The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

There are many things that can kill your reputation online, but one of the things that will kill it fastest is getting caught buying fake reviews. That’s true whether we are talking about Yelp reviews of your business, reviews of your product on Amazon, or reviews on Google Places. Fake reviews are a reputation killer.

Don’t believe it? See what happened to Samsung.

The sad part about this is Samsung has a strong reputation for making quality products. So why would anyone associated with the company feel the need to post fake reviews of its products? They should be able to get plenty of positive reviews for their products.

Whatever genius came up with this idea should be fired. They should be replaced by someone who can encourage their customers to post positive reviews instead. For instance, run an in-store promotion where you give away a product by random drawing that includes anyone who has posted a review of Samsung’s products. That way, you encourage people to post reviews and reward them for doing so.

It is important to protect your online reputation. The best way to do that is to build great products, provide excellent customer service, and don’t do anything stupid.

The reason clients outsource their search engine optimization is because they don’t have the time to commit to it or they don’t have the expertise necessary to create a successful SEO campaign. Both of those are understandable. However, you still need to be involved.

Some clients have the attitude that the SEO professional will take care of all of the details. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But the reality is, it’s your business. No SEO in the world is going to be an expert in every niche every one of their clients is a part of. You still need to be involved in the SEO process.

Here are 4 ways that clients often sabotage their own SEO campaigns.

1. The client isn’t committed to the campaign – This typically happens in large organizations where a marketing professional hires an outside SEO firm but upper management, who have no knowledge or experience with SEO and don’t want it, have not been sold on the idea. This usually leads to infighting. This can often be a distraction to your SEO firm. Make sure everyone on your team is sold out to your SEO campaign before you start it.
2. The client is not involved in the process - Don’t just hand over your SEO to your consultant and forget about it. Your input is necessary for keyword selection and strategy implementation.
3. The client doesn’t keep up their end of the bargain – Whether it comes to paying for services or conducting experiments, testing, or research, if you tell your SEO consulting firm that you will do something, then you should do it. After all, you’d expect the same from them.
4. The client doesn’t implement changes fast enough – If you agree to perform some of the tasks related to your SEO, then be sure to do it. Your SEO firm may be relying on you to complete certain tasks before they can do their jobs. If you don’t implement the necessary changes when you say you will or install particular software on time, then you could be hurting your own marketing efforts.

SEO is getting more and more technical and difficult to implement, not to mention costly. Don’t sabotage your company’s SEO efforts with any of these mistakes.

Link diversity is an important SEO concept that is still misunderstood in a lot of ways. What it involves is how Google (and Bing) count your inbound links. It’s not enough to have those links. You must work hard to make your link graph look natural, and link diversity is the way to do that.

Here are 5 ways that link diversity is important:

1. Link sources – Google looks at how many links you have, but that’s of secondary importance. The search engines are also concerned with how many domains you get your links from. Instead of going after 10,000 links from one domain, try to get links from as many domains as possible. Spread your inbound links out from around the Web.
2. Anchor text – Don’t make your link anchor text all the same. Vary your anchor text and use many different keyword and non-keyword variations.
3. Domain age – Links from older domains are more valuable than links from newer sites, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get links from newer sites. You should. Eventually, those sites will have age going in their favor too.
4. Type of link – Text links are the best links, but image links provide value too. Get links from a variety of media, including videos, infographics, and whatever else is available.
5. Niche variation – You’ve likely heard that links from websites in the same niche have higher value. That’s true. Still, you can get links from outside your niche if the content is appropriate. For instance, if you serve the automotive market and you leave a blog comment on a blog that is about music technology because a particular blog post was about car radios, that would be appropriate – and perfectly OK.

Link diversity is one of the most important concepts in link building. Pay careful attention to all of these factors.

No matter what kind of business you are running, you’ll have to create content, but there are different types of content and each type has a different purpose. Here are 5 different kinds of content you should concern yourself with when planning your content marketing strategy.

