When new blog owners find out that RSS is a tool for broadcasting their blog posts across the internet, they get  excited. They think it’s the equivalent of standing on the roof of the tallest building and yelling through a bull horn. They think everybody in hearing distance is getting their message. When it comes to RSS, just because you’re broadcasting doesn’t mean people are receiving your blog posts.

Your Blog “Radio Station”

Think of your blog like a radio station. Radio stations send out content via the airwaves . Your blog works the same way.  Each time you publish a new blog post it’s like another radio wave going out into the world. But just because radio waves are out there, doesn’t mean people can hear them. Fortunately, radio waves roll right past us if we’re not tuned into them. Imagine how crazy making that would be if you heard every radio wave out there!

In order for listeners to hear what your radio station is broadcasting, they need 2 things. They need a radio AND their radio needs to be tuned to your station. Your blog works the same way.

Your Blog “Radio”

In the case of your blog, the “radio” takes one of 2 forms:

Blog Reader

A blog reader is a place where you can collect all the blogs you want to keep track of. There are many free blog readers out there (Google reader is the most popular) and they work similarly to your email program. You have the equivalent of an inbox where you can view the blogs you’ve subscribed to.

Email
People can also have your latest blog posts show up in their email inbox. This is a good option for you the blog owner because it doesn’t require the subscriber to remember to check their blog reader. Your blog posts show up in their inbox as if they were a regular email.

Tuning into Your “Signal”

While having a blog reader or email is the equivalent of a radio, subscribing to your feed constitutes tuning into your blog. To sign up for an RSS feed, look for an orange button with a dot and 2 curved lines. It should roughly look like a signal going out. When you click on that button, another page appears with either the raw feed (looks like a bunch of code) or a web page with options for signing up.

How Do I Add an RSS Feed Signup to my Website or Blog?

If you know how to do it, RSS sign up capabilities is not difficult and doesn’t take much time. However, unless you’re willing to learn a bit about coding websites, I recommend asking your web designer to add it for you. I’ll give you a quick overview of the process so you know what’s involved.

Feedburner is the easiest and most commonly used  tool for adding RSS feed sign up capabilities to your blog.

1. First, you  need to create a Feedburner account.  but since Feedburner is owned by Google, if you have a Google account that will get you in.
2. Follow the steps to create the feed URL. It’s easy!
3. Then add an RSS sign up image to your site and link it to your feed’s URL.

That’s it! Now people can sign up for your blog.

You’re paying attention to your Analytics, right?

One of the reasons why I like Feedburner is that you can login and see how many people subscribe to your blog and where they found your blog. It’s a valuable metric and helps you not feel like you’re talking to yourself. Put it on your calendar to login in at least once a month and check your progress. When you know how many subscribers you had last month, it motivates you to have more subscribers next month.

RSS feeds are a valuable marketing tool. In a future blog post I’ll talk about other uses of RSS for building an online audience.

Some Things You Need to Know Before You Start Writing

First things first. You’ve done your research, right?
Just because you think you know what key phrases your customers use to find you doesn’t mean you do. Time and again I’ve seen clients who think they know what they want to rank for realize they had missed a whole segment of key phrases or realize people search on one variation much more often than another. Unfortunately, it takes several months to realize the problem is poorly targeted key phrases. Don’t guess. KNOW.

Serving 2 Masters
Ranking well in search engines gets you website visitors. Humans pay your bills. That’s why you have 2 masters: search engines and real live people. Unfortunately how you write for each is different. If search engines were your customer, you would just jam your key phrases in wherever you could fit them. That’s called “key word stuffing” and it annoys people. You might get your website to show up higher in the search results but if your listing is just a list of words, people won’t click over to your website.

I often say that search engine optimization is an art and a science. The science is key phrase research. The art is writing meta tags and page copy that appeals to both masters. You need to strive for a balance between using your key phrases and writing in a way that makes sense to humans. Who trumps who? When in doubt write for humans first.

Map Key Phrases to Pages
A common mistake made by people new to search engine optimization is to try to get every web page to rank for a whole bunch of key phrases. Realistically, one web page can only rank for 2 – 4 key phrases. So, in order to cover a decent range of key phrases, you need to map key phrases to web pages.

