Monday’s Marketing Profs “Get to the Point” newsletter featured Mike Volpe’s 5 tips for starting search engine optimization. Mike is the VP of Marketing at HubSpot and blogger for HubSpot’s Internet Marketing Blog. These are great SEO tips and we wanted to be sure to share them  with the readers of  The B2B Lead.

5 tips you should be sure to include in your SEO strategy:

1. Pick good page titles. The words that appear at the top of the browser window are what a search engine looks at first as it evaluates that Web page. Use keywords and unique titles.
2. Be smart about URLs. If you’re using a URL like yourcompany.blogspot.com, then you’re building SEO power for blogspot.com, not your own company.
3. Start a blog. Blogs help in two ways. They provide new content (search engines prefer new over old). Plus, the more interesting blogs tend to generate lots of inbound links.
4. Leverage your PR program. Use press releases and externally distributed articles to drum up more inbound links. To maximize effectiveness, link back to your Web site from keywords.
5. Use social media to build links. Find out where your customers hang out online, and start participating there. Remember to add value. Don’t lead with a sales pitch.

In this chapter, David covers the basics of search engine marketing without getting into the technical details. He makes the great point that if you follow the New Rules, you will already be practicing search engine marketing.  It really is all about the content.  (Some of you may scoff that inbound links are most important, but I contend that great content is what draws inbound links.)

David covers a few tips on SEM but I want to highlight his tips on landing pages:

• Make the landing page copy short and the graphics simple.
• Create the page with your company’s look, feel, and tone.
• Write from the prospect’s point of view.
• A landing page is communications, not advertising.
• Provide a quote from a happy customer.
• Make the landing page a self-contained unit.
• Make the call to action clear and easy to respond to.
• Use multiple calls to action.
• Only ask for necessary information.
• Don’t forget to follow up!

Landing pages are critical to direct buyers to your content.  Well optimized landing pages can rank highly in organic search and produce high conversion rates.

That pretty much wraps it all up.  Now that we have completed The New Rules of Marketing and PR, the title of the final chapter sums it up nicely, “Make it Happen.”  David, himself, admits that he has not put into practice every idea presented in this book.  The point is to find what works best for you and your organization, put it into action and start reaping the benefits.  Best of luck!

Podcasting and video can be very scary to use…buying new equipment and software, and then learning how to use it all. The procedure might be a little more difficult than just writing text, but the outcome of engaging your audience is worth it. And if that doesn’t sell you, then what David has to say about it will. It sold me!

“The potential to deliver information to buyers in new and surprising ways is greater when you use a new medium. And while your competition is still trying to figure out ‘that blogging thing,’ you can leverage your existing blog into the new worlds of audio and video and leave the competition way behind.”

Who doesn’t like to watch a short video (mostly if it is funny) while reading a blog post? I won’t speak for everyone, but I am willing to bet the majority does. And it might seem scary at first, but putting a podcast or short video together really is not all that hard. Luckily, David has some tips for us to use as well:

For Podcasting

• Show preparation -gather ideas and create a script
• Recording when you are near your computer -use a microphone that delivers audio into your computer (need software here)
• Mobile recording gear – is required if you are going to be moving around interviewing people at different places
• Phone interviews – require a digital recording switch device that connects to your telephone
• Editing your audio files – optional
• Postproduction editing – sometimes includes running a noise-reduction program and sound compression
• Tagging the audio -adding text-based information about the audio to make it easier for people to find
• Hosting and distribution – so people can easily obtain your podcasts
• Promotion – you must provide links to your show
• A companion blog – to discuss the content of each show, and will also help to be indexed by search engines

For Video

• Posting to video-sharing sites – like YouTube, just shoot and upload
• Developing an online video channel – usually used with a unique URL
• Attempting stealth insertions to YouTube – dangerous, YouTube will find inauthentic video
• Vlogging – “video blogging” by embedding a video into a blog post
• Vodcasting – a podcast with video tied to a syndication component
• Inviting your customer communities to submit video – to help generate viral marketing interest

Our friends over at HubSpot recently posted a really funny video about imbound vs. outbound marketing that was a real success. They told us it only took an afternoon to come up with idea, write it, shoot it an edit it. See…worth it!