1. Foundational content – This is content that is foundational to your website and business. It includes your home page, About page, and landing pages. Foundational content is necessary content that gives potential customers an idea about who you are and what you do.
2. Community-building content – This content is social. It can be on your site or off site, but its purpose is to engage with your audience. It usually involves your blog, but it can be wholly contained on your social media outposts as well.
3. Promotional content – Promotional content should be kept to a minimum. Its sole purpose is to promote, such as a notice of an upcoming event or a book you’ve published.
4. Informational content – This content is strictly to inform your audience about a particular topic. It can be a newsletter article, a free download, a white paper, or even a web page or blog post, but it’s strictly for informational purposes.
5. Fleeting content – I call this “fleeting” content because it typically is short lived. That is, it has no long-term appeal. Certain types of blog posts typically fall into this category, but guest articles can too. They address topics that are hot right now but may not be hot next year. Like promotional content, you want to keep this content to a minimum, but it can be good marketing to include it.

There are other types of content, but these are the types you’ll encounter most often. Design your content marketing strategy around them.

I’m going to assume for the purpose of this blog post that you already have a website, you’ve done the right keyword research for your online marketing plan, and you have already established a marketing plan and budget. You are ready to begin the implementation phase. How should you start your blog?

I’d recommend with starting an editorial calendar. Begin your calendar with the first day of next month. You want to give yourself a little lead time.

Plan to post two days a week the first month. Pick the days and put them on your calendar. For each blog post on the calendar, pick a keyword from your list and write a blog post for that day. Write the entire first month’s blog posts and then schedule them to post on the appropriate days. WordPress makes this easy.

During that first month, you want to monitor your analytics. How much traffic are you getting, where is it coming from, and how long are people staying on your site?

Also, each time one of your blog posts goes live, share it to social media.

During that first publishing month you’ll want to plan the next month’s posts. It’s a good idea to have your publishing schedule completed before the 15th of the previous month. This time, plan to post three days a week. Write your posts and pre-schedule them. Monitor analytics.

Before the halfway mark of the second publishing month, have your posts for the third month planned. This time, plan to post five days a week. If you are a service business open Monday through Friday, post on those days. If you are open on weekends, post on your five busiest days, or the days that make the most sense for your business.

This is your first three months of posting. Continue sharing your blog posts on social media and monitor your analytics.

Mike Blumenthal recently experienced a face brownout with Google. Ouch! How painful.

Don’t worry. Even though it could happen to you, it’s only virtually painful. No physical pain.

What happened is, Google didn’t like his author photo. So he changed it.

The thing that strikes me about this is, Google is able to identify an author by their photo, which is pretty amazing. And another thing, Google arbitrarily decides it doesn’t like certain photos and that becomes your problem. Welcome to the world of Google.

If you find your photo not showing up in Google search results alongside your articles, especially when it did before, then do as Mike Blumenthal did and change your photo. If that new photo starts showing up in search results, then you know the problem was the photo. If it doesn’t, then it’s a problem you can’t fix, evidently.

Here’s a little advice about author photos. When possible, use full face photos. I think Google likes those better.

At any rate, don’t use photos where your image is obscured or where only half of your face shows (I know, Seth Godin does it – but, he’s been doing it for forever and a day).

You want to make it easy for Google to associate your name with your image. That’s the main thing. And there’s even a fancy name it – FaceRank.

Guest blogging has been quite popular for a couple of years now, but it isn’t for everyone. Whether or not you should accept guest bloggers for your blog depends on a number of factors.

First, what are the benefits of having guest bloggers?

Well, one benefit is you get to take a break from blogging while still providing your readers with quality content. Another benefit is, if you get a good guest blogger, then you’ll attract that person’s audience to your blog, picking up traffic you might not otherwise gain access to. Those are pretty good benefits.

