Going Viral with a Press Release Service

Let’s start by getting one thing very clear: not every use of a press release service results in a massive boost in traffic. Press releases can be insanely effective, but most of them are just backlinks like any other blog comment or one-off article submission. In fact, many experts will tell you not to put a lot of effort into your press releases — just hire a service and get one put out there about your latest product, service, or idea.

They’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

You see, a press release isn’t like an article you write and then put on a directory where someone might search for it and might read it. A press release goes out on a variety of websites that gather such releases, and the nation’s newspapers, news radio stations, televisions, and other press agencies actually comb through those looking for great stories. If they find one, they’ll take it to their editor, and if it’s approved, it gets printed (and/or airtime.)

What’s more, if a news agency puts it out there, it’s likely to be picked up by one of the hundreds of secondary news blogs out there that are racing to get a few thousand hits by being on top of Google News for a few precious hours. That increases your potential audience by another order of magnitude — just about the most effective organic SEO you can imagine.

Of course, all of this depends strictly on having a press release writer who can craft something that doesn’t vanish into the massive pile of press releases that come out every day announcing thousands of new businesses’ concepts and products. To that end, you might want to consider asking whomever you hire as your press release service what their track record is. You might even consider offering to pay a little extra to get their best man on the job.

Again, it’s a gamble — but the sheer power of getting literally hundreds of permanent backlinks from all of the secondary (and a few primary) websites is so enormous, especially for a new business, that the extra cost is essentially like a lottery ticket that you’re much more likely to win from.

Good Forum Posting Habits Take Time To Develop

When you start down the path of forum posting, there are distinctly two different paths you can take toward success. You can go for the short-term, high-volume approach, or you can take a longer-term perspective that will result in the same high volumes that continue to flow each day, indefinitely. Too many erstwhile SEO experts who advocate the forum posting and, to a lesser degree, the blog posting tactics — blog comments, that is, not creating an actual blog — take the short-term perspective, and it ruins the real value inherent in these highly effective techniques.

That value is obvious when you stop to think about it — a forum is a very powerful thing. A large community of more-or-less dedicated readers will naturally build up quite an authority in the eyes of the websites as time goes on. Equally importantly, someone that has respect within that community — even if they’re not a pillar of it, but just someone that’s known for making meaningful contributions — will get his posts and thoughts read by scores if not hundreds of people.

On the opposite note, someone that’s a complete newbie to the forum might get his posts read if he’s inflammatory or provocative enough, but the chances are good that the denizens will simply ignore him. Or worse, that the forum moderator will detect that he has a backlinking agenda, and simply delete his account and all of his posts along with it.

Either way, the net effect of all of his effort is squandered in whole or in part. But it’s easy to register for a forum, throw away a lame post or two, and then vanish never to be seen again — that’s why most people do it.

The other end of the spectrum involves time. Time to find a forum relevant to your subject matter, that doesn’t disallow personal links, that also happens to be big enough to be worth your attention. Time to learn the rules, time to post meaningful contributions that bring value to the community. But if you DO put in the time, the results speak for themselves: high-value backlinks coupled with an instant customer base for whatever relevant product or service you happen to be releasing. It’s golden — if you take the time.

Local Internet Marketing And Receipt Tape: A Powerful Combination

Sometimes, success in local internet marketing has more to do with tiny, subtle details than it does the broad strokes. Don’t get me wrong — if you don’t do the broad strokes right (like getting your Los Angeles SEO company listed first for the keyword “LA SEO”), the other parts won’t ever fall into place. But there are times when you can take the success of a great local internet marketing campaign to an entirely new level by doing something so minor — and weird — that you’d probably never consider it.

Without revealing the name of the business or its owner, let me tell you a quick story about a client. EliteSEOMarketing.com had just finished getting her floral business on the top of the local listings for her hometown, and she could tell — her foot traffic was up just under ten percent, and sales were improving accordingly. Then, she had a long discussion with one of the salesmen that comes to every small business trying to sell those credit card swiping machines.

He told her about a trick that not many business owners take advantage of: the ability of almost all receipt-printing devices to add a bit of customized text at the bottom of their receipts. Immediately, she wondered how she could use that to drive traffic. After a quick call to us, we put together a plan.

