All For You by Brian Keith

While my recruiting talk. at Washington State University yesterday went well, there were many other small things that happened over the weekend and yesterday that could be as important as the people I met as a result of my talk.

A casual mention of a friend who works for another company may turn in to a prospect.

Running in to a professor of mine and telling her more about what I do now may result in her department hiring Portent.

Talking with the Study Abroad people, they are going to interview me on what I learned while studying abroad that has helped me in the “real world” of work in Seattle.

Discussion at a coffee shop results in an article being written, which could be the beginning of a long term relationship.

I meant to interview one potential recruit. I meant to give a talk on internet marketing jobs. I meant to build more connections through the College of Business.

And I am not sure whether any of the things I meant to do matter more than the things that just happened.

For me, the moral is to be aware of opportunities, all the time. And in internet marketing, that means doing everything right, every time, because we don’t know which aspect is going to matter most for any one visitor.

In Todd 430 at 5:30 this Monday, January 29th, I will be giving a talk on Internet Marketing Jobs in Seattle.

I will cover a few specific companies, a good deal about who I work for, and what kinds of roles there are at these companies. And how much they pay and what kind of advancement is reasonable.

Get there early as the Honors College and College of Business have been invited.

And bring your questions. I will talk for a half hour to an hour- after that, I will open it up for Q&A. And I will be available Tuesday morning for a few preliminary interviews for positions and internships.

What, you say? Internships? Why yes, Portent does internships, sometimes, when we find the right people. So if getting to work at an internet marketing agency this summer sounds good to you, come see me after the talk on Monday.

See you there!

B.L. Ochman’s 12 Tenets of Social Media Marketing includes #5:

“V. Thy communications must pass the “who cares?” test.
Abandon ye all communications which are long-winded, formulaic, boring as hell and laden amidst superlatives and marketing babble.

Write down your concept in one sentence. Then ask yourself, and answer honestly, “So what?” If it still sounds like a good idea, proceed to re-write it over and over until it has not one extra word.”

He wasn’t thinking of landing pages specifically when he wrote this, but it applies 100%. If you landing page does not answer So What in a couple of seconds, the money you spent to get someone to see that page was just wasted.

And remember, Ian says that every page is a landing page in his free internet marketing book Conversation Marketing.

On January 10th I talked about Vodazon.com and how someone had completely copied our company site just changing the name.

As it happens, this guy’s kid did it, and put his dad’s name in place of Ian’s.

Here is the problem for the guy: if you search his name in Google, the top result is a different guy with the same name, and 3 out of the next 4 are me talking about him. Only the 4th result links to the guy himself, via his LinkedIn profile.

So how can he fight this bad press?

First, he could have talked about his side of the story in public. Now, this is hardly a spectacle or an outrage, and not many people care, but the principle applies: if the guy talked through his blog about what his son had done, that result would likely be in the top results for his name as well. So someone googling him would see his side of the story.

Second, he could ask me to remove my posts, which I would not do, or to add an update to them, which I did already out of common courtesy. UPDATE: The guy in question asked me to remove my posts. Instead, I am removing his name and links to him. While this will not kill all the results I have for his name, it will lessen them considerably.

What if someone treats you unfairly? How can you publicize that?

A better question would be, why do you want to publicize someone treating you unfairly. In this case, I was encouraging the offender to remove their site. Search the company name and you will see what I mean. They took down the site, and if it was still up it would get top rankings for its own name, but I with my bad press would own the space below that name.

So someone treats you unfairly and you want to encourage them in public to make amends. Guidelines:

1. Say it first. Whoever gets out there first has an advantage, both in search engines, and in making them reply to you.
2. Blog it. You can do a press release, or post a page to your site, but Google loves blogs.
3. Tag it. My boss wrote about the same thing before I did here. The difference? Besides him getting comments, and being better written, and posting screen shots, I tagged my post with ‘vodazon’ among other things while he tagged his ‘ethics.’ That small difference means I am higher in the rankings. (Maybe. We don’t really know how Google works, we just guess, but this seems to hold true.)

What you can do: set up a blog now, so if someone writes bad press about your company, you can fight it on the first page of Google, and if somone wrongs you, you can demand satisfaction in public.

NOTE: I am tagging this post with the guy and the company name, so that this post will rise to the top of Google for his name, and be above the results where I just say that he copied our site.

UPDATE: Tagging appropriately worked so well, we got emailed and asked to remove the posts, because we were hurting his credibility. I would rather he have read this post and then told his side of the story in public, but I am okay with removing all references to his name and company.