However, there are some drawbacks. You’ll have to sift through quite a bit of low quality content to get to the good stuff. You’ll have to deal with e-mail spam from people pitching a blog idea who have no idea what your blog is about and probably don’t even know your name. Don’t waste your time responding to those e-mails. Instead, should you decide to accept guest bloggers, create a set of guidelines for them to follow and enforce them religiously.

You may want to keep the content on your blog entirely your own. That’s OK. It’s your blog. You are perfectly within your rights to do that.

It’s a matter of choice. There are pros and cons to accepting guest bloggers. Do what’s right for your business.

Testing is one of the most important aspects of creating new web design. If you have a current website and think you can improve upon it, how shall you go about it? You should test new designs against your old design and see which one performs better.

There are two types of website testing that are popular and recognized by most industry experts: A/B testing and multivariate testing. Which one is right for you?

In general, it depends. However, I think A/B testing is appropriate for most circumstances.

A/B testing is where you take one component of your web page and you test it against a new version of it. For instance, you take your page headline and tweak it slightly then present an A/B test to see which one users like the most. The A version is usually the current web page published. The B version is the one with the new headline. You don’t test any other components on the page.

Multivariate testing allows you to test multiple components at the same time. You can add a new headline, move your lead photo from the right to the left side of the page, and make your sidebar wide and narrow.

Testing multiple variables at the same time can give you an idea about different versions of your page, but it won’t necessarily tell you which variables users are attracted to. In the above scenario, for instance, users might like version B of your web page more than version A, but do they like it because of the headline, the image or the sidebar? All you can is they like the combination of elements better.

This is why I recommend A/B testing over the multivariate testing most of the time. Still, it’s OK to use multivariate testing because the end result is a better website that visitors love.

One of the most successful – if not the most successful – online business models is called a hub-and-spoke model. Think of it as like a bicycle wheel. There’s a hub and there are spokes that connect the hub to the actual wheel. Without both of these two components, the wheel will not do its job – even though neither component is the actual wheel.

So now that you have the visual, what is the hub and what is the spoke?

Your hub is the center of all of your marketing efforts online. It’s the place where you plan, strategize and implement your online marketing plan.

In essence, it’s your website. Your website should include your blog.

The reason you don’t want just a website without a blog is because your website is static. You want to update it on a regular basis to keep the search engine spiders coming back and crawling it on a regular basis. Fresh regular content is one of the most important things you need on your website.

So now, onto the spokes. Your spokes are the outlying bases that you use to drive traffic back to the hub. These could be popular forums in your niche, directories, or social media websites. It could also include other blogs. The key is to find locations around the Web where your target audience is hanging out. Then you go there and hang out too. Create content they will like, engage their imaginations, and then slowly siphon the traffic and direct it to your hub.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It’s much harder than it sounds, but it’s necessary. This is one of the most successful content marketing plans on the Net. Try it.

It seems the whole world is going ga-ga over social media. It’s practically all you hear about nowadays. People are flocking to the social media sites to establish a presence and build their brands. Often, when they get there they realize it is more work than they thought it was going to be. Then they get the “what next?” glaze in their eyes.

Social media is important. But far more important than social media is the voice behind it. In a word, it’s authority.

Think about the sources where you receive your daily news. Why do you like them? Are you more interested in CNN or Fox News? Why? Chances are, you get your news from the sources you select because you like their reputation as news sources. You consider them authorities.

Readers in every niche look at online content the same way. They want to get their information from a credible authority.

But how do you build authority? How do you establish yourself as a voice of authority in your niche? The surest way to become a respected and recognized authority on any topic is to produce regular material on your subject that is respected. You can get your content recognized by a large number of people interested in the topic, by a few respected leaders in your niche, or a combination of the two.

How you build authority is up to you. The fact that you need to become an authority is getting more and more evident every day. When it happens, social media will be there to help reap the rewards.

We’ve talked about Google+ Hangouts before, and we’ve talked about YouTube marketing too. But did you know you can integrate these two features to make them both more powerful?