This is a fantastic chapter for anyone thinking about or embarking on starting their own company blog.  I have blogged about this subject quite a bit in the past but I want to pull out a few great tips from David (and one of my own) that I have not covered before.

Following the ethical guidelines for blogging David outlines is very important.  Here are the high points:

• Transparency - Let readers know that the blog is tied to the company, don’t try to pass it off as a third party.  When commenting always leave your real name and don’t comment for someone else.
• Privacy - always ask for permission to blog about anything that could be considered private.  If a customer emails you to share their success using your product, be sure to ask permission before sharing it on the blog.
• Disclosure - Always disclose any connection you might have to what you are blogging or commenting about.  If you are recommending a product be sure to reveal that they are a partner.
• Truthfulness - Don’t lie, period.
• Credit - It is very common practice to read someone else’s blog post and write about it on your own blog.  This is fine but always give credit to the source.  (Tip: be sure to add some new idea to the topic and don’t just regurgitate their ideas)

Another tip David suggests is password protecting your blog in the beginning so you can get input from those you trust before opening it up to the entire online world.  I would add that it is a good idea to build up a few posts before you begin promoting your blog so that visitors can get an idea of what your blog is all about.  When we launched The B2B Lead, we wrote about ten or fifteen posts before we actually posted a single one. That way it was easy in the beginning to post something everyday.

One of the best reasons to start a blog is for SEO, but keep in mind you will be not be ranked #1 on Google your first day.  From what I understand (and please correct me if I am wrong) Google searches sites only every few months.  When it notices that content changes have been made it will crawl that site again sooner that a site with no or only minor content changes.  Your blog should have lots of new content so you want Google to crawl it everytime you have a new post.  Over time, Google will recognize that it it a site to be checked frequently, but there is a way to “train” Google  to crawl your site frequently.  You can submit a new site map to Google everytime you post.  I am not a technology expert so my advice is to ask your webmaster how to do this in your blogging software.

For more blogging tips, check out these posts:

Blogs – Don’t Underestimate Their Reach – ReachForce Book Club

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Corporate Blog

Keep Your Blog on Track to Support SEO and Other Business Objectives

Page Titles are Important

Blog Basics

In Chapter 5 we learned the New Rules of News Releases and how news releases should be written for your buyers. Building off of the New Rules, after you have written for your buyers, now you need to reach them. David gives tips on how to develop a news release strategy in order to reach buyers directly.

Here are some of his tips:

Write about pretty much anything that your organization is doing.

• Have a new take on an old problem?
• Serve a unique marketplace?
• Have interesting information to share?
• CEO speaking at a conference?
• Win an award?
• Add a product feature?
• Win a new customer?
• Publish a whitepaper?

Publish news releases through a distribution service.

• Business Wire
• Market Wire
• PrimeNewswire
• PR Newswire
• PRWeb

We have been using PRWeb for our latest news releases and have gotten descent response. What service have you had success using?

Use RSS feeds.

• Many distribution services provide this to make your news release available to other sites, blogs, journalists and individuals.

Simultaneously publish news releases on your web site.

Link wherever possible.

Focus on the keywords and phrases your buyers use.

• Think about your buyer personas.

Include social media tags.

• Like Technorati, DIGG and del.icio.us

Tell the media, your clients and your prospects.

• Repurpose content for all audiences.
• Example: Tweak content for use in company newsletter.

I’ll close with what David said about the importance of reaching your buyers.

“Implementing a news release strategy to reach buyers directly is like publishing an online news service – you are providing your buyers with information that they need in order to find your organization online and then learn more about you.”

Thinking about how to make the biggest splash with your next mega-launch? Think again. Emerging companies are getting smarter about how they “launch” and opting for a slower community building process that takes place over the course of months. Turns out it is not only less expensive but it proves to be more valuable over the long term.

The process involves getting out months ahead of your product availability and building relationships with key influencers, contributing relevant valuable content to your market and attracting a loyal following with a blog or community. We did something like this at BreakingPoint, although it happened in a far more condensed time frame, and it has indeed been very valuable for reaching our hyper-niche market.