The florist added a large and very visible footer on her receipt. It simply said “For 15% off your next visit, go to and print off a free coupon.” The twist — on her website, in order to print off a free coupon, you had to Email an identical coupon to a friend.

The sales funnel created by her first page placement instantly doubled in it’s effectiveness. People looked for a florist online, found her, came in, loved the product, and in a burst of enlightened self-interest, they told their friends. The friends went to the website, saw the quality page she had put up online, printed off the coupon, came into the store, saw the product for the awesome stuff it was, and went to print off more coupons (and tell more friends!)

That’s the power of a clever entrepreneur that isn’t afraid to mix local internet marketing with offline business tactics — and it’s beautiful to behold.

Coming Off the Blocks: A Fast Start With PPC Management

PPC Management is the key to getting a web based business off the ground fast and hard. Startup companies that engage in traditional SEO services can expect to wait for weeks, months, or — if they hire the wrong company — years before the organic traffic they get from those services starts to pay the bills. By engaging pay-per-click marketing experts to build them a solid PPC campaign, however, they can turn a solid profit long before their SEO experts get them on the front page of the SERPs.

Many such sites are reluctant to try PPC because they’ve heard horror stories of individuals or other small businesses that sank thousands of dollars into pay-per-click without ever seeing any significant benefits. To be blunt, that’s because they tried to do it themselves, or they hired an amateur. A company that is skilled at PPC management will take the time to find the right long-tail keywords, build a massive list of keywords to bid on, and know what keywords to back away from as the competition becomes too fierce.

Pay-per-click advertising requires expertise to do right. Imagine how you’d feel if you hired an expert to design a flyer for your pet store, and he designed a pamphlet about sharks (which you don’t sell) and then handed it out to middle school kids at a playground. That’s what amateur PPC is like, in a very real sense. Unless you know what you’re doing, you can easily end up targeting the wrong market with an offer they care nothing about, and end up paying through the nose to do it.

With the right amount of expertise, on the other hand, PPC turns into the perfect complement to organic SEO efforts — essentially like an electric scooter that lets your website get by until it learns to run on its own. With the right ads appearing in front of the right people, you can drive traffic that will convert with startling regularity and get your bills paid as the SEO team slowly builds you a web of backlinks with the goal of eventually turning the PPC faucet down — and then off altogether.

The Backlink Trifecta: Forum Posting, Blog Posting, and Social Bookmarking

There are a few SEO tricks that virtually everyone puts to good use when crafting backlinks for their website: forum posting, blog posting, and social bookmarking. SEO, at least off-page SEO, is devoted almost entirely to the art of developing backlinks to your website. There are three basic attributes that make a backlink a good one: authority, persistence, and relevance.

Authority
Authority means that the backlink comes from a webpage that search engines think is important. Getting a backlink from About.com or Wikipedia.com has a lot more weight to it than getting a backlink from mommasgottablog.com or blitheringidiocy.info. In general, the older the site, the more traffic the site gets, and the higher the site’s PageRank, the more authority it has.

Persistence
Persistence simply means that the backlink will continue to exist for a long, long time. Putting forth a lot of effort to get a backlink from a PageRank 8 authority site is all well and good, but if that backlink is going to get deleted in a few weeks because the page regularly rolls over and offers entirely-new content, your efforts are going to be wasted.

Relevance
This is common sense. If your website is about spiders, and you get a backlink from a webpage about chicken casserole, the search engines are going to be all like “Whaa?”, and they’re going to assume that the backlink is an accident or otherwise not actually important. Much better to get a backlink from a page about surviving spider bites.

Looking at these three factors, the power of forums, blogs, and social bookmarking should make itself immediately obvious. First, most social bookmarking sites (like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious) are authority sites by their very nature. More importantly, as you add more and more social bookmarks about a specific topic, the more the page becomes relevant. And of course, the entire point of social bookmarking is to create a persistent list of items that never goes away.

Similarly, forums and blogs offer such variety that finding relevant ones is pretty easy, and they’re designed to leave the comments and conversations around forever. The challenge is finding high-authority forums and blogs to comment on, but if you can accomplish that goal, you’re on your way to a plethora of high-quality backlinks.

