Web Ink Now

Dull news release

My friend Ted Demopoulos just sent a news release via PRWeb with this headline Google Crowns Author Ted Demopoulos Dullest Person. Love it, Ted!

DULL TED

Ted discovered a Google search on "dull person" reveals the number one hit is to his blog. Ouch.

As this release shows, news can be dull and still get noticed. Here I am happily pushing Ted’s viral marketing along (silly me).

What can you say about your organization in a news release? How will you get noticed in the online marketplace of ideas? How can you get people talking about you?

Web landing pages: Required for search engine marketing

Marketing with Web landing pages is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to get a message read by a target market, and it's a terrific tool for moving buyers through the sales cycle.

A landing page is simply a place to publish a targeted message for a particular demographic that you're trying to market to and they are used not only in search engine marketing but other Web marketing programs as well. For example, landing pages are ideal for describing special offers mentioned on your Web site or calls to action referenced in another content page (such as a blog or ebook).

Landing pages also work well for telling an organization's story to a particular target market, promoting a new product offering, or providing more information to people who link from your news releases. Marketing programs such as search engine optimization are—to borrow an idea from the classic sales cycle definition—designed to attract the prospect's attention. The landing page is where you take the next step; once you’ve got your audience’s attention, generate and develop customer interest and conviction, so that your sales team gets a warm lead ready to be worked to a closed sale or you can point people to an ecommerce page to buy your product right away.

Effective landing page copy is written from the buyers' perspective, not yours. Landing pages should provide additional information to searchers, information based on the offer or keyword they just clicked on. Many successful organizations have hundreds of landing pages, each optimized for a particular set of related search engine marketing terms.

Here is a very simple landing page I built for my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Another type of landing page is the free trial offer page such as this one from WebEx

Don't make the mistake of so many organizations by investing tons of money into a search engine advertising program (buying keywords) and then sending all the traffic to your homepage. Because the homepage needs to serve many audiences, there can never be enough information there for each search term. Instead, keep the following landing page guidelines in mind:

Make the landing page copy short and the graphics simple. The landing page is a place to deliver a simple message and drive your prospect to respond to your offer. Don’t try to do too much.

Create the page with your company's look, feel, and tone. A landing page is an extension of your company branding, so it must adopt the same voice, tone, and style as the rest of your site.

Write from the prospect’s point of view. Think carefully of who will be visiting the landing page, and write copy for that demographic. You want visitors to feel that the page speaks to their problems and that you have a solution for them.

A landing page is communications, not advertising. Landing pages are where you communicate valuable information. Advertising gets people to click to your landing page, but once a prospect is there, the landing page should focus on communicating the value of your offering to the buyer.

Make the call to action clear and easy to respond to. Make certain you provide a clear response mechanism for those people who want to go further. Make it easy to sign up or express interest or buy something.

Use multiple calls to action. You never know what offer will appeal to a specific person, so consider using more than one. In the business-to-business world, you might offer a white paper, a free trial, an ROI calculator, and a price quote all on the same landing page.

Only ask for necessary information. Don't use a sign-up form that requires your prospects to enter lots of data—people will abandon the form. Ask for the absolute minimum you can get away with—name and e-mail address only if you can, or perhaps even just e-mail. Requiring any additional information will reduce your response rates.

Don't forget to follow up! OK, you've got a great landing page with an effective call to action, and the leads are coming in. Great! Don’t drop the ball now. Make certain to follow up with each response as quickly as possible.

Are you unique on the Web? Why you must carve out your own search engine real estate

One rarely discussed but very important aspect of search engine marketing is choosing product and company names so that they will be easy to find on the Web via search engines.

When you consider the name of a new company, product, book, rock band, or other entity that people want to find on the Web, you typically go through a process of thinking up ideas, getting a sense of whether these names sounds right, and then perhaps seeing if you can copyright or trademark the ideas.

I would suggest adding one more vital step: Run a Web search to see if anything comes up for your proposed name; I urge you to drop the name idea if there are lots of similarly named competitors—even if the competition for the name is in a different industry. Your marketing goal should be that when someone enters the name of your book or band or product, the searcher immediately reaches information about it. For example, before I agree to a book title, I make certain those names are not being used in any other way on the Web. It was important for me to "own" my titles on the search engines: searching on Eyeball Wars, Cashing in with Content, and now The New Rules of Marketing and PR brings up only my books or reviews, articles, and discussions about them.