There’s been lots of controversy on the topic of launching at Tech Crunch 50 vs. DEMO lately. Robert Scoble triggered a firestorm of commentary when he posted a blog series about how “companies launching at DEMO suck”. (Why is it that blog posts that include the word “suck” always generate so much buzz?) This triggered Paul May of BuzzStream to blog about the economics of launching a startup at TechCrunch 50 or Demo. According to Paul:

“The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin.  Let’s look at an example.  My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago.  In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:

1. Devote 80 hours to prep time.  At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
2. Speaking coach – $5K
3. Travel – three nights for three people – $6K
4. PR rep – $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
5. Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. – $3K to $5K”

Wow, that’s a hefty price tag for a startup—bootstrapped or funded. Years ago when I launched a startup at Demo, it was well worth that investment. Why? Those were the early Internet Boom days when startups had to shell out $30,000 to $50,000 per month in retainers to PR agencies. We netted 17 pieces of very high profile coverage from our Demo participation in major trade publications and even The Washington Post. It was such a success that I actually considered going this year with BreakingPoint.

Today, however, most of those publications are no longer around—at least in print. Buyers get their information in different ways and focusing your efforts on laser targeted database marketing combined with a strong push for building a community using social media are the keys to success for startups. If you have a B2C play, those events may make sense for you. But for us, I had to pass.

So, back to the topic at hand: launching your company online. There’s absolutely no reason to wait until you have a product to launch to get started. Why not start engaging with your customers now? Reach out and conduct a little market research. Build tight relationships and a nice following for your blog. Funnel your money into building a detailed, role-based database of your target market. Hire an intern to discover the top thought leaders and start building tight relationships by interacting with them in social media circles.  Start generating a slew of inbound links so that you will rank at the top of the search engines when you introduce your product or service. The possibilities are endless.

B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right?  The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth.

We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe…

With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch.

Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth.

• # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs)
• # of inbound requests
• # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info.  (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page)
• # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages)
• # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs
• # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline
• # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing

Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it.

Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on.  It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs.

Do you measure anything not on this list?  If so, please share.

Search engine marketing just got a little bit more complicated. According to a story in the New York Times today, former Google employees have just launched a new competitive search engine called “Cuil” which is pronounced “cool” that is supposed to be easier to use and more comprehensive than the search giant. If this takes off according to expectations, B2B Marketers could have another search engine to consider when optimizing their websites. With Google’s domination of the search market, it seems unlikely to be a huge threat, but many experts are touting its advantages. According to the Times story:

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

I think Cuil has many nice things going for it although my initial attempts to use it yielded mixed results – poor recognition of long-tail terms, and some performance delays (probably a result of the New York Times article and subsequent load.) But the things I like most about it are the categorization and formatting of results, the 3 column view and the ability to configure it. What’s more, BreakingPoint’s SEO seems to be working on Cuil as our rankings seem to be fine (unlike our leading competitors). Maybe that bodes well for the future of our SEO efforts. I hope so, as I am certain the complete lack of advertising on the site will appeal to my target audience so SEO will be the only option.

Overall, I’m happy to have another streamlined, high performance option for search and hope that Google will get a bit of competition. So, despite the fact that Google is a pervasive presence in my life, I think I’ll continue to use it despite the un-cool name.

What do you think? Will this be good or bad for Marketing and SEO?

One of the best ways to increase your SEO rankings is to attract inbound links to your blog or website.

Traditional link building efforts involve asking for links, link swapping, or link buying. This process is extremely time consuming and can get expensive if you are buying high quality links. Really, in this instance, is there any such thing as a quality link? After all, Google has made no secret that it is actively seeking ways to weed out this practice.

In contrast, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by leveraging social media to convince others to link to your content. The challenge is coming up with link-worthy material and then spreading the word via Twitter and other social media tools. Fortunately for those of us with little time and fewer resources, the process of building this content just got a lot easier. You no longer need to embark upon a lengthy research project or write a 10 page white paper. These days, successful link bait is taking the form of widgets or mashups or other forms of rich media content. The prerequisite is that the content should be helpful, clever, funny, or remarkable enough that others want to write about it or include it in their roundup of free tools.

