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How are you doing on your Google rankings? Are you spending a lot of money in AdWords and pay-per-click (PPC)? Do you wish you could get better SEO results and reduce your monthly spend on online advertising? Business has awoken to the fact that having an online presence is not enough. Your website needs to be showing up in the search results for your keywords and location. Keep reading for ideas on how you can influence your organic SEO.

Blog
My best piece of advice for anyone wanting to improve their influence with the search engines is to start blogging. Notice I didn’t say, “Start a blog”. It’s important to actively post new content on a regular basis. The more often you add to your blog, the better your SEO results. Once you’ve got a regular publishing schedule, take Joe Pulizzi’s excellent advice on how to promote it, 35 Ways to Market Your Blog

Read more on this tip:

• Blog Logistics: A Key Insight for Your Content Marketing Strategy
• 9 Tips That Improved My Blog
• How to Avoid the Post and Hope Syndrome

News Items
Adding a “news” feature to your home page is a great way to keep your content fresh without spending a lot of time and effort. More than anything, Google LOVES fresh content. I wrote a “BRIEF” post on this titled, BRIEF: A News-Worthy Trick for SEO.

RSS Feeds
Whatever you do, make sure your blog has an RSS feed. The avenues available for distributing your blog using a feed are seemingly endless. Read TopRank’s RSS Blog Directories and start registering your feed. Don’t forget to put an RSS feed on your news items, as well.

Read more on this tip:

• 7 Great Places to Register Your RSS Feed
• Putting Legs on Your Content with RSS

Leave Comments
Search engines love finding links to your website in other places. The absolute easiest way to get them is by leaving comments on other blogs. Plan on leaving at least one comment a day. It’s a great discipline to get into because it also puts you in the habit of reading every day. I discussed this one simple technique in more detail at, BRIEF: Spin Your SEO Web.

The Takeaway
Investing a little time in your website will start to show results in your SEO rankings. Read this fantastic article at Search Engine Journal, 10 Ways All Employees Can Contribute to Link Building for a comprehensive look at how your entire organisation can get involved. Within a few months, you may find you’re getting a lot more traffic and decreasing your spending on SEO advertising and services.

What do you do to help your SEO?
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*image courtesy of jscreationzs at www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Spring school holidays are in full swing here in Australia. It’s the biggest threat to my blogging schedule. I missed my 2nd post last week. The article I’m planning is going to take several hours to write that I just don’t have. I’m admitting defeat. While I’m a strong believer in original content, the goal of this blog is to provide practical advice on a regular basis.

With that in mind, I can recommend the following:

• My latest post at the Content Marketing Institute: How to Make the Case for Design in Content Marketing discusses a great example of Asset Based Marketing using the humble business card – my business card to be exact.

• Joe Pulizzi wrote a killer post titled,  35 Ways to Market Your Blog. You’ll be amazed at how many good ideas are packed into this one post. I picked up at least half a dozen tips I put into use right away.

• 12 Ideas for Quick Blog Posts by Jamie Lee Wallace at the Savvy B2B Marketing Blog is a little gold mine of great blogging ideas. You can’t read it and not come away with two or three topics for your next post.

What have you read in the last week you would recommend?

Last week I wrote a blog post for the Content Marketing Institute titled, How to Make the Case for Design in Content Marketing. The purpose of the post was to help content marketers understand that working with a designer can improve even the best content. It’s a tough argument to make to people focused on words and writing. I should know, I’m one of them.

Taking Advice
I started Global Copywriting with the words of Peter Bowerman ringing in my ears. In his excellent book about freelance copywriting, The Well-Fed Writer, he recommends teaming with a graphic designer. As he puts it:

“When you team with a graphic designer, you’re not offering writing services and design services. You’re offering a complete solution to a business need.”

That made a lot of sense to me. While I was waiting for customers to beat down my door, I started looking for graphic designers to partner with – hoping they could throw some work my way. One of my first meetings was with Ryan Briggs. We’ve successfully worked on many projects since then.

Epiphany
Ryan and I are both independent freelancers. He’s a great designer and our personalities clicked. But I do a lot of work without him, too. Often a client has their own design people or they prefer not to spend money on design at all. Since I’m focused on content, it doesn’t really matter who does the design on my projects.

Or does it?

One of the best things I’ve written has been the least successful. Why? Besides being ugly, the design was so terrible it actually hindered the reader. The client worked with a designer who had specific ideas about formatting the document. My suggestions on what needed to be done to maximize effectiveness were rejected, (e.g., the call to action was edited out as being “too salesy”). It was a frustrating exercise.

Creating Assets
Over the course of the past year, I’ve discovered a pattern. Since I do all the writing, I’m certain the quality of the content from project to project is similar.

• Content with no design is often unsuccessful.
• Content with an amateur design is slightly more effective. I’m speaking about documents I’ve formatted myself or where an admin person does design “on the side”.
• Content with professional design is the most effective, but is dependent on the talent of the designer.

That’s right, I’ve discovered not all designers are created equal. I’ve worked with great designers and I’ve worked with okay designers. There’s a big difference in the overall quality of the final product. When a document is able to generate leads or establish authority for a business, it’s no longer a piece of marketing collateral. It’s a business asset.

