When plagiarism is GOOD!

This post has been a long time coming - I first promised it in February, but it is an important one for anyone wanting to promote their web site for more traffic, visitors and sales.

The premise is this - you want people to plagiarise your web site. OK its not strictly plagiarism, but it looks like it to many people, and here's the difference. When you plagiarise someone it involves using their material (text, copyrighted works) without their permission, and passing it off as your own. This is a bad and dishonest thing. On the web you can plagiarise if you want, and this is sometimes referred to as "scraping": i.e. "someone has scraped content from my site". However you can also use people's content in a legitimate way.

How this works is that you see some text that you would like to use, comment on, add something to, or that you value for whatever reason. You may take this text, and use it on your blog or web site. The only condition is that while doing so you like back to the original source, thereby giving credit to the author. This becomes the equivalent of an academic citation, rather than just down and dirty plagiarism. OK so its not really plagiarism at all. You may chose to republish their work as is, add comments to it, criticise it (be polite and not personal), or use it in another way, but you must give credit to the author, in the form of a "back link" to their site, where the words were originally published.

So Who Cares about this?
Well you should.

In the first instance this allows you to legitimately use others content in your own site, and if its good relevant stuff and you are busy, its a good way of giving your readers valuable information and developing the relationship with a minimum of effort. Having said that, original content is really better, if you have time this week to make a post. When you don't have the time, re-publish. This is effectively the same as news media using syndicated content from agencies like Reuters - which we happily consume in the papers and on television every day.

However even more important is this, and this is the crux of the article.

I'll shout this one out....
IF YOU CAN CREATE CONTENT GOOD ENOUGH THAT IT PERSUADES OTHERS TO USE AND LINK TO IT, THEN YOU WILL BE DEVELOPING THE NUMBER OF LINKS TO YOUR SITE, AS WELL AS ITS REPUTATION AND VISITOR TRAFFIC.

And the point of links to your site is: they are gold dust. They tell search engines that your site is valuable, they bring visitors and "Page Rank" to your site. They raise your site up in the search engine lists, they bring your site more well targeted visitors, and in the final analysis, those visitors are your opportunity to make money on the web. Another term for content that persuades others to link to it is "Link Bait", and its a concept of vital importance to any web marketer.

So how do you persuade others to plagiarise (OK cite) or otherwise reuse your content? Well firstly, it has to be good.
And what do we mean by good? Well it can be anything that other people want to link to.

So here are some examples of things so good that they can be used to generate inbound links.

1. Interesting and informative comment.
2. Add new value or information for your readers.
3. Comment or respond to others web sites in your own market place.
4. Humour - jokes can go round the world.
5. Controversy - you may make a criticism (be careful with this one), or talk on a point of topical interest.
6. Video. A video posted on your site and You Tube can be linked to from all over the web - if its link-worthy.
7. Pod casting - a voice recording of interest to your market can attract incoming links.
8. Blog Posts. Many bloggers link to other blogs that they like and value.
9. Software. Many sites offer free downloads of simple software products. If you have the capacity to build software then great, otherwise don't worry. One of the highest ranked sites in the world is adobe.com - why, because every site that uses PDF files provides a link to them along the lines of "click here to get Adobe PDF reader". The perfect online marketing campaign.
10. Post a story from your blog onto Digg, del.icio.us, stumble, or any of the other tagging sites, in the hope that other readers will value your content, link to it, and increase the number of links back to you.
    
11. See this article I blogged recently about the power of good content, and particularly the genius link building campaign of Cameron Olthuis.
    

For other ideas about link-baiting, and some ideas which you may be able to put into practice, see this article by Jim Westergren. (See we're doing it again: he writes it, its good, I like it, I link to it, I provide you with some additional value, you receive that value, you say "thanks Pete, thanks Jim", you put it into practice, your web site gets more visitors. Everyone wins. Plagiarism can be good!)

So next time you look at my blog and see I have used someone else's content on a busy day, remember - its OK to use it if you don't have time to write your own. When I linked to the article I sent traffic and page rank to the site of the author. When the author wrote his or her article, that is exactly what he / she was hoping I would do.