The process of building a widget or mashup used to require Web development skills or enough budget to farm out the work. I’ve been reading about a number of free tools that allow just about anyone to create their own widgets but have not found the confidence to try them. Prodded by a “tweet” from one of the more influential Twitterati (did I really just write that?), I decided to check out, Sprout, an extremely cool and easy to use site to help you build widgets or other informational tools that can be embedded in your blog or web site. http://sproutbuilder.com/whataresprouts.

Sprout looks easy enough to use and I’m ready to check it out. Now, I just have to come up with the “killer app” for our blog readers. To get ideas, the first step will be to reach out to the community reading the BreakingPoint blog at www.breakingpointlabs.com and then do a bit of brainstorming.

More on this in another post.

I’ve just emerged from a very difficult web site redesign project with a local agency that hasn’t yet moved into the Web 2.0 world. After living through the ordeal, I thought I would share some of the lessons I learned during the process to help others avoid the same nightmare. (I’m also hoping the process is somewhat cathartic for me too.) Fortunately, most of these signs are easily identifiable during the review stages. If I’ve missed any, please share your ideas.

1. When you ask about multi-browser testing, you’re told “Well I have a Mac and so and so has a PC, so I’m sure we have it covered.” Sadly, there is no one browser standard and today’s websites must look great in the top browsers-Firefox, IE, and Safari, at the very least. That requires a systematic plan for multi-browser testing and attention to detail.
2. There is no upfront information discovery session to determine your goals and objectives for the site. No one asks about the personae of your target audience or your sales process. It is absolutely vital to start your website design with careful consideration of your target audience and how you engage with them. It’s also wise to map your conversion strategy prior to design.
3. When you mention in the first meeting that the site design needs to support your SEO efforts, the instant response is “Oh we don’t do SEO.” Designing a website without considering your future SEO efforts is extremely dangerous. Hard coded H1 tags, too many graphics, failing to redirect valuable inbound links, and a difficult to update site will hamper your efforts.
4. Your agency’s idea of a project plan is a list of dates for a design template, copy drafts and a go-live date. Marketers really need to approach a website design or redesign like a software development process with a solid project plan that takes into consideration the need to iterate and fully test.
5. After several attempts to come up with a design, you have to supply “inspiration” sites to get them on track. Well, this one really should go without saying but sadly it still happens. If you find yourself stuck with an agency that can’t figure out how to design to your satisfaction despite being given brand guidelines, target personae, a site architecture, etc. you can pull the project out of the ditch by giving them some other sites that you like to help them get on track. If the right work has been done upfront to understand your business, however, you shouldn’t have to do this.
6. You realize that when the home page design is reviewed on a normal size monitor, the flash movie takes up the entire monitor screen pushing your core content below the fold. Just like multi-browser testing, monitor size is critical. It is vital that you look at the site on different monitors to ensure visitors can get to the content they need.
7. Once the home page is designed no further design goes into the layout and graphics elements of the subpages. This is like walking into a gorgeous store with a beautiful façade and stepping into a bare warehouse. Put the same care and attention that went into the home page into the subpages to make sure you provide content and next steps for your visitors.
8. There are no status checks or project meetings. In fact, it is extremely difficult to get a return phone call from your project manager. Designing a website is a team effort requiring lots of different team members to contribute. And, that requires coordination and conversation. Make sure your agency schedules frequent project update meetings and discussions to make sure you are on track.
9. You are ready to go live with the new site, your project manager is nowhere to be found leaving you to work with a developer. This is a biggie. Always make sure you have a plan for go-live, a backup plan in case something goes wrong. And, go live in the middle of the night or over the weekend, just in case there are problems no one will see them.
10. You must conform to the agency’s process of logging in all processes, errors, changes and questions to an Extranet with no training on it. You find that you still must post those changes multiple times before resolution. OK, you got me on that one, it was just a rant.

Today’s B2B Marketers need to have a well thought out site architecture, succinct and compelling messages for their target audiences, engaging designs, and an error-free site that supports search engine optimization. And marketers should select their agencies carefully, building in strict contractual demands for things like multi-browser testing, and SEO-friendly structure, clean and well-designed page layout, and tight security lockdowns. Pick your web designer like you would pick a software development shop.

Wow, I feel so much better now.