When visiting the nsMarketing section of the new storefront, note that the products and services can no longer be purchased through the website. However, you will see an online marketing calculator that can give you a general idea of how best to spend the budget you have allotted to online marketing (also covered in this newsletter), a toll free number to speak to a specialist, or a form to submit to be contacted by a specialist at a later time.

If you have purchased online marketing products—a press release, perhaps—on the storefront before, this may come as a bit of a surprise. You might ask yourself, “Why can’t I purchase products for myself anymore?”

A New Approach to Serving Our Clients

In the past, Network Solutions took a more product-based approach to online marketing. While individual products relating to organic search engine optimization and paid search marketing had their benefits for clients (and still do), we have moved towards a service-based approach. Clients have one point of contact for all of their online marketing services, ensuring that campaigns including organic search engine optimization, paid search marketing, and online optimized press releases use complementary keywords and research and provide a unified effort to maximize the benefit to you, the client.

In the end, you are not looking for a specific product or service. You are looking for a solution—an answer to the question, “How can I get my website found on the Internet by the people I want to find it?” The new storefront approach—working with a specialist from the beginning, before specific products or services are purchased—ensures that we can help you develop a road map that will maximize benefit at a budget you can afford.

Contacting a Consultant

While our new online marketing calculator can give you a general idea of the best ways to allocate your online marketing budget, speaking with a specialist is the best solution. Our consultants understand working with many different budget levels and are well versed in search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and the benefits of online press releases. Contact us today at 1-866-376-1531 or visit the main nsMarketing page to learn more.

I love the Small Biz Trends site during my search and came across this little gem: 137 Great Twitter Tips

Back in May of 2009 they asked readers, to submit their best Twitter tips. They asked readers to simply answer one of the following 6 questions:

1. Getting Started: How would you suggest other small businesses get started on Twitter?
2. Smart Marketing: What’s the right way (or wrong way) to promote your business on Twitter?
3. Observing Etiquette: What is your #1 Twitter etiquette tip for small business owners?
4. Spreading Your Message: What is your best tip for getting re-tweeted?
5. Time Management: How do you manage your time on Twitter?
6. Advanced Strategies: What is your best kept secret (something not widely known) for using Twitter in business?

All of the tips have been compiled into one PDF document which is available here.

Some of my favorites?

“Identify keywords as well as the “experts” in your industry. Then, visit http://search.twitter.com and
search on those terms. Once you identify the right people, look at who they’re following and who is
following them as your potential pool of people you should follow.”

“Automated DMs aren’t worth sending. If you won’t invest a few seconds to compose a
140-character message I don’t want to invest 5 seconds reading it.”

“A quality “T.W.E.E.T. is: Timely, Worth-reading, Educational, Entertaining, and Tweople-connecting.”

“To get retweeted, it’s all about value. That can be in the form of an exclusive Twitter offer, or a blog
post or article that adds something new.”

“Schedule and treat tweet sessions like these as you would a meeting, be selective.”

There are tons more but you get the idea that this is some great advice from experienced Small Business Twitterers.

55% of small businesses that blog have increased traffic

For many in the social media world, this is a “no duh”, but for small business owner thinking about blogging, this is some serious validation to what many of us have been preaching for the last few years.

Many small businesses have been asking themselves how to stand out in the leveled playing field of the web. In the early days it was awesome. You could put out a better looking web site and compete with companies 100 times bigger than you. You looked the same.

Then came social media and the ability to stop broadcasting and start communicating.

Many saw this as a perfect way to give great customer service and get their web site to be a lead generation engine and not just a digital brochure. However, bigger companies could throw their resources at this and build large communities and execute big campaigns.

This means that there were few channels left to show you are great to work with and know your business. This was were blogging came in.

The team at Inbound Marketing looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in the sample blogged, 736 didn’t.

The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:

• 55% more visitors
  
• 97% more inbound links
  
• 434% more indexed pages

To review the report and look the graphics, check out the full article here.

Last month,Dallas LawrenceVice President of Digital Media at Levick Strategic Communications and I (Gayle Weiswasser, Vice President, TMG Strategies ) spoke on a panel for lawyers sponsored by Grow Smart Business.

