I was writing to 7 people – there are now over 40 people on the list and I know every single one of them.

You’re the expert

Remember – you’re the expert in this world – there’s a huge amount of information that people who have used your services in the past would benefit from.

Work out a schedule – work out a forward calendar and start driving your referral business.

If you’d like help setting it up, reply to this email and book a session.

Where the hell are you?

Location

Location

Location

http://youtu.be/gF2LeunN14s

The location of your business is getting more important - and here's why:

It's about search

Google knows where you are; well it knows the IP address of the computer from which you connect to the internet and this will give it a zip code to work with. This is a good thing, if you’re searching for a divorce lawyer in San Francisco you don’t want to see results from Boise, Idaho.

But when you search from your “immobile” workstation, either at your office or at home, the search results don’t really factor in your proximity to the business location. Search results reflect all the usual suspects – great quality content, number of links and social shares, on page SEO, etc, etc.

With mobile it's different

When you search on your mobile phone, location plays a far more important factor – in fact a study last year showed that desktop and mobile results can differ by as much as 86%.

It's about smart phones

The old mobile phones weren’t terribly useful when it came to accessing the internet, but the arrival of the smart phone changes all of that. A report from Nielson showed that as of February 2012, 50% of all the phones in America were smart phones – and you can bet that the percentage is a lot higher for people who need your services.

So – as more people become mobile, as more people access the internet from different locations, the whole construct of proximity becomes more important to search results

What you need to do

You need to increase the size of your local digital footprint, this means having entries for your business on the following platforms:

• Google+
• Google places
• Facebook
• Yelp
• Foursquare
• LinkedIn
• Local Directories

You don’t have to be active on all of them right now – but at least register or claim your business. If a network looks as though it is going to drive traffic for your business then you can focus on it as part of a strategic plan.

If you don’t have the time to do this, get in touch and Simply Friday can do it for you, or if you want to develop a local strategy, reply to this email and book a session.