Many people ask me why I use my middle name in my professional endeavors, and I’ve had people accuse me of being pretentious. OK, maybe I am a bit pretentious, but that’s not why I use my middle name—Meerman. The reason is simple: there are so many other David Scotts out there. One David Scott walked on the moon as commander of Apollo 15. Another is a six-time Iron Man Triathlon Champion. Yet another is a U.S. Congressman from Georgia’s 13th district. Good company, all, but for clarity and search engine optimization purposes, I chose to be unique among my fellow David Scotts by becoming David Meerman Scott. On Google I am unique and have nearly 100,000 hits to my name.

The lesson here is that if you want to be found on the Web, you need a unique identity for yourself, your product, and your company to stand out from the crowd and rise to prominence on search engines. As you are thinking of names to use for marketing, test them out on the search engines first and try to carve out something that you alone can own.

Attention Marketers: Hire a Journalist!

On the speaking circuit when I talk about The New Rules of Marketing & PR (including thought leadership based marketing) and when I show examples from innovative organizations, nearly everyone in the audience enthusiastically embraces the ideas. Many people see the potential that thoughtful content has for their business and understand how different this approach is from the some old stuff they are doing (trying to convince the media to write about their widgets and buying expensive "on message" advertising).

But there is always a contingent of people whose eyes glaze over and who adopt a bit of a defensive posture. I always hope one of the skeptics will ask a question because they always voice the same general concern: "This all sounds good, David. But how can we actually create all this content you're talking about: e-books, white papers, blogs and the like? We have a small marketing department and very little budget."

The answer is quite simple: hire a journalist!

With the consolidation of the newspaper and magazine businesses, journalists have found it difficult to get and keep good jobs. Many experienced people are looking for work. And there are many more people coming out of journalism school than available entry-level jobs.

A journalist skillfully creates interesting stories about how an organization solves customer problems and then delivers those stories in the form of ebooks, white papers, content rich web pages, podcasts, and video. And consumers love it. How refreshing to read, listen to, and watch these products of journalistic expertise instead of the usual product come-ons that typical corporations produce.

Of course, this is a dire situation for many reporters and editors themselves, but a tremendous opportunity for corporate marketing and PR departments that need to find great talent to create effective content. Sure, this is a drastically different job description and some marketing VPs may have trouble getting their arms around this kind of hire. But I'm convinced based on the characteristics, skill sets, and work ethics of the journalists I know as well as the evidence from companies (such as IBM) that have already experimented with hiring journalists into the marketing department, that this approach is the right one.

Journalists themselves will need to think deeply about the opportunities that a corporate assignment might bring to their career. Many journalists have a strong emotional aversion to selling their skills to corporations. While some would rather wait tables than work for "the dark side," others may find the opportunity refreshing and maybe even an consider the possibility that a corporate stint as an enhancement to their career that would make them more marketable to magazines and newspapers in their future career.

So I ask my marketing and PR friends: Why not just go for it and hire a journalist?

Number 20 on Seth Godin's "Advice to Authors" list

Seth Godin has an uncanny ability of delivering the right information at the right time on his blog, in his books, and live.

In the late 1990s as I was struggling to understand the impact of Web marketing, he published his classic Permission Marketing. I immediately applied those ideas in my role as VP marketing at a reasonably large NASDAQ traded technology company.

Soon after, as the Internet bubble was wearing thin and I was in a professional dip, Seth published a remarkable little essay on his blog about the benefits of quitting your job. That was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment and before long I was a scared entrepreneur starting up my own business.

Then in August of 2006, just as I was beginning to write The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Godin posted his Advice for Authors. This is an awesome list of 19 things that authors must do.

Since Godin never steered my wrong, I followed all of the advice - ALL of it! And what a difference it has made. Godin's list is a terrific asset to anyone writing a book. If you are even considering writing a book you need to study this list because number 2 on the list requires 3 years of work.

But if I may be so bold, I will offer Godin another item to his list—number 20.

#20. Thank everyone who helped you. Writing a book takes a lot of time and a great deal of work. Many people help you along the way. And you must thank them. The list that I created and added to my acknowledgements to thank the bloggers I read and others who helped me is long (163 names). But the people on this list were critical to my process. And I want to thank each of you again because item 12 on Godin’s list says: "Blog mentions matter a lot."

Thanks to the people on my list, sixty people (that’s 60!) blogged about my new book in only one week! Wow. Thanks again to all of you. What an amazing thing.

Which brings me back to Seth Godin. He has a new book called The Dip. In a smart and small package, Godin's The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick)
lays out everything you need to understand about dips: How to identify the times that it's best to quit and move on and the ways to recognize when, if you just stick it out, you can become the best in the world.

Powerful stuff. But Godin's work always is.