The No.1 online Risk to your business - perhaps?

One of the most common problems that we experience with small and medium sized businesses is a self inflicted one - the problem associated with having lost every password that is required to run their business.

Lets get this straight, we are now in the internet age, the internet is now the prime marketing tool for business, and many of us still don't actually record the information that gets us into our key internet places.

Here is an all to common example of the problem....

Prospective Client: "Hi Pete, please could you sort out our web site. It was built by Fred Flintstone as a favour 3 years ago, but he's now away working on Mars, can you do some optimisation on the site to get some visitor traffic built up, and make it look a bit more modern at the same time? Also all my emails have broken so while you're at it could you come round and sort them out."

Me: "Great, love to, can you send me an email with all of the following please?
1. The FTP address, user name and password which will allow me to get into the site and make some changes.
2. (or) Log in information for your domain name registrant so we can renew it, point it to some new hosting space etc.
3. Log in information for your broken emails, so we can get them fixed up and working again." ( I always talk in numbers and bullet points now)

Prospective Client: "Oh I can't remember what those are, the person that set it up is quite difficult to find these days, hasn't returned our calls for 12 months. Can you find a way around this?"

Me: (Sounds of hair coming out), etc. etc.

Now if this has happened to you recently please don't take this personally, it happens to SO MANY people, hence the reason for this post. This is like going to your cashpoint to withdraw money but without your card or your PIN number.

So the answer is easy - please really do record everything in a safe place!

Now what about the security risk - what if someone finds it? Well....

1. They have to be looking
2. They have to care enough to want to
3. Do keep your information in a safe place, this should be as easy to keep safe as your house keys, for example.
4. Consider using some sort of basic personal encryption (No not like enigma!) to make it difficult for others to understand what its about.
5. If its a computer file then keep a second copy elsewhere, as you will become increasingly dependent on it.
6. The banks do recommend that you just entrust your PIN numbers to memory. This is of course very good advice, particularly if you just have one or two PIN numbers, but in the internet age you now need log in information for every web site you're likely to visit, every bank , credit card, utility bill, online forum, email account, web site, and so on. It is simply no longer practical to entrust all these to memory - you'd have to be Albert Einstein to do it successfully. And most of us are not are we!

So what is the cost of losing all this?

• Well the inconvenience for one.
• Lost business enquiries another.
• However there is a down to earth financial cost too, as if your new web developer can't get into your old site to upgrade it (assuming it is worth upgrading anyway), then you have little choice but to pay for a complete new one. This may be a blessing in disguise with many old web sites no longer fit for purpose, but its usually a bitter pill to swallow when you get a bill for a few thousand pounds, just because you forgot to record your details in a safe place.

This is probably about enough on this topic, but just by way of a small finishing salvo, I propose that lost password information is potentially the No. 1 self imposed business risk by small business today. Well maybe anyway!

Breakfast in Bodmin

Slightly off the web marketing topic - though only slightly mind, I went to Bodmin on Friday morning to meet the business league members there over breakfast, and give a talk about "What is Web 2.0 - and why should i care anyway?".

Well the League group over there meet in the Lanhydrock Golf club and Hotel, and what a lovely spot it is too. The restaurant is the type you would happily pay good money for an evening in: modern, smart, with huge windows looking out over the park, and great food. The members and guests there were a friendly crowd, one or two of whom I had met before, but politely tolerant of my usual excited rant about the possibilities open to businesses using Web 2.0.

But I think Bodmin will go on my list of great breakfast meeting locations, joining in no particluar order:

• Falmouth (where I'm a member), with a view of the sea from the beautiful old Falmouth Hotel, and a breakfast that includes black pudding and hogs pudding!
• St Austell where they meet in another golf club with another sea view across the bay towards Fowey.
• And Bodmin in the fantastic Lanhydrock golf club.
• Penzance - another sea view from the Lugger Hotel.
  

