Promote Own Website Like A Brand

Branding at the individual, small or even medium level is a difficult endeavor. However, there are little excuses for inadequacies these days as Google makes it more difficult to rank with content marketing that isn’t “brand friendly” – that is, tactics that are one-off gray or black hat link building techniques.

Today, we must function as brands, and the reality is that although we imagine companies like Kellogg’s and SeaWorld as the behemoths of brand marketing – companies with lackluster websites but still the ability to generate links eight times quicker than us – we are very capable of reflecting a similar identity online due to benefits of miniature scale we can create for ourselves through the proper marketing channels that brands often experience and build on offline.

Link Building with Momentum in Mind

We’ve left behind the term “link building” and must instead focus on identities like “link development” through content marketing. If we build our businesses and link development competencies with the idea that we must build scale, we’ll be a lot more successful with our efforts because we will develop competencies.
What does this mean?

No more one off guest posting for links. Yes I am guest posting here, but I am doing so with the intention of building authority and referrals, and actually, the link matters little to me because I don’t do much SEO for my own blog. Hopefully some of you follow my blog or follow me on Twitter, which will create an audience that will multiply my future efforts online.

If I simply blog for a link, that effort is reduced. If you want to create scale (as you should), you’ll do similar. Yes, the link is valuable, and you should aim for a combinatory effect with your guest posting, but your sole intention should never be the link itself. In the new world of content marketing, it’s no longer a valid excuse.

Creating A Snowball Promotion Strategy

Many brands have the benefit of content that serves itself, and only need to release it into the wild to see the benefits it can create online. Us small peons don’t, right? Well, the reality is that we do. We can’t ever be Kellogg’s or SeaWorld, but we can have the “publish” button that sites like SEOmoz enjoy – when thousands of eyeballs view their content all at once.

This comes from deliberate, long practice of developing audience through mechanisms like guest posting in the target markets our audience operates in. Constantly releasing great content online and then creating introductory “sticky” promotion elements will create the brand mechanisms others enjoy. What are these introductory sticky elements?

• Twitter accounts – getting potential customers to follow us
• Facebook accounts – getting potential customers to like us
• YouTube accounts – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
• RSS feeds – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
• E-mail marketing – getting potential customers to subscribe to us

I say “introductory” because these allow you to remarket to your consumers for free – and are a few steps to the secondary, more powerful sticky element, SEO. If we guest post or do PPC advertising, if we never capture audience intent through one or more of these sticky elements, we lose the potential to scale, because our cost per acquisition continually rises.

This creates a negative brand efficiency if they do not, as customers, follow/like/subscribe to content they enjoy – as such an engagement is an introductory buy-in to your brand identity.

So this means your job, as a marketer, is not to initially think about how you might get thousands of sales, but how you will create the snowball promotion effect every time you release something online. Because if you do not generate that snowball, even if you create a viral sale effect, it will eventually become nothing.

Brands have that snowball effect – which is why every Apple event is covered and talked about once one word is leaked out – and why Six Flags can immediately touch thousands of eyeballs on their brand when a press release is opened up. They built it, but they had it bad compared us – they didn’t have the benefit of online, free promotion mechanisms to do it. They had to do it through high cost per acquisition activities like billboard, display and television advertising.

Build the brand snowball by:

• Leveraging the maximum amount calls to action to social accounts on your sidebar, after blog posts, and occasionally, within blog posts, without appearing spammy
• Most often releasing content to interested markets asymmetrical to your own, such that they might have interest in future relevant content of yours
• Promoting content through all social channels relevant to your own and not to channels where there isn’t much application (such as Pinterest for Daily Blog Tips)
• Creating memorable and brand-identifiable social accounts that are easy to type in, easy to find, and match the company sales mission across all available properties