Google+ Hangouts is like Skype. You can host a web conference with up to 10 people (with Skype, it’s 25). However, Google+ Hangouts has some additional features that Skype can’t touch.

For instance, you can share documents with the other webinar participants in real time for free. You can share your computer screen and use Google Drive to share your documents. You can also click the “ON-AIR” button once your Google+ Hangout is underway and record your Hangout live. Let’s see you do that with Skype!

But it doesn’t stop there. You can easily share your Google+ Hangout with all your friends on YouTube. That makes your webinar available to your YouTube channel’s followers and the billions of YouTube users who search for videos on a daily basis.

Once your web conference on Google+ Hangouts is shared on YouTube, you can then share it on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social media site you are a member of.

Google+ Hangouts is a free feature that is a part of Google+. It’s a powerful business tool for video marketing.

Chances are, if you’ve been online for any period of time and have been reading SEO blogs, then you’ve probably heard that press releases are a great way to build links back to your website and garner a little SEO from them. Exercise caution. This could be bad advice.

Think about it. Google slapped article directories hard with its Panda update. They essentially killed some of the top article directories on the web. Some of them managed to bounce back.

Press release distribution websites are just like article directories. They are directories for press releases.

While I believe press releases are important tools for getting publicity for your business, I think you’re better off developing a list of media that you send your press releases to directly. You can upload your press releases to press release distribution websites in addition to your own media and PR list. However, don’t expect much.

Those press release distribution websites have become saturated with overly optimized press releases that do little to inform journalists about anything.

You may find a few journalists in any industry that scour these sites for news stories, but my bet is that most of them rely on press releases sent directly to them. Inbound links from press releases might help a little, but I wouldn’t use them as a primary SEO tactic.

Marketing your brand through YouTube is one of the most powerful media for marketing on the Internet, but what is the true value? Is it traffic? Rankings? Brand reputation?

The truth is, most of the benefit you get from marketing your videos through YouTube is with brand management, not traffic or rankings.

The Truth About YouTube Traffic

In the FAQ section of this lengthy blog post, the author gives an example of a YouTube video marketer who showed over 400,000 views on their YouTube videos in December 2012 but received only 19 referrals to their website as a result of those videos.

If that doesn’t shock you, it should.

The amount of traffic you can expect from your YouTube videos is relatively low. Why? Because people don’t go to YouTube to find videos that promote websites. They go there to find a video to watch for entertainment or informational purposes.

YouTube And Search Rankings

If you upload videos to YouTube hoping to increase your website’s search engine rankings, you’ll be disappointed. You could see a rise in your brand’s search rankings, but it will likely be your YouTube channel – especially if you upload a lot of videos and if you share them on your social media accounts or embed them on your website.

Video embeds from YouTube help YouTube’s rankings, not the site on which videos are embedded.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you want more rankings for your brand name, YouTube could be a place for you to make that happen. Just know that you’ll be ranking your YouTube channel, not your website.

YouTube And Branding

Your best bet for using YouTube for marketing purposes is to upload videos that have a strong branding message to them. Try to make your videos informative and entertaining. If you can do both and still get your brand in front of your audience, then you’ll be golden. That’s what YouTube is all about.

According to Constant Contact, 74% of all social media users are using #hashtags. That’s interesting because at last count, Facebook hadn’t incorporated hashtags – yet.

They’re working on it, though.

So, what is a hashtag and how can you use it for business?

Simply put, a hashtag is a word or phrase accompanied by a preceding # symbol that is often used to track a conversation. For instance, if you want to know what people are saying about hashtags on social media, you can go to Twitter or Google+ and search for #hashtags. You can even subscribe to the threads to follow the conversation more easily.

As a business, you can enter conversations where hashtags already exist or create your own hashtags. For instance, the popular micro-job site Fiverr has the hashtag #Fiverr on Twitter.