Read The Dip. Then wait a few days and read it again. You'll appreciate the words of wisdom even more the second time.

New free ebook – The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders: How technology company CEOs create success (and why most fail)

Alert readers of this blog know that I am a huge ebook fan. Ebooks are a great way to deliver information directly to your buyers in a format that they want to read. Ebooks also have potential to go viral when people share it with others.

For the past few months, I've been working on an ebook with my colleagues at Pragmatic Marketing. Together with Craig Stull, Pragmatic Marketing CEO and Phil Myers, Pragmatic Marketing President, I co-authored "The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders: How technology company CEOs create success (and why most fail)."

Download a totally free copy, no registration is required.

We spoke with 30 CEOs of technology companies large and small, established and upstart for this project and learned some surprising things. We learned the secrets of market-driven leaders and also the fatal flaws that keep companies from making their goals.

"Our first product was a winner...but the rest stunk. What happened? Did our market dry up or did we just get stupid?"
-- An unnamed and currently out-of-work CEO

The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders is about why some products and companies fail, where others succeed. Based on surveys spanning 3,000 companies, 40,000 individuals and one-on-one interviews with 30 technology CEOs, we found seven consistent success factors related to company culture, management style, and product & marketing strategies that propelled the winners. And we also learned also the seven fatal flaws that derail market laggards.

The industry standard for technology product management and marketing, Pragmatic Marketing teaches a practical, market-driven approach to creating and delivering technology products. Founded in 1993, the company has trained more than 40,000 product management and marketing professionals, with more than 90% of alumni indicating the training as essential or very useful to their careers.

Please feel free to share this permanent link with your CEO, colleagues, investors, PR agency, and anyone else who might benefit from it.

The ebook is freely available to anybody with no registration requirement.

Mobile phones are the new lighters

Last night I took my teenage daughter to the Orpheum Theatre in Boston to see two of her favorite bands: Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace. We had a great time. This was one of the first concerts I've been to recently where the audience was in their teens and twenties. Alas, the bands that I choose to see attract forty-somethings like me.

Last night, half the crowd was holding up mobile phones during the show. Some were snapping photos. Some were shooting videos. And still others wanted to be part of the action by waving around a light source.

When I was my daughter's age in the late 1970s, I went to dozens of concerts. Some highlights: The Clash, The Ramones, The Grateful Dead (25 times), Talking Heads, The Romantics, Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Frank Zappa… I'll stop naming bands now because this is probably way too much information at this point.

Back in the day we all held up lighters to be a part of the action. Sometimes you'd see thousands of lighters.

Last night there were a thousand mobile phones (and a handful of lighters too).

At rock concerts, mobile phones are the new lighters.

I was thinking how many of the online marketing tactics we use today are really new ways of doing things that have been done for many years.

> Ebooks are the new white papers (but white papers are still important for many audiences)

> Google AdWords are the new Yellow Page ads (but in some local markets the Yellow Pages are still important)

> Wikis are the new print directories (Print directories? Do they still make them?)

> Blogs are the new guy on the barstool who is funny and smart and people listen to (anyone have time for the bar anymore?)

Are your marketing and PR tactics better suited to a previous generation?

Tube Your Mom

Yikes. What a curious subject line for a blog post.

Readers of this blog know that I love viral marketing. I've been known to dabble in a little viral marketing myself. Getting others to tell your story is a terrific way to get known.

Last week, the new file sharing service Tubes launched a campaign for Mothers Day called Tube Your Mom. The idea is that when you live far away from Mom, flowers don't cut it. And by now it's too late to send something via mail.

Are you stuck? No. Why not send photos to her online? Yeah, right. Mom can barely send an email, how is she going to figure out photo sharing!

Enter Tubes. The service makes it easy to send photos to Mom.

The viral campaign included the following components:
A very attractive microsite at tubeyourmom.com
A press release via MarketWire
A YouTube Video

They've gotten some nice pickup including a mention from Yahoo! Tech reporter Gina Hughes and several Diggs.

An excellent viral campaign with all the components.

Disclosure: I have done some strategy work for the parent company of Tubes.

Thank you for helping me to write The New Rules of Marketing & PR! (You are in the book)

Note: If you’ve been linked to in this post, I have an early copy of my book ready to send you. Please read below for details!

This is indeed one of the most unique blog posts I’ve ever done.

In August 2006, I announced that I was starting work on a new book and that I would blog snippets of the book throughout the process.

And I asked for help.

Hundreds of you jumped in to comment on my work, email me with thoughts and suggestions, meet for lunch, or you took the time to chat at a conference. And many others of you wrote great stuff on your own blogs that made me think.

