They created a link wheel aka “Linkie” or “Super Duper Wheelie”, posted content on some directory sites, did a PR or two and received 50 back links to his blog from these efforts. If you figure from writing a few articles, making sure each are different and posting the articles throughout the Web to build your offsite links, the time you spent completing these efforts will help not only promote your content but also help with increasing your SEO ranking.

What other items have you found helped your content promotion efforts?

What is next in the series in the big bad world of online content promotion?

Do you expect anyone to just find your posting?

Do you think the Google trolls will just choose your content because it is so amazing that no one else has EVER written about that exact topic? (sense some sarcasm…)

No matter how large or small your website is, once you post content whether it be copy or media, you should have a plan of action on how to promote or market your content. Whether it be through directories, links, press releases or emails, unless you have a HUGE subscriber list, we all need some push to get people and search engines to read and view our content.

Social media has been a blessing for content producers because with all the social networks focused on specific niches, it has now allowed promoters to promote their content directly to the audience who may be interested. Through social media, between groups and lists, customizing which piece of content you want to share with a specific group of people has now made it easier than the earlier days of content promotion.

For example, you are a hospitality ezine whose focus is on helping the hotel owner by giving online marketing tips and insights to users online behavior. The challenge is what will make you stand out from the crowd? Are you trying to capture visitors searching for lodging within your city or town? The content should be focused around these answers so you know the audience to target and where to promote.

What are some other techniques you would like to share that you use to promote your content?

I am also realizing as a business owner I need to be more verbal by sharing the accomplishments we have had. As a person I have always been hidden in a sense that what I do is not shared by me to many people and in the online content creation and publishing world, I DO need to share. I need to share online!

Yes, I have been involved with social media and SEO since 1999 but never overly pushed my name or the business name. Of course PearlyWrites is our branded name on all the social media networks but then I realized when I meet many of my followers in person and we start discussing things they are always surprised with the amount of knowledge and experience I have.

So with all this information I have buried deep inside my brain from 11 years of being in business and working in the online publishing and marketing field, I am going to put my best effort  forward into making it more known the amount of experience PearlyWrites has. When clients increase their revenue by $150K per month from strategies that I created and executed or a client increases their revenue by $50K a year, these are all accomplishments which I am realizing I need to be sharing with others.

Til next time…

I can’t believe I just found a Website for a brick and mortar business in New Jersey that has the most horrid Website! I mean the Website looks like one of my first attempts at Website building back in the 90′s! Yes, that is how bad this is AND the business caters to high-class, high-end celebrities!

What type of message are you showing to a visitor when your services are costing easily a few hundred up to a few thousand a spa session and then you visit the Website and it’s just horrid! Don’t you want to show how you take the money you are making and put it back into the business to portray your upper class services? Isn’t that the first rule of being a business and having an online presence?

With the branding that Josh Gilmore did for PearlyWrites, everything from our print marketing collateral to our Website is all cleanly designed. When pictures and links are thrown about, it doesn’t help the visitor, no matter how well known you think you are.

Remember you have a few seconds to keep your visitor on your site and direct them with call to action statements and guide them to contact you via phone or email. BUT only a few seconds! I guess from having celebrity pictures all over the pages, visually they are trying to show they have famous clients and I get that BUT the site isn’t optimized or even ranking! Could you imagine what an amazing amount of more potential business could come if this celebrity spa actually got found in the search engines organically? 

The copy on the site which is non-existent could be such a great push for this spa. SEO friendly copy targeted for their keywords would be the basics of Organic SEO that they can do. Maybe one day when the celebrity pull seems to slow down business, they will look at their unoptimized, badly designed Website and realize it’s time for an upgrade.

But what does this mean in terms of a businesses marketing budget? As we all know the first budgets to be cut are always the marketing budget. Why? It seems since the new business is far and few between, the all mighty powers that be feel that marketing isn’t too important as the existing customers will stay customers and why bother to try and pick up new customers during a down economy?

The reason to not stop your marketing is when the economy begins to pick up, the first companies or products which are going to be remembered are the ones who didn’t stop their marketing efforts. And (yes I used an And to begin a sentence) there are people and companies who are still making money and not feeling the downside to this economy. They are still spending money and going about their lives as if nothing has changed. Think about this population and target them!

This is why I ask the question, "Why stop your marketing?"

With all the new ways to market your business, why not open your mind up to the endless possibilities. It’s just not about print or radio anymore! Video optimization, content creation, podcasts, webinars, online article marketing, social media marketing and online press release distribution, oh and blogging; don’t forget blogging, are all great tools to use when you want to continue marketing to reach a different or new audience.

So ask yourself should you stop all your marketing efforts? When this economy begins to turn around, think about who will be ahead (competition) of and who will be left behind (you).

1) Decide on how you want to be viewed online. Whether by the Website name, a product name or your individual name. Of course this depends on what you are selling. For example if you are an artist selling original art, most likely you want to create a brand centered around your name.  From your Website domain name to your logo through all the social media networks, this name and brand will be how you stand out from the crowd as well as be recognized from the competition.

2) Decide what type of strategy you want to use in grabbing a visitor’s attention. Do you want your campaign to be focused on "scandal" type headlines or do you want visitors to view your site as a clean, wholesome, family friendly place to visit while online. An example is say you’re a well known pizza chain who wants to target the college scene.