Let’s assume you have 12 web pages and a list of 24 key phrases you want to rank for. Don’t just assign 2 to each page. Assign each key phrase a relevance ranking; I use a scale of 1 – 5 with 5 being the most relevant. Then map your key phrases to pages using the most relevant ones more often than the less relevant ones.

Write Unique Tags for Each Page
It might be really important to you to rank #1 for “business coach in Boston, MA” but you’re not going to get there by using that in the title tag for every page of your website. You might think it helps your site overall but keep in mind, search engines rank web pages not websites.  And search engines want to know what this page is about.

Tips for Writing Title Tags

How long should a title tag be?
Common wisdom is that a title tag should be 70 – 75 characters with spaces. However, while humans may not see it, search engines will index far past 75 characters.

Should we use our company name in the title tag?
There is debate about whether or not you should start you title tag with your company name. The beginning of a title tag is prime real estate and since the only people searching on your business name already know who you are, I start with key phrases likely to be used by people who don’t know you yet. (Plus, if your website doesn’t rank for your business name, you’ve got bigger problems than meta tags.)

What key phrases should go in the title tag?
My advice for which key phrases to use, falls into 2 categories:

1. Competition –Since search engines give the words in the title tag a lot of weight, I say put your most competitive key phrases in your title tag. But then there’s…
2. Relevance – Since the purpose of all this work is to get customers, it’s more important that your web pages rank for key phrases that actually describe what you are selling.

Tips for Writing Description Tags

How long should a description tag be?
Because different search engines display different numbers of characters, common wisdom is that a description tag should be between 160 and 175 characters long. However, Jill Whelan of High Rankings Advisor says “Description tags can be as long or as short as you want, because Google will display just the relevant part of it. So even if your meta description is hundreds of words, Google will pull a snippet from it that uses the keyword phrase that the searcher used.”

What goes in the description tag?
I think of the description meta tag as “making the sale” for why the searcher should click on your link as opposed to the other 9 search results. In order to make the sale, you need to know who you’re talking to and what they want. Instead of talking about what you do, talk the problem they are trying to solve or the solution they are looking for.

Do a few searches and you’ll see that most description tags are written like “We provide the best, most reliable baloney at the lowest prices. Blah, blah, blah.” If you can turn it around to say, “All our customer service reps are licensed and bonded and have at least 5 years experience in the field. We also give a money back guarantee.” Your listing WILL get more clicks.

Write Meta Tags at the Design Stage

Putting up a website is a huge job and one of the things that tends to get put off is writing meta tags. Usually the web designer puts up place holder meta tags like “XYZ Company Home Page” with the intention of coming back and adding real meta tags later. Later doesn’t come until you start looking into why the website isn’t generating any business.

I know in the rush to finish a website, meta tags is one more thing to add to the To Do list. But! If you do it while writing copy and coding the site it will take a lot less time and get your website working for you sooner than if you do it several months down the road.

Meta tags are snippets of code in the source code of a web page that give the search engines information about that web page. While a person viewing the web page doesn’t see them, the search engines do. There are about a dozen different meta tags but two are most important for our purposes: the Title tag and the Description tag. Their names pretty much tell you what they do. The Title tag is the title of the page and the Description tag is a brief description of what that page is about.

How Meta Tags Help

The search engines will rank your web pages for the words in your Title tag. How high the search engines place your web pages in the search results depends on whether you’re doing other things right and how many other sites are competing for those same key phrases. While the search engines don’t use the Description tag as a factor in your rankings, the Description tag is still very important. The Description tag should “make the sale by enticing the searcher to click on your listing in the search results as opposed to your competitors.

You might have heard that you should use the Keyword meta tag too, but don’t bother. In the early days of the internet the Keyword meta tag was a list of words to help the search engines understand what the web page was about. But search engines don’t give any importance to the keyword meta tag any more. Frankly, all it does is tell your competitors what you’re trying to rank for and possibly give them ideas for key phrases they should try to rank for too.

Meta tags are REALLY important! In fact, I’ve had more than one client’s site get on the first page of the search results just by adding or changing meta tags. Even sites programmed in search engine un-friendly languages like Flash can see rankings improve by adding meta tags.

Meta Tags at Work

Meta Tags in the Search Results

You can see the Title and Description tags at work by doing a simple web search. Here is the first search result when I type “growing dahlias” into Google.