Creating A Brand Effect in SERP Results

As you build those accounts, you will begin to effect a real change in the search results, depending on your vertical. For example, SEOmoz, a now established “brand” in SEO, has the benefit not just of ranking well that being a brand provides, but also getting a higher clickthrough rate because of it.
It is likely a higher clickthrough rate is a positive signal to Google to actually rank you higher, which then gets you even more clicks – and more links, and so it goes. But that’s not where it stops to create a “snowball effect”. Obviously, hopefully you’ve now established some search result rankings, and some sales. From here, build on that efficiency and “snowball effect” by multiplying effort.
Do this by:

• Signing up customers immediately for e-mail newsletters such that they can serve as content promoters even if they can no longer be upsold
• Immediately leverage a secondary call to action such as “follow us on Twitter/like us on Facebook!” after they’ve completed a conversion event
• Creating content that is good enough to be talked about through word of mouth, bringing new customers back to your website to then be pulled into future promotion efforts through social and email campaigns
• Using rel=author where applicable to create brand identity/quick identification when potential customers use your services online

Hopefully posts like this can help push you to start creating your own mini-brand online. SEO isn’t dead, but I believe winning a competitive vertical by sustaining a business on one-off linking strategies truly is.

8 Ways To Use Pinterest As A Marketing Tool For Your Business

Pinterest is growing in popularity as the hottest social networking site. It is a simple structured social network. Here users share photos that they can find online by ‘pinning’ them that is equivalent to ‘liking’ on Facebook or giving +1 on Google plus. You just have to download a toolbar that can be used for pinning the items from any web site. Then the photo and its information will appear on pinterest board so that the people who follow you can watch your collection and they can even re-pin them.

Any business which relies on driving a good amount of traffic on website should consider pinterest to fulfill this aim. Its structure is quite simple so you can not experiment with various marketing strategies but still there are wide chances to promote your business. Have a look :

• You can share your products: You can use pinterest by pinning your own products to share them with others. By this others will come to know about your product. Here you can create many boards and you can group your specific pins into product categories for specific customers. You can create groups according to the different categories of customers like managers, artists, kids, students’ etc.By doing this; a virtual catalogue of products will be created of your customer’s choice. You can also create “best of” called board to showcase your most popular product over there.

Helpful in your SEO efforts: It helps you to maximize your SEO opportunities by pinning your products over there and driving your potential traffic directly on your website. You can create quality backlinks by linking your products. You can use your targeted keywords in writing the descriptions so that your target customers will be encouraged to visit your site. So all these efforts will ultimately helpful in increasing your rankings in search engines.

• Add to Gifts: On pinterest when you create an entry for your pins simultaneously you can also add a price tag there. By selecting this option you can add a link which points back to your website. By adding items in this way automatically will be included in the gifts section of pinterest which is a virtual catalog of gift ideas over there. But you just have to take care of one thing that you are selecting your best product’s photos for pinning there and also you have to write an appealing description with this so that people get attracted.
• Create a video gallery: You are not limited to just pining the images but you can also pin video too on pinterest. You can create a pin board of some very interesting videos of your business products interspersed with relevant images. Pinterest’s home page has separate tab for your videos so that you can get better exposure by being featured in that category. You just have to include a ‘call to action’ with in the video itself to bring the viewers to your website for better engagement.
•  Interact with customers: Encourage users to interact with you on pinterest by offering an exclusive content which make them to view your website. You can start contests over there by asking users to re-pin items. The more re –pins you will get the more interactive environment you will be able to build around your products and sites. You can also offer few exclusive discount offers which will be able to attract your target customers.
• You can highlight services too: Every business doesn’t sell products as many them are in service industry too. So they also can use pinterest as an effective marketing tool for their business. If you are providing services then you can build a virtual resume with pinterest. You can share photos and messages over pinterest which will reflect your work and services provided by you.
• Increase your social sharing: As we know that connectivity is quite crucial for success in social media thus pinterest enables your users to directly log in through other networks like Facebook and twitter, users can share posts through emails twitter or Facebook.

So use pinterest as marketing tool. Will catch you soon with my next post!!