SEO Expertise

I’m reading a post by Lisa Barone about the Social Media presentation at SES New York.  One of the speakers, Gini Dietrich, points out that people want to see inside  a company, they want to get to know the people that work there.   I’ve believe this for a long time, even before we had the term social media.   I have frequently expressed this idea as “people buy from people”.

I’ll admit this might be a personal bias.  I spent 15 years on the road selling various products and services before I struck out on my own.  Buying from a website is very impersonal.   Online purchases work well for commodity type purchases that are usually driven by price.   As a former sales manager once said to me “sell on price, lose on price”.

The idea that people buy from people is important to keep in mind when you are developing your eCommerce strategy. Will your site sell based on price?  Will people be available to assist?  Have you posted pictures of people that work at the company?  Humans are a social animal.  We want to see “who” we are dealing with.

If the idea that people buy from people sounds like common sense you’d be right.  Unfortunately business owners do not always apply offline common sense to their online initiatives.

In the last month I’ve seen three blogs running on WordPress that have failed to take advantage of search engine friendly URLs.   It is incredibly easy to turn on search engine friendly blogs running on WordPress.   In less than two minutes you can go from URLs like this:

http://www.johnarobb.com/?p=362

To URLs that look like this:

http://www.johnarobb.com/school-caught-spying-on-students-webcam/2010/02/

Something to keep in mind is that if you can’t tell the subject of a page from the URL neither can a search engine.

There are a number of ways to turn on search engine friendly URLs in WordPress Here is one way:

1. Open the Settings menu
2. Select Permalinks
3. Paste this in the Custom Setting text box – /%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/
4. Save changes

That’s it, you are done.  From now on your pages will have more search friendly URLs.

How do you get 76% of your audience to say yes to your proposition?  First get them to say yes to a simple proposition aligned with their identity.  This at least is what a study conducted in the 1960′s seems to indicate.   Professors Freedman and Fraser from Stanford University got 76% of respondents to place a homemade billboard on their lawn.  How they did it was by approaching the respondents 2 weeks earlier and asking them to post a small 3 inch sticker on their window that said “Be a Safe Driver”.  When the researchers returned two weeks later and asked to place a “Be a Safe Driver” billboard on their lawn more respondents said yes when compared to the control group that was not first asked to place the small sticker. So how does this apply to Twitter?

Twitter is your “foot in the door”.  If you are trying to make a complex sale it is very easy for a prospect to say no to your sales pitch.  Imagine you call a prospect and ask them to buy your software, it’s easy to image that most people will answer “no thanks” even if they could benefit from what you have to offer.  Now imagine instead of asking to buy the software you simple call and ask if the prospect if they want to do better at what they do.  Who is going to say no to that?  With this small yes ask the prospect if they use any of the micro-blogging tools such as Twitter or LinkedIn.  If they answer yes to that you can now establish your foot in the door by adding them as a Twitter follower.

Here’s how my pitch might go: “Hello John, I know you are  a busy person and don’t have time for a sales presentation but I’m sure you want to make sure you are doing all you can to make your business a success.  I occasionally post helpful tips on Twitter/LinkedIn/Plaxo/Facebook.  Would you like to make sure you are receiving these tips that 100/200/300 other people in your role receive?”   This is not a fullproof script and it won’t get you a 100% success rate but I think you can agree that trying to get the small yes is easier than the big yes.

Once you have a prospect following you on Twitter, this could also work if you had a newsletter, you can take time to establish trust with the prospect.  With your foot in the door your next ask can be bigger.  You might be surprised by the results.

I follow simple philosophy when it comes to using Twitter.  I want my tweets to:  Engage, Enlighten or Educate.  This can be described as:

• engage – do something
• enlighten – feel something
• educate – learn something

To engage your followers you need to get them interested in taking some kind of action.  Typically you would be trying to poll your followers or learn something yourself.   Google recently bought Aardvark which is a service that allows you to post questions and get answers.  The answers aren’t always great but they can help point you in certain direction.

Who doesn’t like a good laugh?  Depending on your audience you could substitute Entertain for Enlighten.   A funny joke, a cute picture, a great video.  Those are examples of the kind of tweet that people enjoy reading.  It doesn’t have to be heavy but it shouldn’t be empty.  There has to be something in it for the reader.

It’s much easier to educate your followers in this context that you might think.  All you need to do is share the link to a good story.  Sharing links is a good way to demonstrate domain expertise.  Let someone else do the heavy lifting of writing the story.  All you need to do is point people to it.  I suppose it also means you have to be on the look out for quality stories which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

There are a variety of ways to get a sense of what people are tweeting about.  It is a good idea to look at these resources and get a feel for what your audience might appreciate.

• search.twitter.com
• hashtags.org (a hashtag is a keyword proceeded by #, such as #gps)
• whatthetrend.com

When you are tweeting just remember to always make the tweet interesting to your audience.  If you do that you will have success in keeping your followers.

If this was an email more people would have opened it because of the provocative words in the subject.  I’m not just saying that.  I know for a fact that if you use provocative words in the subject line of an email, or a blog post, you can get 6-7% more people to open the email.

Slut, kidnapping and death are three words that I included in the three separate subject lines for a weekly email newsletter that I worked on.  These words are definitely sensational and not suitable in a business setting.  This newsletter went out to over 100,000 movie goers.  For this newsletter a 6% increase translates into more than 6000 people.  That is a meaningful number.

A well crafted subject line can lead to an increased open rate.  I picked these sensational words for this post as they allowed me to write a sensational title.   In a business setting something less sensational is required.  Subject lines don’t need to be sensational but they should be provocative.   Give the reader a reason to open the email.