The Title tag of the page is the first line of text that is blue and underlined. In this case, the title tag is “Planting, Growing and Caring for Dahlias.” The words “growing” and “dahlias” are bold because they were words used in the search. If the search term had been “caring for dahlias,” those words would have been in bold instead.

The next 2 lines of text are the Description tag. In this case the description is “A guide to the care and cultivation of Dahlia plants, with tips on planting, digging and winter storing.”

Meta Tags on Your Website

The following is the source code of the webpage. The Title tag is outlined in red and the Description tag is outlined in blue.

Besides helping your website rank better for your key phrases, well written meta tags ideally make the searcher click on your listing instead of your competitor’s. If your web page doesn’t have meta tags, the search engines pull a snippet of text from the page and display that instead. There’s no guarantee they will use text that works to your advantage. So, I strongly recommend you check your meta tags and make sure each page has a unique title and description tag. If not, write them and have your programmer add them. It shouldn’t cost very much to add them and they’re definitely worth the return on investment.

Click here for a PDF version of “What Are Meta Tags and How Do They Work?“

I have worked with many business owners who have come to regret not thinking through their Facebook strategy before jumping in. This blog post is the result of hard lessons learned.

Facebook Profile vs. Facebook Fan Page

Before I explain the different between a Friend and a Fan, you need to understand the difference between a personal profile and a Fan page. Facebook’s primary purpose is as a personal networking site. They want real people to connect and share information with other real people. That is why you start by setting up a personal profile.

The Facebook terms of service clearly states in several places that you cannot have more than one account. For example, I cannot set up an account as myself, Elgé Premeau, and then set up another account as my business, eMarketing Strategist. If I do this and Facebook finds out, they will shut down both accounts. So, how do I create both a personal and professional presence on Facebook?

This is where Fan pages come in. I start by creating a personal account as Elgé Premeau. From that account, I set up an eMarketing Strategist Fan page. My personal account is the parent account and my Fan page is a sub-account. While you can only have one personal profile, you can have as many Fan pages as you want.

Here is a screen shot of the home page of my personal account

Keep in mind my feed – the updates from my Friends in the center column – is constantly changing as my Friends post updates.

Now let’s get into the distinction between a Friend and a Fan. The people you connect with via your personal account are called Friends and the people you connect with via your Fan page are Fans. In general, you have a two way conversation with Friends and a one way conversation with Fans. Here are some important distinctions between Friends and Fans:

So why take the extra effort to set up and learn how to use a Fan page? Let me elaborate on the problem with some of the distinctions above:

1. Privacy – I don’t Friend people I don’t know now in real life largely for privacy concerns. If you don’t know people, you don’t know what they’re doing with your personal profile information.
2. Number of Connections – If you’re using Facebook to build a platform, you want to have tens or hundreds of thousands of people reading your updates. But if you only have a personal account, you’re limited to 5,000 connections.
3. Fun and Enjoyment – Friending strangers takes all the fun out of Facebook. If you’ve got hundreds or thousands of “friends” you don’t actually know, your feed is cluttered with updates from people you don’t care about. Also, you can’t be yourself. You’ve got worry about offending somebody or sounding unprofessional. Boring!

If you blithely Friend everybody who will accept your invitation, there WILL come a day when you decide to do something about it. Many times I’ve had to explain to a frustrated business owner that you cannot change someone from a Friend to a Fan.

On the other hand, I don’t do nearly as much work in a day as I think I should. I have a few close friends who get a staggering amount of work done and still juggle other responsibilities like  a household, a husband, elderly parents and raising kids. When I compare how much they get done in a week with how much I get done, I flagellate myself with self-recriminating statements like “I am so lazy” and “I HAVE to get more disciplined!”

As a business owner, I’m hardly unique in my struggle to get everything done. There’s marketing my own business, talking with prospects, managing sub-contractors, keeping in touch with colleagues, doing actual client work, bookkeeping and writing. Oh, that damn writing…

I’ve been meaning to write an ebook on “Internet marketing Basics” and one on “How to Build an Online Audience” for close to a year. I’ve taught and written on aspects of these topics several times so I’m not exactly starting from scratch. But I am notorious for getting something 70% done and then moving on to the next thing. I have hundreds of half-done articles and blog posts. If I would just finish them, I would have a ton more content out on the web.