The Takeaway
Developing content without design is not a complete solution. From my own experience, I know a talented graphic designer can enhance content in a way words never can. Design can convince someone to pick up a document, or not. Design can entice someone to click on a link or miss it altogether. Design draws people to your content and makes them consider reading or viewing something they wouldn’t otherwise notice. Even the best words cannot do that. It’s why design is critical to Asset Based Marketing. Without design, your content is not a complete solution and it’s definitely not an asset to your company.

Where has design or lack of design made a difference to you?

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*Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono at www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last week I wrote a post about Asset Based Marketing, an idea requiring a content marketing strategy with an equally important design focus. While the article received a lot of attention, I wanted to take a few minutes to define the essential elements necessary to have your content become an asset to your marketing efforts.

Collaboration
I can’t stress enough the importance of a collaborative effort between content producers and your design team. Unless your content is visually appealing, it won’t be digested. If you publish without the assistance of professional design, you run the risk of presenting unappealing or unprofessional products. Copywriters and graphic designers each bring specific focus to a project. With both working in the planning AND execution phase, you will get an end result able to attract customers and prospects.

Body of Work
One piece of collateral may be able to stand on its own as a good piece of content. If it’s standing alone with nothing else to support it, you can’t classify it as an asset for your business. One of the principle truths of content marketing is it takes time to build your strategy. Published content, a social media presence, or SEO activity all require concentrated effort before they start adding benefit to an organisation.

Consistency
When building an asset for your company, consistency in your content is one of the most important elements of asset based marketing you can adopt. You can apply it in many different areas: frequency of publishing, adherence to your style guide, execution of your message. Once you start producing inconsistent content – in quality or substance – you corrupt your own asset.

Persistence
To realise maximum benefit in your asset based marketing program, you must be prepared to take a long-term approach. So many people abandon their Twitter or Facebook accounts after a month or two because they don’t achieve the benefit they expected. Blogs sit idle. News feeds stagnate. Newsletters dwindle in frequency. Scheduled case studies never materialise. Each activity will develop in its own time, but a collective effort with continual attention paid to each channel will produce results. Asset based marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Longevity: The Big Takeaway
An important distinction of a marketing asset is a long shelf life. Business has resigned itself to big spending on marketing and advertising with no guarantee anything tangible will come of it. Once an advert has run or the event is over, the only thing left is goodwill and, hopefully, brand awareness. Asset based marketing produces products with evergreen qualities. Blogs, white papers, podcasts, websites, and case studies all have the ability to continue to draw prospects into your company weeks, months and even years after you first publish them.

It’s no secret implementing a content marketing strategy requires careful planning. By adopting essential elements of asset based marketing, your efforts will result in long-term assets for your company.

What do you consider essential in your asset based marketing?

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Related posts:

• Asset Based Marketing: Where Content Meets Design[*]The Website Conundrum: Design vs. Content[*]Why Print Still Matters

*Image courtesy of John Althouse Cohen at www.flickr.com

What do you expect your website to do for your business? If you’re like me – and I bet you are – the ultimate goal of your website is to drive more business through your door. Whether it’s an e-commerce site, an outbound marketing site used to generate leads, or an inbound marketing site designed to establish your authority, the real reason to have a website is to promote your business. Did you ever consider your website might be losing business for you?

Poor website design will drive your customers away. While it might seem odd to hear a copywriter talk about the importance of design, I know a poorly conceived and implemented website will pretty much guarantee no one will ever read the web copy. It’s in my own best interest to share some of the more annoying attributes that could be losing you customers.

Music
When I took to Twitter complaining about websites with automatic music on them, I immediately received eight replies confirming it was a bad idea. Every person said they immediately leave a site with music. Me too.

Automatic Video
Nearly as annoying as music, websites that automatically download and play a video also raised the ire of the Twitterverse. Video is a great addition to any website, but let people decide if they want to play it. Don’t worry, people love to do things on a website. More than that, they like to be in control of their own experience.

Flashy Stuff
Unless you’re running a special effects company, avoid Flash and flashy features on your website. People visit your website to get information. When they have to deal with flipping tabs, new windows opening with every click or icons tumbling around the screen they give up and go somewhere else. Don’t you?

Small Print
Cramming more content onto a page by reducing the font size might sound like a great idea. It’s not. If you want people to read, make the type easy on the eyes.

Poor Colour Choices
Colour can be subjective and I’m not about to start a debate about it. However, if your print is similar to the background colour, you won’t have many people reading your page. Grey on grey, yellow on silver and red on purple are all difficult to read. Don’t do it.

Busy-ness
More is not always better and that’s certainly the case for websites. Position your content so it’s the obvious feature on the page. Filling up every bit of space with images and copy detracts from what you’re trying to accomplish.

This is a relatively short list of pet peeves, but every one of them is guaranteed to provoke your prospects to move to another site before they’ve even read a word. Your website needs to support the goals of your business, not the whims of your web designer. Ensuring your website “looks” attractive will give you a better chance to influence your current and potential client base.

What annoying features make you abandon a website?

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Related posts:

• 3 Things Your Home Page Must Do [*]8 Website Compliments You’d Rather Not Hear

*Image courtesy of briannaorg at www.flickr.net