Some people argued with me. (Some pissed me off).

But in the end, drawing on the ideas of many people has made my book much, much stronger.

In the blog world, when someone writes a great post, you link to it. It’s a virtual pat on the back and acknowledgement that the effort was worthwhile. And it recognizes the original idea.

Unfortunately in a hardcover book, that’s not possible. Well, not exactly. What I’ve done is turned the standard book acknowledgements on its ear a bit and have included everyone in this post in my book acknowledgements together with your blog URL.

Yes, I still did the standard thank you messages to my agent, my editor, my wife, and the other people associated with the book. But I also wanted to thank all of you. So, you’re in the book with my thanks.

So not only are you mentioned in the book but my publisher has kindly agreed to supply early copies of my book for each of you. If you’re in the list below, just send me an email to david (at) davidmeermanscott (dot) com with your postal mailing address and I will ship you a book.

Alas, you won’t get the spiffy hard cover with a dust jacket because it is still at the printer (you can order that on Amazon and get it in early June). Instead you will get an early paperback version ahead of the rest of the world.

Cool? Just send me an email!

And thanks for your part in creating my book.

Oh, and one more thing. I’ve met some cool bloggers since the manuscript was due to my publisher. Sorry you didn’t make it into the list. And if I forgot someone (which I’m sure I have), I’m really sorry. My bad.

So, in no particular order, a big thank you to:

Robert Scoble Scobleizer
Adele Revella Buyer Persona Blog
Joe Wikert Publishing 2020 blog
Steve Johnson
David McInnis
Mark Levy
David Hamm
Mike Levin
Colin Delaney epolitics
Steve Goldstein Alacrablog
Todd Van Hoosear
George L Smyth Eclectic Mix
Mark Effinger
Michelle Manafy EContent magazine
Kevin Rose Diggnation
Grub Street Writers
Dave Armon
Britton Manasco
Jordan Behan
Nettie Hartsock
John Havens
John Blossom ContentBlogger
Larry Schwartz Newstex
Steve Smith
Melanie Surplice
Nate Wilcox
Ian Wilker
Cody Baker
Dianna Huff
Brian Carroll
Ken Doctor
Jonathan Kranz
Barry Graubart
Steve O’Keefe
Ted Demopoulos
Debbie Weil
Paul Gillin
Matt Lohman
Seth Godin
Rob O’ Regan
Steve Rubel Micro Persuasion
Paul Gillin
Joan Stewart The Publicity Hound
Dave Schmidt Word Currency
Glenn Nicholas Small Business Inspiration
Mac McIntosh B2B Sales Lead Expert
Jill Konrath Selling to Big Companies
Guy Kawasaki How to Change the World
Court Bovée and John Thill Business Communication Headline News
Grant D. Griffiths Kansas Family Law Blog
Robin Crumby The Melcrum Blog
Jim Peake My Success Gateway
Eli Singer Refreshing the Daily Grind
Duane Brown Imagination+Innovation
Scott Monty The Social Media Marketing Blog
Ian Lamont
Blog Campaigning
Rich at Copywrite Ink
John Lustina SEO Speedwagon
Adam Tinworth OneMan+HisBlog
Dave Schmidt Word Currency
Scott Clark Finding the Sweet Spot
Amanda Chapel Strumpette
Jennifer Veitenheimer reinventjen
Morty Schiller Wordrider
Matthias Hoffmann the power of news
Erin Caldwell’s PRblog
Ferrell Kramer Talking Communications
Anita Campbell Selling to Small Businesses
Rugjeff
Karl Ribas’ Search Engine Marketing Blog
Tony D. Baker Advanced Marketing Techniques
Tom Pick The WebMarketCentral Blog
Tina Lang-Stuart
Bryan Eisenberg Jeffrey Eisenberg Robert Gorell and the rest of the team at Grok Dot Com
Michele Miller WonderBranding
Publicity Ship Blog
The Media Slut
Brad Shorr Word Sell
Sasha Where Business Meets the Web
Ellee Seymour ProActivePR
Chris Kenton The Marketers’ Consortium
Paul Young Product Beautiful
By Ron Miller
Michael Morton
James D. Brausch
Janet Meiners Newspapergrl
Andrew B. Smith The New View From Object Towers
Cristian Mezei SeoPedia
Jim Nail Cymfony’s influence 2.0
Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff The Blog Squad
Forward Blog
Ben Argov
Zane Safrit Duct Tape Marketing—Business Life
Will McInnes Online Marketing Guide
Robbin Steif LunaMetrics
Mike Boss
Marc Gunn Music Promo Blog
Nancy E. Schwartz Getting Attention
Kami Watson Huyse Communications Overtones
Todd Defren PR Squared
Michael Stelzner Writing White Papers
Dee Rambeau Adventures in Business Communications
Glenn Fannick Read Between the Mines
Owen Lystrup Into PR
Morgan McLintic
Mark Batterson Evotional
Jay Coffelt
John Richardson
Robin Good MasterNewMedia
Shel Israel Naked Conversations
Robert J. Ricci Son-of-a-Pitch
Mike Sigers Simplenomics
Dan Greenfield Bernaisesource
Brian Clark copyblogger
Lee Odden TopRank Online Marketing Blog
David Weinberger
Carson McComas
The FutureLab blog
John Bradley Jackson Be First Best or Different
Wired PR Works by Barbara Rozgonyi
Mark Goren Transmission
John Wall Ronin Marketer
MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
John Koetsier bizhack
Steve Kayser Squareballs Entertainment
James Robertson's Smalltalk Blog
Linas Simonis
Dale Wolf The Perfect Customer Experience
Eric Mattson Marketing Monger
Scott Sehlhorst Tyner Blain
Seeds of Growth blog
Hugo E. Martin
David Phillips leverwealth
Terry Affiliate Marketing Blog
Gavin Heaton Servant of Chaos
Mark White Better Business Blogging
Eric Eggertson Common Sense PR
Michelle Golden Golden Practices
Liz Strauss
Tony Valle Small Business Radio
Chris Heuer’s Idea Engine
David Evans The Progress Bar
Todd Andrlik The Power to Connect
The New PR Wiki
NewPR
Pelle Braendgaard Stake Ventures
Lisa Banks Search Engine Optimization Eblog
Chris Brown Branding & Marketing
Graeme Thickins Tech-Surf-Blog
Ardath Albee Marketing Interactions
Lauren Vargas Communicators Anonymous
Lori Smart Lemming
Dane Morgan
Jason Leister Computer Super Guy
Bill Trippe
Jason Eiseman Jason the Content Librarian
Reuben Steiger Millions of Us
Taran Rampersad Know Prose
John Richardson Success Begins Today
Valentin Pertsiya Brand Aid
Bill Belew Rising Sun of Nihon
Joe Beaulaurier An Ongoing Press Release
David Koopmans Business of Marketing and Branding
Chris Anderson The Long Tail
Roger C. Parker Design to Sell

