Giving a good speech can be good for SEO

June 18th, 2013

Do you take the opportunity to speak at industry events, conferences and meetings?  You can get double the value from a good speaking engagement. Not only can you share your expertise, but when promoting your speech, there are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits.

Woman Smiling Behind PodiumMost people tend to shy away from public speaking, which provides more opportunity for you. The key to public speaking in many ways is the same as any other communication– make sure you know who you’re talking to and what you are going to tell them. This is the key to marketing in general. If you’re talking to a group that could potentially help your business, then that’s good. Next, think about what you’re going to say.  It’s a good idea to make sure that the subject matter you are talking about is what you want people to know about you and your business.

In my case, I give a talk about how to “Get Famous.” Since Placemaking Group is all about marketing, PR and websites, helping people understand how to make themselves and their companies better known in their industry connects right back to what we do for a living! We’re helping to make you famous.

One advantage of public speaking is you can really hit the subject directly. My advice when I coach speakers is to feel very comfortable in the subject. Practice speaking it a few times and make sure that any call to action statement is delivered clearly and with confidence. That is really the payoff for a speech. So, practice the call to action. Practice saying it clearly and without a lot of extra words. It’s often normal to make important sentences sound almost like a question when you’re talking. Try not to do that. Make it a clear statement.

Make sure when you’re promoting your talk that you use the keywords to improve your website’s SEO ranking. I know! It always comes back to the keywords. Then, when you write about your speech on your website or a press release or your blog, you’re letting people know that you have a talk that you give that is interesting and informative. It also tells the search engines that you are keeping your information timely.

If you need help with your speech, give me a call. As a speaker coach, I help with the subject and delivery of a specific speech. It can be a valuable experience to give a good speech to a group you’re trying to connect with and telling them what will help them grow.

Related posts:

Five Ways to Get Speaking Engagements

Three tips to Get Famous

Get Famous with Social Media at the Pleasant Hill Chamber

YOU are a brand.

 

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Posted in Marketing, Speaking Placement | No Comments »

Gated Content for Professional Services Firms

June 11th, 2013

content marketing for professional services firms

Many professional services firms (lawyers, management consultants, accountants, IT consultants and architects) we work with are developing content for their customers and using website content to educate and demonstrate knowledge to potential clients. According to a benchmark survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 33% of marketing budgets for professional services firms are spent on content marketing.

The question often comes up during meetings with our clients:  ”What content is valuable enough to be gated?”


First, what is Gated Content?

Gated content is when a website requires visitors to fill out a form before they can get the content, whether it is a PDF that gets emailed to the person, or a webpage, or MP3, that is delivered via the web.

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Posted in Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web sites | No Comments »

Five Steps to Maximize Your LinkedIn Profile

May 24th, 2013

linkedin-logo-1LinkedIn currently reports that it has 200 million members worldwide. Most have probably created a LinkedIn page to connect with colleagues and clients and have high hopes of connecting to prospects. However, many will probably never be found, because they have not maximized their profiles. Here are five LinkedIn profile strengthening tips to boost your profile and create a network of professionals that has the potential to increase your business.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »

Reacting Negatively on Social Media Doesn’t Help

May 22nd, 2013

 

kitchen_nightmareLogo

Here’s a great example of why you should be careful about what you post on the web, especially social media. A restaurant owner in Arizona has been getting bad reviews for a while now and was recently on Fox reality TV show “Kitchen Nightmares” starring Chef Gordon Ramsey.

That show didn’t go well for him either, so he ranted on Twitter…  “I AM NOT STUPID ALL OF YOU ARE, YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW GOOD FOOD.”

There’s a great article in the San Jose Mercury about this. “You need thick skin in this business,” Chef Ramsay said before walking out. It was the first time he wasn’t able to reform a business, according to the show. But the owner continued his rant on Twitter, Facebook and anything else he could find. That led to closing the restaurant for a week or two to let things simmer.

We all have an occasional bad review or negative comment in social media. The right way to deal with it is to apologize, if there was something wrong and perhaps give a discount for the next visit. But the idea is not to increase the negativity. That just doesn’t work. Here’s the article… Arizona restaurant featured on Fox show learns online reviews can make or break

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Posted in Branding, Facebook, Issues Management, Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »

Pinterest for Travel and Tourism Promotion

April 30th, 2013

GUAM-pinterest-homePinterest can be a powerful and fun addition to your travel and tourism PR social networking program. For those of you not already on the bandwagon, Pinterest is a social networking platform that allows users to create virtual bulletin boards on which they can “pin” inspiring images or videos.

Followers can like your pins, effectively bookmarking them, or repin them to their own boards to share them with their own followers. Gorgeous travel shots are particularly suited to the Pinterest audience; the combination of images, video and descriptions can bring a place to life for its followers. It’s a visually rich way to create a buzz around any travel destination.

Create boards to highlight different areas of interest for vacationers: for example, Placemaking Group client, the Guam Visitors Bureau shares images about local culture, Guam’s stunning beaches, wedding ideas, sightseeing activities, and sports and golf, among other attractions specific to Guam.