What type of approach would you want to use to grab this particular crowd? We would suggest not only blogging daily but to incorporate social media into your online marketing campaign. Whether on Twitter you give away coupons or free soft drinks to hitting the college crowd on MySpace and Facebook and creating a Fan page where you can post multiple sales for all fans to receive, this is only one idea toward targeting the crowd of your choice.

3) Do you want to target specific locales or target the global population and if so how do you want to approach it? Do you want separate efforts made toward locales as state, cities, basically following the same plan for each but just using targeted keywords and/or sub-domains focused on, for example, West Palm Beach, Florida or generalized areas like Southeast Florida. And then take it one step further to where you not only target a specific locale but then a specific population of consumers ranging from mothers to fathers or singles.

4) Are you a hotel looking to give visitors an option to search points of interests within a certain radius from your hotel like beaches or theme parks? This is another idea when brainstorming for your online marketing campaign. If you are a one building hotel located on the beach in Southeast Florida or a big corporate chain of hotels, mapping out a plan of action for hotel SEO is a highly suggested idea.

5) Free local listing sites is another option. It doesn’t take that long to write up an ad and confirm it. If you have multiple locations and again, looking for local business, listing yourself in the local directory is another easy option.

6) Setting up an analytics program on your Website so you can see where the traffic is coming from as well as measure which online marketing techniques seem to work best for your site is a must! As I repeatly say during our radio show, if you don’t know where your traffic is coming from and don’t know which is converting, then how do you know what techniques are working!

Although you may know many of these techniques, and these are just the beginning, it is always good to remind ourselves that we need a plan of action when approaching an online marketing strategy.Testing and tracking is a must and doing your keyword research of course needs to be incorporated into your strategy decisions.

SilkWeb Consulting & Development , an e-learning development company based in Arizona, which we coached last year toward getting their Websites and Blogs created SEO friendly has now invested PearlyWrites to complete their monthly Organic SEO campaigns. Traffic has increased and potential leads are coming in from creating custom e-learning course development to purchasing and/or becoming resellers of SilkWeb’s off-the-shelf courses. SilkWeb is moving up in the search engine rankings for their keywords using Social Media Marketing, blogging, article marketing, PR distribution and online ad postings.

Transformational Health, a hydrotherapy colonics service based in Santa Monica and Palos Verdes, California, informed me last week that after a month of using our online marketing services their Website ranked above their competition! Talk about a REALLY nice boost! This client is just an example of updating your Website with the focused keywords and adding in social media marketing to the campaign to create a change in search engine rankings.

Then we have a PearlyWrites experiment…

A month and a half ago I was asked if I would host an Organic SEO radio show on RadioDentata.com. I agreed and the show is called Sensual SEO, airing Wednesday’s at 9pm EST. So on the show we discuss the techniques we use to rank an Adult Website organically through copywriting and online marketing. We decided here at PearlyWrites to put up a blog that will recap our Sensual SEO shows as well focus on Adult online marketing. The new blog is AdultOrganicSEO.com and we are taking all the techniques which we discuss on Sensual SEO and putting it all into place to allow our listeners to follow a brand new domain and blog and observe with us how quickly it can rank in a fairly overloaded niche using straight organic techniques. It has been up for 2.5 weeks so I’ll post updates as we begin to see the results.

Happy Online Marketing!

Lindsay Lou can be followerd on Twitter at Twitter.com/Lindsay_Lou and will be providing the clothing to 1928 Jewelry Company’s photo shoot next week in LA.

With designer brands like Juicy Couture, Love YaYa, Young, Fabulous and Broke and more, Lindsay Lou continues to be your personal shopper for designer style. Welcome Lindsay Lou!

The travel booking sites have a high volume of pages which dominate the search engines for specific keywords and mainly because they have been online businesses for close to 10 years! And even newer players in the game are seeing their day in the spotlight like Kayak. I mean if a potential client does a search for “Comfort Inn Georgia” and the hotel of Comfort Inn wants to be found first in the natural listings vs a travel booking site then what do they need to do to get to that page result and dominate that page with all their hotels located throughout the world?

So what should Hotel chains do when wanting to conquer the organic search results?

For hotel organic SEO, first the brand should devise a strategy, either in house or by contacting an outside source who understands how to get listed organically in the search engines. Once they have the knowledge and experienced players on board, then write out the expected goals and a time frame when these goals can realistically be met.

• Discuss what needs to be completed. Some Organic SEO choices can be SEO Web content, MetaData, hotel blog entries, article submissions, social media, natural link exchanges, RSS feeds, and landing pages.

• Devise a 6-12 month plan, broken up into phases with realistic deadlines.

• Give status updates to the corporation 1-2 times a week.

The biggest thing we have found is that corporations, no matter what industry, don’t have much information when it comes to Organic SEO. We have in-person, phone or web meetings to discuss a strategy, the realistic expectations and the best course of action and devise a 6-12 month phase plan.

Working together to devise an Organic SEO plan and allowing a strategist to do their job and then discussing the phases is the best route to take when looking toward a long term organic hospitality SERP goal.

Kris did a wonderful job and has made SEO management of the site very easy! He has been great to work with and open to little “fixes” after the initial design. It is wonderful to connect with other local Phoenix developers and businesses who work well together.

We have lightened up the color of the PearlyWrites site to a white over a black. (Black works for PB Vixen.) We hope you enjoy our new slight site redesign and thank Kris as well as SEO Compatible Design for all their amazing work!