These meetings normally kick off at 7.30 am so you can get back to work by about 9.30, and the ones I have tried include:

• Tuesdays: Truro
• Wednesday: Penzance
• Thursday: Falmouth
• Friday: Bodmin & Redruth.

Anyway thoroughly recommended for good company and a free exchange of ideas, and particularly good for those like me that have only been in Cornwall for a year or so, and therefore still getting to know who everyone is! You can get more information at http://www.thebusinessleague.co.uk if you're interested.

Article Marketing

A great post by Garrett French, introducing Article Marketing, Blogging, and how they can be made to work together.

For the uninitiated this deals with the highly effective technique of writing short articles about your area of expertise, interest or business, and posting them strateguically on the web to help draw visitors and links to your web site....

Article Marketing: "Adding a Blog to Your Article Marketing Strategy
How can a blog best compliment your current article marketing initiative? There are some quick answers, which I'll break out first and foremost in this article. Secondly I'll investigate how you should differentiate your blog posts from your articles.

4 Quick Tips for Integrating a Blog into Your Article Marketing Strategy

1) Put your blog directly on your main site. Put one of your business's main keyword phrases into the title of your blog. Make the url for your blog the name of the blog itself. Frank's Fish Shop's blog url should look something like this, depending on how Frank architects his site: http://AquariumFishToday/FranksFishShop.com.

2) Link to your articles from your blog, even though they are on your site. Don't publish your articles directly in your blog however. Write a little commentary about the article, why you wrote it, what inspired it, who it's for (thx to SEM wiz bw).

3) Link to and mention those who publish your articles. Not the article directories, but rather the websites or newsletters or even other blogs that publish you. Especially if they are useful resources and if you have a decent relationship and or dialogue with the publisher.

4) Discuss responses to your article, whether good or bad in blog posts. Show the how the impact your articles have had on your readers. Show, more importantly, that you're engaged with them.

Differentiating Your Blog Posting and Article Marketing Strategy

A blogging strategy differs significantly from an article marketing strategy, and positions its author differently.

Many writers/marketers simply post entire articles in their blogs. I do, on my article marketing blog, but that's just because I'm not being particularly strategic at the moment. This is not the ideal method if you're looking to maximize the benefit of your blogging and article writing efforts can have on your site's conversions.

These are my opinions about blog posts:

• Blog posts, as a rule, should be shorter than articles and provide bite-sized nuggets of information, usually accompanied by a link.
• Blog posts are great for your quick, from-the-hip reactions/thoughts/opinions to news that affects your industry.
• Blog posts can be chattier in tone, more informal, and perhaps show a bit more of your personality (though your articles should certainly have personality).
• You can write several commentary or "check-out-this-cool-industry-news" blog posts in a tenth of the time it takes to write a decent article.
• Blog posts keep you more regularly in the awareness of your readers/RSS subscribers. Articles are the foundation of your expertise. Blog posts are your constant reminders to others of your expertise.
• Blog posts show your involvement in your industry's conversation, whether you're disagreeing with a colleague's recent article, or lauding an industry player's recent acquisition.

In short, blogs are better for news, commentary and quick analysis while articles are better for establishing your expertise.

This is not entirely a hard and fast rule and should only be followed as a general guideline, especially for those who want to differentiate their blogging efforts from their article marketing efforts.

Executing Your Blogging and Article Marketing Strategy

A dual blogging/article writing strategy is best, as it enables the marketer to position himself as both an industry thought leader by writing great articles and as someone who follows closely the happenings in his industry.

The execution is up to you. Now get writing!

Did your web site not send you flowers this year – AGAIN?

Like all relationships the one with your web site takes a little work to get the very best out of it. In this article I’ll suggest a Dozen red roses that may well improve the quality of your relationship... with your web site.

1. Are you taking an interest in what she’s doing?
If you don’t really take an interest in what she’s doing she is unlikely to be fulfilled by the relationship. By setting up “Google Analytics” you can get a real picture of what’s going on, and find out any potential problems in your relationship, and things you can do to improve it. You can track conversions – which of your visitors actually committed to an action on your site. Take an interest and you’ll understand her much better!