Our planned topic that morning: “Social Networking for Law Firms 102,” and specifically how lawyers can help clients use social media in times of crisis to get their messages out proactively. The crowd was made up mostly of lawyers and law firm marketing professionals, and while we did talk about crisis communications,some of the discussion also centered around how law firms can use their own social media – websites, topic-specific blogs, and even Twitter accounts, to attract clients and manage their own reputations.

As Dallas recommended, using keywords and search engine optimization on each page of a law firm website can help generate business simply by including strategic descriptions of practice areas and attorney expertise. Dallas also recommends that law firm HR departments “friend” their attorneys, so that they can see how the firm is being represented on social networks. We talked about some of the key points to consider when advising clients how to use social media to protect their reputation in a crisis:

(1) have a social media presence and a crisis plan in place in advance of the crisis;

(2) be willing to respond, engage, apologize, reassure and explain, for as long as it takes;

(3) don’t forget to engage your employees, who can become brand messengers; and

(4) use all of the tools (social and traditional) at your disposal to amplify your message.

Here are some other points that were raised on our panel:

Generally, bloggers write about what they are passionate about.

Helping clients engage in dialogue with social media on topics of shared interest can be very rewarding for both parties.

There are many tools available to clients trying to monitor what’s being said about them online. Google Alerts, BackTweet, Tweetdeck, and Tweetbeep are examples of free social media monitoring tools that can help track client names and issues, and provide instant notification of relevant discussions. Social media is also an excellent way to research jury pools and community opinion on issues related to litigation. There is no one tool that provides a silver bullet for communication today – clients need to be engaged in traditional media as well as different kinds of social media in order to reach their intended audiences.

Many thanks to Steptoe & Johnson LLP for hosting the panel

I bring you the top 10 Killer SEO Tricks to Wordpress (so far…) – from the Moonlight Blog:

1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

The most search-engine friendly permalink MUST includes the post title (%postname%) in the link,having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. My suggest permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ or /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html .

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post, and use those words or phrases in your post title.

3. Optimize WordPress Page Titles

According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks very poor SEO. I suggest you to use a WordPress plugin so call “All in One SEO Pack” to fix that problem.

4. Optimize WordPress robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation. Here is an SEO optimized WordPress robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /trackback/

5. Use Google Sitemaps Plugin

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

6. Use Wordpress Anti-SPAM Plugin

Akismet is the best automated spam killer that actually gets better as it learns from the whole community marking new spam comments as spam.

7. Use Related Posts

Amaury BALMER’s Simple Tags plugin is a perfect tool to manage perfeclty your WP 2.3 tags, which can show related posts on your post and rss feed. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

8. Use Ping services

Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog. By default, Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to).

9. Make your content searchable

Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

10. Update your blog frequently

Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

Do you have any tips you care to share? Have these worked for you?

These are some great tips and if you did a simple web search you would find alot more. What has worked for you? Have any of these? Leave a comment and let’s hear from you.

A truly unique experience is about to happen in the land of Hollywood and Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles. At the end of this month, the City of Angels will play host to one of the biggest and most extravagant events on the West Coast: Twiistup.

But what is Twiistup? According to the event’s website, it’s an annual event that was designed to help bring something “new and unique” to the Southern California networking scene. It was created by Mike Macadaan and this year is produced by Francisco Dao who has made it clear that he wants to expand from the previous editions to create something even bigger and better. So just HOW is he going to do that? First of all it’s not a one day event. It’s nearly a two day event where you have networking and celebration and then the traditional conference for the other day where exceptional speakers will help enlighten the crowd.

So aside from the celebration of networking and learning more about what’s going on in the technology and web scene, what else can Twiistup offer that intrigues people to attend? The mission of the event is clear: it’s to create buzz, energy and excitement in the air in order to help move ideas along. The organizers of the event want to focus on bringing the “best and the brightest” together in the area to make the community better.

The format.

Before you think it’s all just fun and games where people get together for over a day and a half and swap business cards, please note that this is not your average networking event. Attendees will be able to attend sessions and panels relating to not just the technology industry, but also entertainment and music – all three industries which share some things in common. Some of the panels tentatively lined up for this year include:

» Incubators and Early Stage investing
» Bridging the online/mainstream divide
» Technology and Music
» Investing and Marketing based on the 7 Deadly Sins
» Startup Ecosystems
» Opportunities and Challenges of User Generated Content
» Monetizing Social Media

Just who shows up?