This is another way to optimize your social media posts. By creating hashtags around popular topics related to your niche you can pull in people who may not already be following you on the social media sites where you have a presence. Be sure, however, that you use the hashtags appropriately. Don’t use them to spam people with related topics. That’s a sure way to tick people off and get a bad reputation.

Hashtags are powerful social media tools if you use them correctly. They’re easy to implement and could lead to some big boosts in your business.

If you’ve been writing your company blog for a while and you’re not sure if you are reaching your audience – maybe the engagement is low, you’re not getting a lot of comments, or there’s little interaction with your audience – then try incorporating these 5 content marketing ideas into your blog. Measure your efforts to see how audience engagement on your blog is improved after you implement these ideas.

1. Invite guest bloggers – Guest bloggers can often add a different flavor to your blog and encourage new comments. However, a guest blogging program is more effective if you set reasonable guidelines for your guest bloggers. Among those should be included a requirement to respond to comments and keep readers talking beyond the blog post.
2. Content curation – Look for opportunities to incorporate content created by others on their blogs or through other online media into your blog. This can as simple as creating resource posts with links to pages online that could be helpful to your audience.
3. Include multimedia content – Every now and then, add a slideshow or a video to your blog.
4. Ask open ended questions – Get people talking on your blog by ending your blog posts with requests for feedback. Use open ended questions whenever possible. You can also incorporate surveys.
5. Sync your posts with off-site content – Become a guest blogger on another blog in your niche. Sync your guest posts with a more in-depth post on your own blog. Drive traffic back to your blog and engage your readers with thought-provoking content and open ended questions.

Content marketing requires a creative approach. You can increase your blog engagement, but it will require some planning and thinking outside the proverbial box.

What’s it mean that Amazon has acquired the social networking site for readers, Goodreads?

One thing it could mean for authors, especially indie authors, is that more opportunities for marketing themselves to Kindle owners could arise. Cynthia Boris does a good job of pointing out that both the Amazon press release and the Goodreads press release mention the Kindle. That might mean a Goodreads Kindle app is on the way.

If that is the case, then that will make social networking via Goodreads more accessible to Kindle owners. It might also mean more Goodreads users overall.

The reason that is good news for Kindle owners and authors is because a lot of indie authors publish e-books as opposed to print books. It’s easy to do, costs much less, and the potential for return on investment is much greater. If Amazon can create a way to bring indie authors and readers closer together in their reading devices, that could mean more e-book sales.

Of course, there are other ways this could impact e-book sales. There could be ways for Amazon to influence the use of Goodreads from inside of the books on Kindle devices. That would certainly benefit authors and readers. Social networking while reading a book, being able to ask questions and have conversations about specific passages within a book, and interact with authors and other readers within the book where those comments can only be read by people who have purchased the book? Those would be really powerful benefits.

If you are an author, this might be good for you. Anything that leads to better social media marketing is a good thing.

There’s a good chance you’ve seen “(not provided)” somewhere in your analytics. If you have, then you know it’s associated with your targeted keyword. Google, somewhere along the line, decided to fight keyword spam in its indexes by not providing the metrics that search marketers use to create it. That’s a win for Google.

But a win for Google doesn’t necessarily mean a loss for you. It just means you need to get a little more creative in your analysis.

While Google has closed off a lot of information that you can ascertain from your keyword metrics, one thing they did not close off was metrics associated with your landing pages. Most search marketers associated their landing pages with one or two keywords. If you can measure how much traffic you’ve gained for your landing pages, then you can unwittingly measure how much you’ve gained for the associated keywords.

Granted, it’s a little crafty, but it’s a necessary level of analytical craftiness in this post-Panda world.

Let’s break it down:

• You have landing pages A, B, and C
• Landing page A is optimized for keyword 1
• Landing page B is optimized for keywords 2 and 3
• Landing page C is optimized for keywords 1 and 4

If your analytics tells you that you got 10,000 unique visits for landing page A, 15,000 unique visitors for landing page B, and 25,000 unique visits for landing page C, then your math problem is: How do these numbers translate into metrics for the associated keywords?