Wednesday night was Springboard at UW, a recruiting event for startups in the Seattle area. Here are the companies that attended:

All Star Directories
Alphabet Lane, Inc.
Atlas Accelerator
Benevia
Buerk Dale Victor, LLC
Carena
ek Real Estate Group (updated name)
Enerdyne Thermal Solutions, Inc.
Experticity
goChongo, Inc.
GridNetworks
Healia, Inc.
Jakoba Software
Junxion Inc.
Knacta, Inc.
Lilipip
Limeade
Local Marketers, Inc.
MapMate
Movaya Wireless
mPoria, Inc.
Ontela
PayScale
Portent Interactive
QL2 Software
Realnetworks
RIPL Corp.
SchoolSoft Corporation
SecondSpace, Inc.
sengWare
Shelfari
Sionic Group
Targeted Growth, Inc.
Titanium Ant LLC
Visual Ignition LLC
WebNav360
Whidbey Equity Group
Widemile, Inc.
Works Out Software
ZINO Society

Meeting all of these companies reminded me of the variety of firms starting up in Seattle. Zino connects angel investors with startups. Widemile does landing page optimization. Alphabet Lane does remodeling consulting. Second Space does… well, they won’t tell anyone yet.

Kudos to the UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship for putting this on.

UW has a thing called Springboard where they bring in startup companies to talk with students. The data:

January 24, 5:30–8 p.m.
LOCATION CHANGE:
UW Business School
Balmer Hall, Undergraduate Commons (Lobby Level)

I don’t know if they are letting everyone in, or just preregistered students. I will be there talking with potential recruits, so come along and say hello.

Widemile.com does landing page optimization. They have a list of 10 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Landing Pages that you should take a look at.

I’ll summarize: don’t be distracting, confusing, or dumb. If people are there to buy something, then help them out, don’t get in the way.

I’ll quote #5:
“Prospects are easily confused when a landing page lacks a clear goal or important elements are unclear or appear off the screen. Make offers bold and easy to accept.”

Easy to accept is what we harp on a lot. Do Not Get In The Way.

Further, treat every page in your site as a landing page. Make every page so the visitor does not get confused and leave.

Here is Widemile.com’s pitch for landing page optimization.

Now here is your homework: in my last post, I gave three easy steps to look at a website’s seo. Do #2 (pagecount) and #3 (sites linking in) for widemile.com.

Results: pagecount is 95, and sites linking in is 14. For ‘conversion marketing’ they are first page just above the fold, and for ‘landing page optimization’ they are not on the first page.

We all want to be on the first page of Google, and here are three easy ways to see how you are doing.

1. Look for your major keywords on Google. Which page are you on for your 3-5 major keywords? Check this each week to see progress, or lack thereof.

2. Search google for site:www.yoururl.com. So for my blog, site:allforyou.wordpress.com., the output is a list of every page on the site. The important part here is that I have 235 pages on my blog. The higher the page count the better, generally speaking, the better, as it is more search engine food.

3. Search google for link:www.yoururl.com, for my blog link:allforyou.wordpress.com, where we see that I have 49 incoming links.

For practice, do these three steps for Conversation Marketing, my boss Ian’s blog.

1. He is #10 for ‘internet marketing seattle’ and #1 for ‘conversation marketing’ and ‘ian lurie.’ I am cheating a bit because I know what terms he is high for. A better test is to identify in advance the terms you want to be high for, and then test yourself for those terms.

2. There are about 250 pages.

3. There are 155 incoming links to his blog.

Now use the data: On the keywords, Ian is doing quite well for his name, his brand (conversation marketing), and his industry in his location (internet marketing seattle). For pagecount, he just edges me out. But in incoming links, we see that Ian’s blog is more than 3 times more powerful than mine.

Rankings, pagecount, and sites linking in. 3 easy ways to assess your seo.

Ian put his book Conversation Marketing online for anyone to browse today. He writes about it here, where he says he put his internet marketing book out for three reasons:

1. Get more input.
2. He wants the book to grow. Possibly a wiki format in the future.
3. Great propaganda.

I would add to this list in a few ways:

4. Establish authority- hinted at in the three reasons above, this sharing of information helps establish Ian as the authority on internet marketing that he is. While some of our competitors may write articles, they don’t put their books online for free. Ian is saying, here is how I think, now interact with me about it. Godin did a similar thing with the Ideavirus book, with one crucial difference:

5. Search engine food- Godin made his book freely available in PDF, which is not as good for search engines as plain text. Right now, Ian’s book is online as it is written. Over the next months he will be rewriting parts for SEO. His site conversationmarketing.com currently has 250 pages of content. It had 197 before. And those 50 additional pages of content can be very keyword rich.

What this means to you:
Release information, unless that is what you are really selling. Portent is selling internet marketing expertise in seeing the big picture and doing all the parts so they fit together well. We are not selling a book.

You are not selling manuals. Or books. Or CDs. Use those items to get more people to come to buy what you really are selling.

Fred Janssen doesn’t have a site yet at www.fredjanssen.com, but he will in a month.

To preposition his name for Google, I am writing this post and tagging it with his name. In a few days, this post will be in the top 5 at least for his name. Then, when the site goes live, I will post again with links to his site.

This does a few things: people searching for his name right now will be able to find him above the fold in Google. Also, by linking to his site from my blog, I make sure Google indexes his site promptly.

It can take months for a site to appear in the rankings pages; it takes a blog days. This is because Google et alia like frequently updated content, which a blog is.

You can use this same tactic to preposition a website you are launching- just get a wordpress or blogger blog, and write about the new site.

I did this before with CASSIN Collections, and it worked like a charm. And I send links to her site.

Check the Google results page for Fred Janssen in a few days, and you should see this post.