The past five years of Twiistup has received thousands of people in attendance and this year promises to be nothing short of a record. Here are some of the folks who you will at least see throughout the event and are pretty sure to be appearing at the sessions:

» Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo and co-founder of TechCrunch 50 and Weblogs
» Chamillionaire,  Grammy Award-winning and chart topping musician and entrepreneur
» Quincy Jones III (QD3) Music and film producer/entrepreneur.
» Dave McClure,  Seed stage investor for the Founders Fund
» Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs
» Brian Solis, Author of Now is Gone and Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, Publisher of PR 2.0 and bub.blicio.us, Founder of Future Works PR, and strategic advisor to Fortune 500 businesses and startups
» David O. Sacks, Former COO of PayPal, founder and CEO of Geni.com & Yammer, movie producer Thank You For Smoking.
» Todd Goldman, Artist, entrepreneur, co-creator of BLAHGirls (with Ashton Kutcher) & founder of David and Goliath apparel.

The list is tentative at best right now but rest assured that you’re going to have a lot of prominent industry professionals in attendance all eager to help move ideas about and create something truly remarkable. The partnership opportunities (and potential funding) is there. Why wouldn’t you show up?

It’s the startup showoff!

This year the organizers for Twiistup have thrown down the gauntlet to startups who want to show their wares to those in attendance. Companies were invited earlier this year to submit their products & ideas to the selection committee and only just recently has the results been announced – although partially at best.  In the sixth year, Twiistup will allow companies who plan on launching in the Fall of 2009 to demonstrate or present their concept, website, product – almost like their very own press event. People will be able to ask questions of the startups and will also be privvy to seeing some of the latest technology to emerge out of these respective industries.

But here’s the catch on how you know these companies presenting will be top-notch: startups interested had to have submitted their proposals to a panel of judges well respected in their industry. If the proposal holds muster, then they move onto the next round. Who knows? Maybe one of these companies will have the next Twitter, Facebook or Google that we’ll all be abuzz about for the next few years. The topping on the cake? These spots are free so you know the companies will put together all their effort to really impress you.

The details.

If you want to attend Twiistup at the end of the month, it’s in Los Angeles at the Universal Hilton. The cost for attending all the events relating to Twiistup will run you $297.00 but if you’re just interested in the evening mixer, you will only have to shell out $79. I’m sure that this entire event is not one to be missed and you can get your ticket by clicking here.

Media and press passes are also available in limited quantity. To get one, you will need to send an email to twiistup@lewispr.com.

I’m looking to attend this event and I’ll be more than happy to report back any findings and any buss about new companies that look promising. If you happen to be there at the same time, look for me and let’s connect. Get ready for Twiistup!

Photo Credits: Mike Macadaan

The opposite of this and the purpose of the post is Inbound Marketing.

Many of you might have heard the term “Inbound Marketing” but for those of you that have not, it is essentially getting the customers to come to you. This involves “discovering where potential customers are searching, positioning yourself correctly so they’ll find you and letting them discover whether you have what they are looking for”.

So how do you get discovered naturally and have customers come to you? Well, I have put together what I think are 10 Great Rules for Inbound Marketing that you can use in your business.

Rule #10 – Blog about things that solve your customers problems – People will see the value in your advice and your business. You may think you are giving away free consulting but if people don’t know you how will they know you are an expert and worth talking to?

Rule #9 – Optimize your web sites – SEO is critical so that search engines can locate our sites and our articles easily

Rule #8 – Market Your Content to Where your Readers Are – Submit your content to social bookmarking and social networking sites. We also submit our sites to blog directories and our articles to article directories

Rule #7 – Create an “Inbound Hub” – This means setting your website up like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites.

Rule #6 – Use Social Networking Sites for actual networking – There are many other social network sites out there beyond Facebook that focus on niche areas. This allows you to build focused networks with others in those respective niches and interests

Rule #5 – Employ Analytics – Your hard work needs to have some result and you need to know if things are working. The easiest way to do this is to employ metrics technologies like Google Analytics, Hubspot and Radian6.