Working time to write into my schedule is getting crucial because I will be speaking on both topics at the Willamette Writer’s Conference on Saturday, August 6^th. “Internet Marketing Basics” and “How to Build an Online Audience” are HUGE topics. If I am going to do anything other than overwhelm and frustrate attendees, I need to have print books ready to sell. I thought I had about 4 – 5 months to get it done. I have 13 weeks. Yikes.

Because I’m organized and never late, I assumed I was pretty good at time management. So when I saw that the topic of this month’s North West Association of Book Publishers meeting was “Time Management Skills for Writers and Publishers” presented by Marydee Sklar, I thought “Boring! What’s she going to teach me? I already know everything I need to know about time management.”

Turns out I was wrong!  I had a few fundamental, simple things to learn that shifted my mindset about why I don’t write and how I can fix it.

What I particularly liked about Marydee’s approach to time management is that she doesn’t  just give you a list of things you should do. She starts by discussing how the brain works. She talks about how the front of your brain manages executive functioning. There are 33 executive functions and they include things like:

• Meta cognition – thinking about thinking
• Goal directed persistence –working at something until you get it done
• Working memory – holding pieces of information in your brain
• Response inhibition – ADHD people have a hard time with this
• Planning & prioritization
• Time management – awareness of what time it is and how long it will take to do what you need to do
• Organization – papers and files
• Controlling emotion

As Marydee talked about her own experience of being a visual person and not a word lover, I had an “A-ha!” moment. I was sitting next to my good friend Susan who is a word lover. She can sit at her desk for hours and get lost in the writing process. I on the other, am doing well if I can write for 5 consecutive minutes. When Marydee described her own experience, I realized I’m not lazy, I’m just not a word person. I don’t think I ever realized this before because I love to read. The way in which I’m not a word person is that I don’t love to write. One of my favorites quotes is by Dorothy Parker. “I hate having to write. I love having written.”

Realizing I don’t get lost in the writing process isn’t because I’m lazy but because of the way my brain works, allowed me to quit beating up on myself about it. Now I know what I need to do is put writing time in my daily calendar, get comfortable and use a timer to keep myself at my desk for 30 minutes to an hour at a time. I’m confident that if I commit to writing an hour a day, I’ll get those books done by August.

Once Marydee explained that time management issues are a matter of having specific strengths and weaknesses, she talked about tools and tactics you can use to manage your time better. I realized I need to consider my schedule from 3 perspectives; month, week and day.

1. Monthly – I needed to get wall calendars that enable me to look at the month view of my schedule and map out when section of the book need to get done.
2. Weekly – Each week I need to map out chunks of time for writing, client work and marketing/admin for my own business.
3. Daily – Take the daily To Do List and work it around the chunks of time I set aside for writing and working.

If I stick to this schedule, I won’t  wind up flitting form thing to thing all day and all week and feeling like I didn’t get anything done.

I realize these revelations are hardly earth shattering and they weren’t even new to me. What they did do is make me realize I can’t juggle personal life, work and writing a book not because I’m lazy but because I haven’t mapped out how it’s going to get done. Duh! It is such a relief to be in the solution instead of stuck in the problem!

In my next blog post, I will show you exactly how I mapped out 3 classes and 2 ebooks and how I will get them all done in 13 weeks. Oh yeah! And I still need to work too!

They are good questions and you really should spend some time writing down your answers. They will you figure out what should go in your info product and what to leave out. The answers will also come in handy when it’s time to write the sales copy which is easily the hardest part of the whole process.

What Can You Do to Give Your Info Product the Best Chance of Selling?

Writing a quality info product is incredibly difficult and takes more time than anyone thinks it will. In order to create a quality product plan on writing it, setting it aside for a few weeks and writing it again. If you’re not willing to take the time to do it right, don’t bother.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many clients to write and promote info products and in that time I’ve learned a few things about what sells, what doesn’t and why.

Go Light on Theory

When you’re an expert, you have a unique understanding the problem. You’re steeped in your theory about how the problem came about, the dynamics at hand and the intricacies of the various ways to solve it. You’re looking at the problem from the outside-in and not the inside-out. Unless people want to do what you do, they don’t really care all that much about your theory. They just want to know how to solve the problem. In the writing process that means go light on theory and heavy on stories and examples.