Optimizing Social Networking sites as a tool to reach your buyers

Social Networking sites are an excellent way to deliver information to people who might want to do business with your organization. Particularly if you use a thought leadership based approach, sites like MySpace, Squidoo, and the other social networking sites reaches your buyers and helps you to achieve your goals.

Although social networking sites certainly aren't advertising, you can still use the sites to lead people into your buying process. For example, The Alternate Routes' MySpace page has links to the band's latest album, touring schedule, and online ticket purchasing tools; Volkswagen's Miss Helga MySpace page links to the automaker's other sites; Vince Ciulla’s Squidoo page links to his extensive set of content pages; and John Edwards links to a place where visitors can make online donations from his MySpace page.

OPTIMIZING SOCIAL NETWORKING PAGES

Here are some ideas to get the most out of using social networking sites for marketing:

> Target a specific audience. Create a page that reaches an audience that is important to your organization. It is usually better to be thinking a small niche market to target (for example, people who want to do their own car repairs but don't know how to discover what’s wrong).

> Be a thought leader. Provide valuable and interesting information that people want to check out. It is better to show your expertise in a market or a buyer's problems than to blather on about your product.

> Be authentic and transparent. Don't try to impersonate someone else. It is sleazy, and if you get caught you can do irreparable harm to your company’s reputation. If your mother would say it is wrong, it probably is.

> Create lots of links. Link to your own sites and blog, and those of others in your industry and network. Everybody loves links—it makes the Web what it is. You should certainly ink to your own stuff from social networking site (like your blog), but also link to other people’s sites and content in your own market.

> Encourage people to contact you. Make it easy for people to reach you online, and be sure to follow up personally on your fan mail.

> Participate. Create groups and participate in online discussions. Become an online leader and organizer.

> Make it easy to find you. Tag your page and add your page into the subject directories. Encourage others to bookmark your page with del.icio.us and DIGG.

> Experiment. These sites are great because you can try new things. If it isn't working, tweak it. Or abandon the effort and try something new.

And remember, there is no such thing as an "expert" in marketing using social networking—we're all learning as we go!

I want to learn from you too. Let me know if you're doing something cool or that is working for you.