Rule #4 – Make it easy to buy – Give visitors to your site the information that will help in their decision making process.

Rule #3 – Get that prospect’s name – There are many clever ways to drop in their name and email to keep updated on information. Sounds easy and at this point in web technology, it is but most people

Rule #2 – Provide methods for visitors to make inquiries or purchases – You would be surprise how many web sites FAIL at this portion of the web site. Heck, you spent all that money on a web site and someone can’t fill in a form or quickly ask a question. SEE RULE #4 on Make it EASY TO BUY.

Rule #1 – Give some stuff away – This might sound trite or even cheap but this actually brings all previous nine rules to a focus point. Create an e-book, or a podcast, maybe even a video series. This relates to capturing info and leveraging all the rules together so a potential customer can easily find you, see that you have something of value they can use in exchange for some basic info (email and name) which shows them how much of an expert you are and how easy it is to buy and hire your company.

Any other rules I missed?

These are my 10 rules for implementing an inbound marketing program with customers, is there anything I missed or should add? Leave a comment.

You might be rolling your eyes and saying “great, another acronym to remember and another marketing concept to understand and incorporate into my business”. But not so fast, this one is on of the most important concepts to come along to marketing in years.

Let me explain myself…

Explaining Word of Mouth Marketing in Plain English

According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association web site, they define it as “Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place. It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications.”

It goes on to explain “Word of mouth is a pre-existing phenomenon that marketers are only now learning how to harness, amplify, and improve. Word of mouth marketing isn’t about creating word of mouth — it’s learning how to make it work within a marketing objective.

That said, word of mouth can be encouraged and facilitated. Companies can work hard to make people happier, they can listen to consumers, they can make it easier for them to tell their friends, and they can make certain that influential individuals know about the good qualities of a product or service.

Word of mouth marketing empowers people to share their experiences. It’s harnessing the voice of the customer for the good of the brand. And it’s acknowledging that the unsatisfied customer is equally powerful.”

It is really about two-way transparent conversation

Again from WOMMA, “All word of mouth marketing techniques are based on the concepts of customer satisfaction, two-way dialog, and transparent communications. The basic elements are:

• Educating people about your products and services
• Identifying people most likely to share their opinions
• Providing tools that make it easier to share information
• Studying how, where, and when opinions are being shared
• Listening and responding to supporters, detractors, and neutrals”

WAIT! Didn’t you just explain what social media is? YEP.

Social Media are really Word of Mouth Tools

Granted, social media is on the tip of everyone’s tongues with tools such as Twitter and Facebook but if you think about it, Social Media and its tools are the ultimate digital conveyance of “Word of Mouth”. Instead of telling 20 of your friends that this restaurant rocked you can share it with 20 million people on Yelp.com. Pissed off at a vendor and you vented on Twitter? Most likely that company has an outpost there and is listening.

You can’t fake this stuff

“Word of mouth can’t be faked or invented. Attempting to fake word of mouth is unethical and creates a backlash, damages the brand, and tarnishes the corporate reputation. Legitimate word of mouth marketing acknowledges consumers’ intelligence — it never attempts to fool them. Ethical marketers reject all tactics related to manipulation, deception, infiltration, or dishonesty.”

Expanding the Discussion of Word of Mouth Marketing – I want to hear from you

This is just touching upon the basics of Word of Mouth marketing and I plan to dive in further and really explore how your business can benefit from these concepts but I want to hear from you. Let us know what you want to know. Case studies? Concepts? Resources? Leave a comment.

In the mean time, check out these great resources:

Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)

Word of Mouth Marketing Book – Andy Sernovitz

Photo Credit: Media Bistro

True, this is nothing really new about personal branding. There are experts on it, books about it and passionate detractors. However, with sites like Twitter and Facebook creating very valuable property if you can get your name and/or your company name to extend your personal brand, it is more important all the time. Most people don’t know who the heck you are but they can through techniques like Personal Branding and establishing yourself as a Thought Leader in your area of expertise. Jay lays out a nice and simple 10 point plan to accomplish this and own your “personal brand” and the space you plan to occupy.