Small Business, Big Money: The Power of Local Internet Marketing

Local internet marketing — the term seems almost oxymoronic. After all, isn’t part of the allure of marketing online the fact that people from Poughkeepsie to Paris can find your webpage and learn about your business? Well, yes, but if you run a brick and mortar business, how likely is it that people will drive there from Poughkeepsie — much less Paris — no matter how awesome your website is?

Brick-and-mortar businesses can still benefit from internet marketing, but of a very different variety than is used by the infopreneurs, site flippers, and other money-from-nothing gurus of the ‘net. They shouldn’t be targeting broad keywords and trying to snag traffic from other continents — they should be focusing on locale-specific searches, trying to make sure that when someone from Sequim, Washington searches for “lavendar soap”, that their lavender soap making shop it the one that Google displays first.

That’s the essence of local internet marketing — marketing to local people that are using the internet. It seems almost tautological, doesn’t it?

But for all that it makes sense, local internet marketing isn’t always easy. Depending on the location, “local” might mean a place with 50,000 people, or 5 million — and the more people, the harder you have to work to optimize your site for the search engines. Los Angeles SEO, for example, is a dozen times more competitive than Oregon SEO, which is still two hundred times more competitive than SEO for the aforementioned lavender shop in rural Washington State.

However, once you’ve made it to the top, the profit that comes through the door is astounding. Studies have shown that 70% or more of internet users look up products locally online, and they have a tendency to decide on a business based on their web presence more than on their phone voice or their yellow pages advertisements.

That’s why local internet marketing is so much more effective than an ad in the newspaper or handing out fliers. A properly-performed localized SEO effort will give you more bang for your buck than almost any ‘real-world’ marketing campaign, especially for a small business, and especially in a smaller town. It may be a small business, but with localized SEO services, it can be big, big money.

Affordable SEO, Not Amateur SEO

Affordable SEO is the heart and soul of any startup web-based business. Small businesses don’t have the budget to drop vast quantities of money on pay-per-click marketing — though it is usually smart to spend a bit on it, just to get your income kick-started. In many ways, smart PPC management is the perfect compliment to affordable SEO — you get the income fast from your PPC campaign, you spend it maintaining that campaign and investing in some inexpensive but effective SEO, and eventually, the SEO will take over and the PPC campaign can be dropped.

That’s the fundamental essence of an expert route to success online, actually — find a way to make some consistent money up front, often with pay-per-click marketing or some other method of expensive but high-volume traffic generation, and then use the money you make to create backlinks and other SEO substructure to get your website on the stop of the search engine results pages.

The problem that many webmasters have is that they hire an SEO freelancer for pennies per hour on ODesk or Elance, and then they wonder why it’s been seven months that they’ve been paying for a service and haven’t gotten anything out of it. The answer is that they hired an amateur. It’s possible — and common — for amateurs to spend hundreds of hours doing what seems like valuable SEO work, building backlinks, posting on forums, commenting on blogs, and writing articles, only to get no results at all.

Professional but affordable SEO services might charge a bit more than a freelancer, but the results will be evident from the first week. Professionals know how to perform proper SEO, often utilizing ‘tricks’ that make every effort they put forth perform multiple functions at once — like giving your site a high-quality backlink while also driving traffic to the site to create sales, or writing an article and submitting variations of it in different places that all link back to the main article, driving the article itself up in the search engine results and making it’s effect on your website that much stronger.

The lesson here is simple: when it comes to search engine optimization, not everyone can afford to hire a huge company to work for them and make them king of the hill overnight — but everyone can afford professional SEO services if they know where to look, and anything less is just a waste of time and money.

Organic SEO is Like Organic Food for Your Website

Organic SEO is, at heart, the practice of creating the circumstances that will make Google and other search engines show your webpage on their front page. It’s an absolutely vital practice to the success of any long-term web-based business — in a very real way, if you’re not getting natural traffic, your website isn’t healthy — it’s on life support.

Like a healthy diet of organic food, organic SEO doesn’t have instantaneous effects — the goodness builds up over time. No one expects that if they stop eating Happy Meals and start eating right, they’re going to magically become perfectly healthy overnight — it’s implicitly understood that building a healthy body takes time and continuous effort. Organic SEO is exactly the same.