Vegetables versus Dessert

People want to eat dessert first. But as the expert who can solve their problem, you know they need to eat their vegetables. I hate to break it to you but until you can demonstrate why they need their vegetables, they’ll buy dessert first every time. Let me illustrate with an example.

One of the services I provide is search engine optimization (SEO) which is the art and science of getting website to rank well in the search engines. Ultimately, the purpose of SEO is to get people to buy your service or product. The first and most important step in the SEO process is to figure out what words and phrases your website should rank for. This is called “key phrase research.”

Considering that key phrase research is literally the “key” to making sales online, you’d think people would rush to buy an info product that showed them how to do key phrase research. You know what? They don’t. A product called “How to Do Key Phrase Research” is vegetables and only people who want to do SEO for a living see the value of vegetables.

Other search marketers are not my target market.  Entrepreneurs trying to sell services or products online are my target market. The only people who visit their website are people who already know them. Their most pressing problem is getting in front of new people and building an online audience.

That means I need to make the focus of my info product “how to build an online audience.” My job is to get people thinking “Yeah! I need that!”  And then when they ask “How do I do that?” is the time to tell them the first step is key phrase research. Once I’ve given them dessert, I make the case for why they need to eat their vegetables. They get what they want and I get to give them what I know they need.

Get Feedback

So how do you figure out what’s vegetables and what’s dessert? Get feedback. Sending your ebook to a handful of friends and asking them what they think is not enough. They’re going to say it’s great. Even if they give you some constructive feedback it’s not going to be as helpful as if you got face-to-face feedback.

I strongly recommend that you teach the material at least once, preferably twice. Invite some friends over for snacks and drinks. When you invite them, tell them what you’re doing and what you want from them. Be specific about what you want. Make a list of questions such as “Does this part make sense?” and “Should I leave this in or take it out?”

See where the energy is. I recently taught an internet marketing basics class and was totally surprised to see where the questions led me. People couldn’t care less about how Google works. What they wanted to know about was building an online audience. I wound spending 30 minutes on a topic I’d only planned to spend 5 minutes on. Believe me! That feedback greatly changed the structure of my next info product and the language I will use to set up the problem.

While you’re writing and gathering feedback, think about what are the “vegetables” of your topic and what is the “dessert.” Then when you write, start with dessert first.

It happened to a husband and wife real estate team near where I live in Portland, Oregon. Here’s a local news story about what happened.

So what can the real Bergeron Properties do about this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

How did this happen? They let their domain name expire. When the registration lapsed a guy in Tennessee with an axe to grind scooped it up and put up this website.

You might think this is a rare occurrence but swiping domain names from unsuspecting owners is more common than you think.  Several years ago I had a client who let an old domain name lapse. She’d forgotten she has a website with a shopping cart running on that site. The people in Yugoslavia who swiped the domain name also scraped the website. Then they hosted the website and the shopping cart on their own servers. To customers it looked like the same site and they had no idea my client no longer owned it. Customers would enter their credit card information and next thing they know their identity has been stolen. The only reason why we were able to get it taken down was because the thieves stole the entire site. If they had put up their own site, there would have been nothing we could do.

Your domain name is your most important online asset and there are 3 simple things you can do to protect it.

#1 REGSITER YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME!

You wouldn’t say “I don’t want to deal with the DMV so I’m going to have my mechanic go down there and register my car in their name.”  That would be nuts! Although you might be driving your car, in the eyes of the law you wouldn’t really own it. But business owners do this all the time when they have their web designer register their domain name for them.

Sometimes web designers try to talk you into letting them do it. This is concerning for a couple of reasons. First of all, unscrupulous web designers will try to strong arm you into letting them do it because they know they’ve got you over a barrel if you try to take your business elsewhere. Secondly, even if you have an ethical web designer, if something happens to them (like they die), you can’t contact the company they registered it with and say “Hey. That’s really my domain name. Can I get that back?” Nope. Even if  the domain is your name and your picture is plastered all over the site, they can’t give it to you.