2. All you have to do is ask.
Do you know who is looking for your web site and how? Have you used words on it that people are actually looking for? Most web site owners just guess what to say, based on what they know about their own business. While this is relevant to what you do, what if no-one is searching for that, or almost as bad, there are already 20 million web pages offering exactly the same thing? Web Marketers like us have special tools which tell you what search phrases people are actually using, in what numbers, and how many other sites are after the same visitors. All you have to do is ask, and the visitors can be yours!

3. Be Spontaneous.
Everyone likes a bit of spontaneity, and your site is no different. If you see a topic in your industry that gets you thinking, write it down, blog it, and put it on your site. The search engines have algorithms looking for fresh and topical news, so strike when the iron is hot, and get your topical news up there.

4. Raise the intensity.
Neglect is the curse of a relationship, so don’t do it. Once a week try to get something fresh and interesting posted on your site or blog, and your visitors (and search engines) will love you. After all – why come back to a site where you have already read everything? Raising the intensity of your new posts, to even once a week, will make your web site increasingly popular and successful.

5. Quality Relationships.
Your relationship will bloom if you provide quality time, quality information, and quality content. If your site offers its visitors quality information that adds real value to their search, then their chances of coming back are greatly enhanced. Quality posts may be linked to from other parts of the web, enhancing the traffic to your site. Think about what information you might offer to your visitors, be it gardening tips, recipes, holiday location information. They’ll appreciate it and come to see you again.

6. Being seen in the right places.
Some of us are homebodies at heart, but we also like to be seen in the right places from time to time, be it Ascot, Henley, or just a nice restaurant. Your web site likes to be seen in the right places too, and unlike a cocktail at the Algonquin Hotel, it need not break the bank. One the web one of the best places to be seen is in DMOZ – the Open directory. Google looks at this to work out which sites are authorities. However it can take many months for a site to be checked, and listed, by the real people who edit the directory, so apply for free to get listed today: www.dmoz.org. There’s a pile of other important places for any good social climber to “be seen”, and many of them are free too, so get started with DMOZ and then work through the list.

7. Stop Tarting around!
If she finds you tarting around you’ll get a slap – and your phone number blocked. Listing your site in ”Hundreds of directories for free” does not work, not does buying “Hundreds of incoming links”. Worse still these schemes can get you banned from the three directories that matter – Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Focus on building high quality relationships with relevant sites, and improve the quality of your relationship.

8. Communicate - because Love is a two way thing!
No relationship thrives on take-take-take, and nor does your web site. With the advent of Web 2.0 there are lots of tools allowing your visitors to participate, help each other, give and receive advice relevant to your market place. Putting these tools – like Forums, Comments, Polls, Chat Rooms – on to your site can enhance your content, your visitors’ experience, and your financial results.

9. Are you a one night wonder?
You’ll get no flowers for a one night wonder – unless you’re fantastic of course! Regular communication is the secret of relationship building, so when people come to your site give them something useful or interesting to sign up to for free, so that you can keep on talking and building the relationship. If you’re not doing this then your marketing is a one-shot-wonder, your visitors are unlikely to come back, and your web site will never really love you.

10. Naughty can be nice!
It doesn’t always pay to be goody-two-shoes: perhaps he’ll like you more if you’re naughty? This is a technique that used carefully (you don’t want to be too naughty or you might find yourself in trouble), can yield great results. Posting inflammatory content on your blog can get all sorts of people interested and linking to your site, yielding great results. However there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, so tread carefully, and remember you really do have to find a way of doing this that doesn’t hurt anyone!

11. Consideration.
Show a little consideration and show what a nice type you are – it works in your favour in the long run. On the web one aspect of this is the accessibility of your site, which can manifest itself in resizable fonts, Alternative text for your images, and a raft of other techniques making your site easier to use for the elderly or the hard of vision. It can cost a little more to set a site up this way, but the benefits can be substantial, and of course – you’re doing the right thing. One really good example of how NOT to do this is my old web site www.channelcomputing.co.uk which rather embarrassingly adheres to none of these principles, and enshrines a large number of other poor practices which you may spot. But it has one saving grace – there is a newer and better successor on the way, so I will eventually start showing a little consideration – I promise!