Similarly, like eating right, Organic SEO has some of the most profoundly positive effects on your business of any of the practices you could engage in. When you eat right and overcome your health problems, you wake up every morning feeling energized and ready to take on the world. When you have powerful backlinks driving your page to the top of the search engines, you wake up every morning to learn that you’ve gotten another thousand visitors, few hundred conversions, and dozens of sales overnight, and you’re ready to pay bills, set some aside for a rainy day, and go out for a night on the town.

For a small business SEO is even more important, because the budget is that much tighter and the profit margins are that much more critical. SEO represents that investment into your future, without which your business will be permanently hooked on ‘fast food’ — by which I mean paying for banner space, classified ads, and other expensive, less-focused traffic.

Like McDonalds, these alternate traffic sources are fast, easy, and they claim to be cheap — but in reality, in the long run, they cost you so much more than doing things right. Just like eating junk will eventually cost you more in medical bills than you could possibly save on your monthly food bill, paid traffic will always eventually catch up to you, wallet-wise, as your conversions suffer.

Far better to ‘eat right’ from the get-go, and achieve a truly healthy web-based business sooner rather than later.

Local internet marketing for small and medium businesses

Research shows that an astonishing thirty to thirty five percent of user-based search queries on the major search engines like Yahoo! and Google are targeted towards local businesses. The percentage is increasing as mobile computing has become very popular and people have also become more open to the idea of buying stuff online. Small and medium businesses comprise the long tail of advertisers. Search engine giants need small and medium advertisers and businesses to try out their associated products and services not only to gain a market stronghold but also to increase their reach and popularity in the developing markets across the world.

If a user is searching for a book store in a specific area, the local search feature embedded in all the search engines helps the user locate products and services in a defined radius. Earlier, this search was specified to locate a service a user was looking for within the driving distance (WDD) of the users’ location. Recently, Google launched the ‘Nearby’ search feature that generates results based on user-generated local search queries. So, if you’re an online marketer or business owner who chooses to promote their small or medium business at a local level, the online marketplace still remains a great spot to promote your website on. Online search is now integrated into iphones and mobiles using the Android platform through the ‘Near Me Now’ mobile application. Using the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is a great way of promoting local businesses. You can pitch your site using email marketing, blogs, online forums, videos, social networking sites, etc.

Local internet marketing can be more affective by establishing a good network of affiliated and referrals. An affiliate based system can enhance the visibility of your business and maximize your Return On Investment (ROI). Another way of promoting your business is by using the process of geo tagging. By linking your pages to Google Maps and defining your company’s or store’s location using either the latitude and longitude option or just the physical address, you can allow people to find your business when they type in local search queries. You can now go ‘glocal’ (Global and Local) using different Web 2.0 based products and software.

How good PPC (Pay Per Click) management services can help your business?

When a user types in a search query into the search box of the major search engine Google, along with the search results are displayed ads, above the search results and on the right side of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). While the search results are generated in response to the user-generated search query, the advertisements displayed contain the either the exact keyword or variations of the keywords that the search query contains. Each time a user clicks on a particular ad, the advertiser associated with that ad has to pay Google a fixed price for using that keyword. This amount is referred to as the ‘Cost Per Click’ (CPC) of the keyword and these advertisements are called Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns as the advertisers have to pay Google for each and every user click.

There are two networks that work in tandem along with the search engine to define the advertising and the publishing network. Advertisers who choose to use the SERPs to display their advertisements need to create a Google AdWords account to set up advertising campaigns. The quality of the ad text and the display URL that links the advertisement to the landing page of the website decide the popularity of the displayed advertisement. Online advertisers set up multiple campaigns and use a trial and error method to determine which campaign is performing well. Each ad group is assigned a set of chosen keywords and variations of those keywords. By choosing popular keywords that generate a lot of traffic online, relevant ads that are descriptive of the products and services being offered can be created.

Apart from the SERPs, advertisers can also choose specific websites to display their ads on. These websites belong to the network of publishers who have signed up for Google AdSense accounts that allow the AdWords ads to be displayed on their websites. The search engine and the chosen publisher websites provide an ample amount of real estate for Internet marketers and advertisers to display their ads. AdWords-integrated software helps track ad performance by registering the total number of clicks and the associated sales.