10 Simple Rules to Effective Personal Branding

1.) Be Your own Brand Manager (develop your brand marketing plan, how are you going to promote, set specific measurable goals)

2.) Determine your USP (what makes you distinctive, how can you enhance your unique skills)

3.) Follow Your Passion (where do you like to hangout, what do you

4.) Listen to everyone else

5.) Embrace Your Inner Author (Create Unique Content)

6.) Build Your New (Set a goal to make a few quality connections, give to get ask about them, Ask about them)

7.) Volunteer to Shine (Develop new skills, enhance skill through freelance opportunities)

8.) Innovate to Lead

9.) Be Entrepreneurial – Entrepreneur is a verb

10.) Speak Up! – Go to Toastmasters, Presentation Zen

I think that no matter how you feel about the term “Personal Branding” you can’t deny that with all the content and bombardment of information we receive every minute of the day it is harder and harder to be recognized. Jay is convinced that this will become even more critical in participating in Web 2010 and he is probably right on target.

What are your thoughts and feelings on “Personal Branding”?

I know there are experts out there, dectractors and people learning this approach and I want to hear from you all. Leave a comment on whether you think this will be important now, next year and beyond.

Photo Credit: Digital Mommy

Back in August 2008, public relations professional, author of the book Putting Public Back In Public Relations and creator of the term “PR 2.0″, Brian Solis released what is called the Conversation Prism. But what exactly is this Conversation Prism? According to Solis, it’s to help “provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the Social Web and the conversations that define it”. There has been a lot of new tools and applications that have appeared over the past few years and this has become a pretty crucial means of keeping track of how people engage in conversations online.

So what does it all mean? It looks pretty convoluted so here’s an explanation to help make it pretty clear:

The core of the conversation is the brand. It’s the main reason why you’re going to have a conversation. From there, your goal is to become the observer, listener, internalizer and router. This is where you look to find the communities you should participate in and to gain the research on how to improve your relationships with your customers.

After listening and researching how you can enter the conversation, you need to create an environment inside your company and brand that will respond to the conversation being had. So what type of infrastructure will you have to handle crisis communication, product & sales,  marketing & public relations, and even community? It’s in this phase of the conversation that you’ll need to help determine who will be managing each component. Is it a community manager? Do you have a committee who will determine the next course of action but with a single leader?

According to Brian Solis, the next cycle after establishing your brand, listening, and determining the authority on managing the conversation will complete the “image of the conversational workflow”, but not the cycle. It should be noted that this is where you begin to participate. You, as the community manager, will begin to shape the dialogue through active participation, building online relationships (which will help build brand visibility and strengthen its value), engaging in researching for ongoing feedback and insight, and finally recognizing that conversations extend beyond the online realm – it’s also about meeting people in real life.

Okay, now you know the steps to creating the conversation, where do you talk the talk?

This is the outer part of the Conversation Prism. You seek out where your customers/community are and then engage them there. One step to begin would be to create what’s called a social map. Take your customers information and research and find out where on the social networks are they having a dialogue. As Solis points out, doing so will help you identify exactly where relevant discussions are taking place, as well as their scale and frequency. The outer realms of the Conversation Prism are categories of social networks and examples of specific sites within each category. So if you’re finding that your customers are active on photo social networks, you might look into seeing what conversations are being had on Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Picasa, or others.

Solis recommends that anyone serious about conversations should conduct an audit and gauge where customers are and track the results. He also suggests measuring the rate of occurrence, whether each instance required a response, and if so, by whom, and also the potential reach of each dialog by quantifying the network of friends and friends of friends in order to establish priority, authority, response strategies, and urgency. You can read more about the idea of the Conversation Prism here.

The idea behind diagramming how conversations can take place online is a pretty great one and Brian Solis has done a great job putting something conceptually together. Combined with a great aesthetically pleasing diagram by Jesse Thomas, the Conversation Prism is a glowing representation on the ever-expanding universe of the social web. Regardless of the type of conversations being had on social networks, the point is that they should. Learn to focus on the brand, the infrastructure, its management and the effort in participation and you’ll have plenty of discussions for years to come.

Image credit: Brian Solis/Jesse Thomas (ConversationPrism.com)