12. Let her know you love her.
Oh but how can I tell my web site I love it – don’t be so ridiculous. This article has really gone too far now. Well as luck would have it there is a way, several ways in fact. Some of them are called Digg, Squidoo, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and other funny nerdy names. These are the main “Social bookmarking sites”, and the place to go to tell a web site that you love it. You get to share your love with other lovers, and tell them why you love your (or another) site so much. If you haven’t visited these sites yet then have a go, they’re all free to join, very popular, and very effective, so tell a web page you love it, I’m sure there’s plenty to go round!

Well this article is a slightly different approach to the subject of love on the internet isn’t it; what do you think? Is it tacky? Do you pity my girlfriend? Does it stretch an already weak analogy much much too far, or is a humorous, useful reminder of a few things you could be doing better in your business? Do feel free to let us know (politely) – you can comment, criticize, or even Dig it!

Remember though – spend a little attention and time on your relationship with your web site, and you may be receiving flowers next year on Valentines, or perhaps some more visitors, money to buy yourself some flowers even? Who Knows...

Happy Friday!

Internet Marketing - and Web 2.0

So how much does your Internet Marketing course deal with Web 2.0?

Well it is an interesting question, as I've been doing talks on both Web 2.0 and internet marketing for a while now, and there is a significant amount of cross-over between the content of the two presentations.

Web 2.0 is a funny beast - possibly more hype than fact in many ways. Its name implies that the web has changed, and while the web does change every day, there was never a step. With regards to marketing a business, the core values have never changed, and if I were to paraphrase people with much longer histories than myself in the Internet marketing game I would say the process consists of:

1. Find out what people are searching for on line.
2. Find a solution that meets their needs.
3. Offer that solution.

OK that was the difficult bit, it gets easier from here:

4. Write compelling sales copy that leads towards a sale.
5. Bring people quickly to your site with PPC advertising.
6. Learn which keywords actually lead to sales.
7. Optimise your site for those keywords to bring the longer term and higher volume organic search traffic.
8. Build content and links, then more content and more links to bring that traffic your way.
9. Bring your visitors back many times using social networking and Email Marketing.
10. Develop credibility and trust to build a strong relationship.
11. Sell to your people what you know they need, and then sell them more based on your knowledge of them.

Which brings us back to Web 2.0.
So if those are the basics, where does Web 2.0 fit in?

Well here are some of the topics that we cover that are "Very Web 2.0"

The aspects of web 2.0 that we deal with, as supporting increased profits from a business web site include:
1. Using Social sites for developing high quality inbound links and traffic to your web site.
2. Using blogging to attract the attention of search engines, and for a more relaxed approach to developing the relationship with your customer.
3. API based tools including the Keyword research tools are very web 2.0, and they provide us with vital information about who is searching for our product or service, and allow us to understand how to alter our web sites in order to bring that traffic to us.
4. Tagging and cloud type components that make our sites more accessible to search engines.
5. Forums and Wikis that help us provide valuable and fresh content to our users, and to develop our sites with user generated content. This reduces the effort involved in keeping our sites clean and fresh.
6. Using RSS and syndication both to add relevant content to our own sites, and to add incoming links, traffic and improved Pagerank to our own sites.
7. Using Tagging and Linking sites such as Digg, Technorati and Squidoo and others to increase traffic and sales to our sites.
8. Turning one-time visitors into long term customers and friends using social networking as a relationship building tool.
9. Applying web 2.0-type standards to the design of our sites to improve the user’s experience, accessibility, and search engine ranking.
10. Using techniques that can turn our marketing tactics viral – i.e. to make our promotions spiral outwards on the net with little or no effort of our own. When these are applied correctly they can exponentially increase the success of a site.
11. Effective use of press release and Article marketing to increase page rank, traffic, and sales.