Well, you know you got at least 10,000 UVs for keyword 1. But there’s an X factor. Landing page C also uses keyword 1 and got 25,000 UVs. You can figure this out in one of two ways:

• You can split the UV down the middle for your keywords, giving 12,500 of them to keyword 1
• Or you can look at your last known traffic numbers for the associated keywords and split the metric according to that percentage. For example, if your last known traffic measurement for keyword 1 was 15,000 and your last known traffic measurement for keyword 4 was 3,000, then the numbers represent a 5:1 ratio toward keyword 1. What that means is you’ll take your 25,000 UV and divide it by 5. Give 5,000 UV to keyword 4 and the rest to keyword 1.

Doing it this way will yield a 22,500 UV metric for keyword 1 under the first scenario and a 30,000 UV metric for keyword 1 under the second scenario. Is it perfect? No. But it can give you a sense of your relative traffic for each keyword, and it can give you a much better picture than simply blind guessing.

SEO services can be either useless or powerful. Some services that used to be very good services are now no longer worth spending a dime on. One of those is search engine submission services.

I still see companies offering this service on their website and, quite frankly, I’m perplexed. It makes me scratch my head to think there are people who buy these services, but I’m sure some people do or the SEO companies offering them wouldn’t have them in their inventory. So why am I against search engine submission services?

For one thing, there are really only two search engines left you should even bother worrying about. And both of them are capable of finding your website on their own.

All you have to do to ensure Google and Bing crawl your website and index it is to create a few inbound links and to submit a sitemap. You can build the necessary inbound links (it only takes one) by sharing a few pages on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Another thing you can do is write a few guest blog posts for websites in your niche.

As long as you build a few inbound links to your website, you don’t need submit to search engine services. But you should add a sitemap to your websites.

A sitemap will give the search engines a directory of pages on your site and make it easier to crawl. Don’t both with search engine submission services.

Surveys can provide great feedback for your business. They’re not hard to construct and don’t cost must to produce. All they really cost is your time, or the time of someone on your team, to think of questions to ask and promote the survey to your audience.

With online surveys, you can get results in real time. By taking results online, you can measure them as people fill out your survey. That’s a big plus. Especially if you want data fast.

A survey can also help you decide on a new direction or offering for your customers. If you have two or three or four different ways you can roll out a new product, just ask your customers what they prefer. You can learn a lot by asking the right questions and potentially save your company a lot of money by avoiding a costly mistake.

Surveys also get your customers talking. If you ask at least one open-ended question on your survey, you’ll be surprised at the feedback you can get.

When you do create a survey and ask your audience to help you out, offer some sort of incentive for taking the time to give you feedback. It can be a free white paper, a discount coupon, or anything of value. It lets your survey respondents know you value their input and helps you to maintain contact with them in the future. If your incentive requires an e-mail address for delivery, you get the contact information as well.

That’s real effective internet marketing.

If you submit press releases for online distribution, you want them to be effective. An effective press release contains at least six elements. These include:

1. Headline – Just like a news story has a headline, your press release must have a headline. Your headline should grab your reader’s attention, state succinctly what the story is all about, and be well optimized for search.
2. Lead paragraph – The lead paragraph should contain the bare essentials of your news story: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.
3. Body content – If you want your press release to be effective, it should be structured the same way a journalist would structure a news story. That’s typically an inverted pyramid structure where the most important information is near the top and you work through to the least important information at the bottom.
4. Quote – Don’t ever send out a press release without at least one quote. The quote should come from a credible source, be realistic-sounding, and offer something new or interesting the rest of the press release content doesn’t cover.
5. Contact information – Your contact information and your public relations team’s contact information should be on your press release.
6. Search engine optimization – The only difference between a traditional press release and an online press release is that your online press release must be optimized for search. Otherwise, what’s the point?