Registering a domain name is easy and only takes a few minutes. I use www.godaddy.com but I can’t give them a full endorsement because they try to get you to tack on all kinds of stuff to your order that you don’t really need.  There are hundreds of registrars out there. Here’s a list from ICANN which is the governing body of the internet.

#2 Use an email address you check regularly.

The main reason why so many businesses lose their domain name is because they start using a new email address and forget to update their contact information with their registrar. When it comes time to renew, the registrar sends emails to the email address in their records. If that email isn’t up to date, the first sign that you forgot to renew your domain name could be finding another website where you expected yours to be. Burn it into your brain. If you change your email address, update your contact info with your registrar.

#3 Set your domain names to auto-renew.

You might consider registering your domain name for multiple years at a time. If you don’t do that, I suggest setting it to auto-renew. That’s what I do with my important domain names. Of course, when the expiration date on your credit card changes, you need to update your card information. But if you’ve used an email address you check regularly, that won’t be a problem.

Imagine the amount of lost business and reputation damage this simple mistake is causing Bergeron Properties. You domain name is your most valuable online asset. Take some simple steps to protect it.

The article, The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, by David Segal tells the story of how J.C. Penney’s website was coming up #1 for a whole bunch of search terms (aka key phrases). They even outranked manufacturer’s websites for their own product names. I’m not sure how this came to the attention of the  New York Times, but they hired a search engine marketer to figure out why J.C. Penney’s site ranked so well. He was able to reverse engineer the process and discovered that J.C. Penney was up to some pretty shady SEO practices or what we call in the industry “black hat SEO.”

Before I explain what they were doing and why it was a problem, it helps to understand a bit about how rankings work. There are 2 types of search engine optimization; there is onsite optimization and offsite optimization. Onsite SEO is when you do everything you can to make your website appeal to the search engines. Offsite SEO is when you do things around the web to improve your rankings. The majority of offsite SEO consists of getting other websites, blog, etc. to link to your website. This is because Google considers a link to your site as a vote of popularity and in general, the site with the most links to it wins the rankings war.

What was going on in this situation is that J.C. Penney’s SEO company improved their rankings by paying for links to the site. This is a big no-no in Google’s book and when they catch you doing it, your site disappears from the search results.

Although they don’t say so directly in the article, I’m willing to bet J.C. Penney had no idea what their SEO company was doing to improve their rankings. Often, the marketing executives in charge of hiring the SEO company have no idea what it takes to improve rankings so they don’t know the difference between white hat techniques and black hat techniques. All they cared about was the fact that their rankings were going up which drove more traffic to their site and presumably made more sales.

I’m even willing to bet that SearchDex, who J.C. Penney fired when this story came to light, wasn’t even doing the link building themselves. Link building is an incredibly time intensive process and frankly, it’s insanely boring. There are companies that specialize in it and most of them use methods that won’t get you in trouble with Google. What this company did wrong was pay for them and use link farms.

I think it’s important for any business owner to read the full article because it’s a cautionary tale. If it can happen to a major retailer like J.C. Penney, it can happen to you. That’s why it’s important to have a basic understanding of how SEO works and know what your SEO company is doing in your name.  It’s kind of like bookkeeping. If your company fails to pay payroll taxes, the IRS won’t go after your bookkeeper, they’ll come after you. Google is a lot like the IRS in that respect; they don’t have any sympathy for the “I didn’t know” excuse.

If you need to learn more about the basics of search engine optimization. download my free ebook, “Higher Rankings in Plain English.”

Passive Marketing

Passive marketing consists of building infrastructure and waiting for customers to find you. When I say “infrastructure,” I mean stuff that requires programming or copywriting such as setting up a website, blog, newsletter, Facebook Fan page or Twitter account. Online, passive marketing consists of putting this stuff out there, getting it to rank well (search engine optimization) and then waiting for customers to find you. Offline, passive marketing consists of things like print advertising in magazines or newspapers.

You might find it hard to believe that all these activities are “passive.” This stuff is hard work! The problem with passive marketing is that your sales depend on people you don’t know taking action. An action you have very little influence over.

Just because all this stuff is a passive form of marketing doesn’t mean you don’t need to do it. You do! These things are the hub of your online marketing efforts. They are different mechanisms to demonstrate your expertise, make the case for why potential clients should hire you and where you start to build relationships by inviting visitors to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your blog feed or download a free report.