Link to the "Channel Computing - Internet Marketing Course" page.

For those that are still guessing I think we'll have another post now, entitled "what is Web 2.0?"... because most are by no means certain!

Social Networking with Training Wheels

This is a post by John Jantsch on ducttapemarketing.com, which I republish in its entirety because:

a. Its gives a great summary of how a business would get started in "Social networking", and
b. I'm a bit busy today to write anything of my own for the blog!

I would however mention that this article's premise is that most of the benefits of "Social networking" are in the future, and that perhaps at the moment there is not much to be gained directly from participation. We would take a different approach to that, and find that good use of social networking is already a powerful tool for generating traffic, interest, and sales, from your web activities.

Please read and enjoy,
Pete

Social Networking with Training Wheels: "Look, I don’t really think that the mySpaces and Facebooks of the world are that important for the typical small business as they stand today. There may be very practical business reasons for some to actually use these and other, what are called social networks, for business gain, but most people that have jumped on the social network bandwagon have found themselves left with a “is this all there is” kind of feeling."

To those I say this, the value of the current public social networks for business folks is not what you can get out of them for gain today, but what you can learn by using them for practical gain tomorrow. That’s why SpacebookedIn makes sense for you now

The Facebooks of the world are busy teaching millions and millions of business folks how social networks work, how social networking works, how shared applications can be viral and ever-present. The real payoff in my opinion is that the wave to come after the Facebook bubble bursts is the “personalized business network.” Once everyone of your customers and prospects knows how to use what are easily replicatable social networking tools, like building profiles, sharing video and connecting based on mutual interests, your job of building your own social business network around your own very specific community of niche will get a whole lot easier.

2008 will be the year of the personalized social business network. So, if you've decided to take a pass on the whole social networking trend, I would suggest that you use this handy list to start learning to ride this bike with the training wheels on.

Ten ways to get started with Social Networking.

1) Read 10 blogs - sign-up for a Bloglines account and search for and subscribe to 10 blogs about social networking - you can return daily to your page on Bloglines to find and read all the new content on your 10. Of course you can add blogs about your industry and interests here too.

2) Comment on 10 blogs - posting relevant comments to blogs you read is a very simple form of social networking. It's also a good way to get some extra visitors your site or blog.

3) Join Facebook - Join and create a profile. Find and friend some of your existing contacts using tools on Facebook. You'll be surprised how many people you already know have Facebook accounts. Facebook has some real value for you because of the rich set of tools and large amount of active users. This is a great place to experiment with how people interact in social networks. Once you get your feet wet you may also find that Facebook is a great way to connect with business contacts you may never bump into otherwise.

4) Create a mySpace page - this service is really embraced primarily by musicians and the younger set. It also happens to have a large underbelly contingent so be warned, but it is a great tool for learning how to build a presence outside of your web site.

5) Join LinkedIn - this is a service that's been called Facebook for business. It is really about meeting and connecting with like-minded business folks. It is a great service for people looking for a job or to make connections with people who may be out of reach without an introduction.

6) Visit Ning - this is the largest custom social networking service that allows you to create your own community using a variety of tools that can be branded to match your current site.

7) Create a Workbench profile - this one's a little self-serving as this is my new social business networking site but it's a good example of the personalized business community that's the next wave for small business.

8) Create a Twitter account - this tool is pretty silly on the surface, it allows you to type in 160 characters or less what you are doing right now. It feels like a giant waste of time but a very large and active community has grown around this kind of micro-blogging and you should understand how people are using it.

9) Create a StumbledUpon profile - This is a social network built around discovering and recommending sites that you like. Active stumblers can send a lot of traffic your way

10) Create a Digg account - this site allows you to keep up to the minute with what's happening in the world of business. Users submit and vote on what is believed to be the most important content.

You might also consider Mixx, Squidoo and Flikr as places to find and develop niche related communities when you're ready to really get out there.

Think of mySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook as your labs - get in there and experiment for the future. then start planning your own personalized social business network.