Active Marketing

At its core, active marketing is less about specific tactics and more about building relationships. It’s about connecting with referral sources and potential customers. Building relationships with active marketing is a 3 step process.

1. Figure out where your target markets hang out online. What websites they visit. What blogs and publications they read. What experts they pay attention to.
2. Create content tailored to that community.
3. Use that content to engage referral sources and customers in a conversation.

Offline, active marketing includes tactics like face-to-face networking and cold calling. Online, it consists of blog commenting, guest blogging and answering questions on forums and sites like Yahoo Answers.

Notice I did not say social networking is a form of active marketing? If you’re just putting stuff out there, i.e. tweeting, Facebook updates, inviting people to be a connection on LinkedIn, that’s still passive! For marketing to be active, you have to interact with people. The active form of social networking can be as simple as introducing yourself to someone you’d like to meet via email.

Who Needs Active Marketing?

It’s realistic to expect customers to search for what you’re selling, click on your website and buy something if you sell physical products such as shoes, tech toys or books. However, high-end services such as coaching and consulting have a very different sales cycle. Sure, a customer MIGHT search Google for “management consultant,” land on your site and then pick up the phone. But, that’s not going to happen in large enough numbers to pay your bills.

Because passive marketing is the most commonly used form of marketing, business owners who  need to use active marketing don’t realize they are relying on the wrong marketing approach to bring in customers. In my experience, there are 3 situations that require you to use active marketing.

You Need Active Marketing when Your Service is Seen as a “Want” Instead of a “Need”

Many types of consulting services are like therapy. Nobody wants therapy. People don’t wake up one day and say to themselves, “You know. My life’s going great. I think I’ll start seeing a therapist.” People only go to therapy when they are convinced they need therapy. Coaching and consulting are perceived the same way. Executives don’t want to hire a coach or consultant for themselves or their organizations. They only do so when they believe it will make money, save money or reduce stress.

You Need Active Marketing when You Have a Long Sales Cycle

If your business provides complex solutions to complex problems, you have to do a fair amount of educating the client before they sign a contract. These days many prospects don’t want a sales call, instead opting to educate themselves at their own pace and interest. They want to check you out, see if you understand their problems, have unique solutions and demonstrate why they should hire you instead of your competitors. This isn’t done by ranking well.

You Need Active Marketing when People Don’t Know Your Service Exists

You might have a unique service that solves a dire problem but if your customers don’t know your service exists, they’re not searching for it! And if they’re not searching for it, all the rankings in the world won’t help you. So what do you do?

Active Marketing in Action

I have a client who is a baby sleep coach. Either over the phone or at your home, she will work with you to get your baby to sleep through the night in its own bed. We all know some tired parents who could use her service! About a year ago she hired me to help improve her rankings. Now her website ranks #1 for a bunch of good key phrases. However, those high rankings weren’t translating into phone calls.

This doesn’t mean she can’t get clients from the internet. It just means she needs to take a different approach. Instead of relying on rankings to get clients, she is now building relationships with referral sources such as parenting websites, mommy bloggers and pediatricians. As of this writing, she is working on a free ebook to introduce people to her system and why it works. This ebook will be used to build her mailing list. Part of the plan is to write guest blog posts for the parenting websites and mommy blogs; this will get her in front of people who don’t know her service exists. As for social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter? We might set up a Facebook Fan page if there seems to be a demand for it but probably won’t bother with Twitter. Just because it’s the latest “Must do!” marketing tactic doesn’t mean it’s right for her business.

Understanding the difference between passive and active marketing and choosing the right approach for your business makes the difference between getting customers and wasting money on marketing. In future blog posts I will be going into more detail about where business owners get stuck in passive marketing and how to move into active marketing. If you haven’t already, sign up for the eMarketing Strategist blog feed. It’s going to be an interesting discussion.

The article is long but it’s a good read and definitely worth the time. It’s a story worthy of a John Grisham novel. And although it’s a story still in progress, it looks like the bad guy is going to get his due. Here’s a very brief summary of what happened.

The Horror Story:

A woman wants a good deal on eye glass frames. She does a search for her favorite eye glass designer in Google. The #1 ranking website has the frames she wants at a price she likes so she buys them. The frames show up 2 days later and are obviously fakes. She also realizes she’s been charged an additional $125. She asks for a refund. Not only does the company owner refuse to refund her, he threatens her! When she contests the charge with Citibank, he leaves messages threatening to hurt her and even emails her a picture of her house!

Citibank gives her a provisional refund. Some days later, she received a letter from Citibank acknowledging that she has canceled the claim. She calls Citibank and tells them she has not canceled the claim. She informs them that she has been repeatedly threatened by the person who owns the company she has the claim against. Citibank’s customer service response is “It’s not our problem.”

The woman goes to the police and although they take it seriously, they can’t do anything until they build a case which takes several months.

This Is Where Things Get Weird…

So why would anyone not only rip off customers, but threaten them when they complain? Because it boosts rankings!!! That’s right. This cretin has figured out that customer’s complaints on sites like www.getsatisfaction.com and www.yelp.com don’t hurt his rankings, they help!

How is this possible? If we’ve talked or you’ve read my free ebook, Higher Rankings in Plain English, you know that getting links to your website is an important part of rankings. Google considers links to your site from other sites as a vote of popularity and all other factors being equal, the site with the most links wins the rankings war.

The problem is that Google can’t (or chooses not to) discern between positive attention and negative attention. So when burned customers complain on review sites, Google just knows there’s a link to this website. Unfortunately, we the buying public, assume that high ranking sites must be reputable companies.

What Can You Learn?

I don’t think this woman did anything wrong when she made her initial purchase. The internet is still in its Wild, Wild West Phase and criminals spend a lot more time figuring out how to rip us off than we do defending against them. But, I can see some things she could have done differently. Here’s what you can learn to avoid her horror story.

Lesson #1: High Rankings & Snazzy Graphics Does Not Equal Reputable Company!

If you know how to hire people overseas, a reputable looking site will only cost you a few hundred dollars. And what you have to do to get to the top of the search results is not a mystery. If you know what to do and are willing to spend the time and money, your site can be #1 in Google too.

Lesson #2: Do Your Homework First!

Many of the comments to this article were along the lines of “If it’s too good to be true, then it is.” I think this is blaming the victim. Why? Because we all go to the web to look for better deals. Sometimes it’s not so easy to discern “Too easy to be true” scenarios.

As the article states, Google is better at providing reviews of local companies than it is internet based companies. If it’s not a major company or website you’ve heard of before (i.e. Hewlett Packard, Nordstrom, Amazon), do your home work first. If you do a search in Google for “review sites,” you will see that there are dozens of review sites on specific topics such as restaurants and tech toys. Here are a few of the major review sites:

http://www.getsatisfaction.com/

http://www.yelp.com/

http://www.angieslist.com/angieslist/

Lesson #3: Don’t use your debit card to make online purchases.

Granted, Citibank could have been a lot more helpful when the woman called to say she hadn’t canceled the complaint. But, if she’d used a debit card instead of a credit card, the burden of proof would have been on her, thus making contesting the charge a lot harder.

Lesson #4: It’s Virtually Impossible to Shut Down the Bad Guys.

Criminals can move quickly on the web. Shutting them down is a game of Whack-a-mole. The article states that when the reporter contacted the criminal’s hosting company, they shut down his website. He’s back up and running again on another hosting company which probably only took a few hours to do. The only way this guy is really going to get shut down is to go to jail.

It’s important to know how quickly criminals can move online for 2 reasons. First, it speaks to the importance of doing your homework. Second, keep in mind that it makes it look like there are more bad apples out there than there really are. The vast majority of online business owners are honest people who want happy customers.

Don’t Let This Scare You

I wrote this blog post because it never occurred to me that you could boost your rankings by ripping off customers. But, knowing how Google works, it makes sense. A link is a link. But I’m willing to bet that based on the negative attention Google has received from this fiasco and article, they will be doing something about this.

Sure. It is the Wild Wild West out there but this guy is probably going to jail thanks to the persistence of people like Clarabelle Rodriguez. I tip my hat to her and David Segal who wrote the article. I think Google, MasterCard and law enforcement agencies will change their policies as a result of this article.

If you’d like to learn more about how to ethically get reviews from clients, check out this recent post, The Decor My Eyes Fiasco & Local Reviews Tactics on SearchEngineland.com.