Likewise, the Micronesian island of Kosrae (also a Placemaking Group client) posts about diving and snorkeling, the island’s natural beauty, its people, and getaways, including links to reviews for Kosrae hotels.

Both islands use a mixture of original content from the Visitors Bureau uploaded to Pinterest, and repinned content posted by other Pinterest fans of Guam and Kosrae. Being engaged by sharing images is part of what it’s all about. With that in mind, Pinterest posts can easily be shared across platforms, cross-promoting your posts via Facebook and Twitter.

GUAM-pinterest-chamorroGUAM-pinterest-sightseeing
Contact us if you’d like to talk about having The Placemaking Group spearhead your travel destination’s social networking strategy.

Related posts:

 

by Deirdre Spencer, Senior Designer The Placemaking Group

 

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Posted in Publicity, Social Media | No Comments »

SEO and Article Marketing

April 29th, 2013

Do you want better SEO? Do you know why you want better SEO?  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming one of the most effective tools in the world of marketing–but only when it is used correctly. In the world of PR, we’ve been using it for years. Our goal is to get journalists to find the information for their story ideas at our clients’ websites, or by contacting them directly. We do keyword tweets on Twitter. We make sure that the keywords are clear on press releases and on our clients’ websites.

One of the ways to get better Search Engine Optimization is a process called Article Marketing. Here are two excellent resources for Article Marketing. You can start at Wikipedia and get the basics. There you learn that Article Marketing has been around as long as there have been newspapers and magazines. To use Article Marketing effectively, you must be an expert at something. You write an article about that subject, and you try to get it placed in a newspaper or magazine. The article has your name on it, and you are on your way to becoming well-known in your industry. That’s how Public Relations really started in the early 1900s. When the early PR professionals realized that if they helped make the journalist’s job easier by providing the right information for a story, they could get their clients’ stories placed in print publications.

When you add the Internet with Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., Article Marketing became, for some companies, a way of tricking the search engines to get your company higher up on the search engine listings. There were sites on the web that charged you for a link. Google and their colleagues eventually figured out what was happening and then made it very difficult for them to succeed.

But the actual concept of Article Marketing really can work for you. Your story has to be well written and informative. It can be a blog post, a press release that you have on your site, an article that you got placed in some other journalist website, or a case study that you have on your site. You want people to read it, and then go to your website and contact you. Phil Stone has written a really instructive piece called “What Is Article Marketing?” He gives you a good idea of the process, and what is possible.

The important thing to remember is to make sure your keywords are embedded in your story. But more importantly, make sure your story is worth reading–or it is a waste of your time and money.

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Posted in Blogs, Branding, Journalists, Marketing, Publicity, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Story Placement, Twitter, Web sites, Working with Media | 10 Comments »

The Advantages of Screencasting

April 17th, 2013

Do you often find yourself sitting at your computer noodling through a solution to a challenging technical problem only to find that the next time you need to perform the same task, or even worse, the next time you need to show someone how to perform it, you have totally forgotten the steps to success you had painstakingly sleuthed out? Well say hello to your new best friend, screen capture or casting. By simply capturing the activity on your screen and a voice over as you work through a solution, you can now walk the viewer through complex concepts more efficiently, helping you explain any subject with more depth and understanding.

Here at Placemaking Group we often use screen casting to record walk-throughs on the back end of our custom CMS system, “elfCP”.  We are able to perform specific tasks in the admin panel for a client’s website and record the process with voice over tips and direction.  This streamlines and simplifies the training process by showing the client exactly what to do step by step onscreen. The best thing is that the videos are then available for them to reference whenever they need a refresher course on completing a certain task or a when a new employee takes over the responsibility of completing it.

Here is an example of a walkthrough we created for one of our clients using the built in QuickTime Player screen recording feature.

 

Think about how you could utilize screen casting to your advantage in the business you are in; maybe it is demoing a new piece of software you have created, or maybe it is simply showing your employees how to fill out their electronic timesheet correctly, speeding up productivity and clearing up confusion … the possibilities are endless and exciting!

Software
Looking for a screencasting application? For the little video above, we used the built in screen recording function in QuickTime Player, which works great, and if you have a Mac running 10.7 or above you most probably have it right there in your Applications folder for free!

Here are a couple more options to check out  if you want to start your screencasting adventure and dont have Quicktime already installed:

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Like the look of our  ELF content management system, contact us for a more thorough walk-through and see how it could work for your site.

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Post by Jannah Lyon, Creative Director, Placemaking Group.

 

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Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Video | 10 Comments »

Do You Understand the Key to Social Media?

March 30th, 2013

Do you understand the basic advantage of using social media? Or, should I say, do you understand the key to social media?

I’ve given you the answer before, the key is achieving a heartfelt response. If the social media message is something that really connects with you, you respond. If it barely connects with you, you just keep reading past it.

In the last few days, two bloggers for MediaPost Publications came up with two different bits of news. In “The Disturbing Dogma of Social Media Marketing,” Kaila Colbin discovers a statistic. As she says, “In the provocatively titled ‘Can We Please Stop Hyping Social As The Marketing Messiah?’ Nathan Safran replaces assumptions with data. During the 2012 holiday season, for example, 34% of retail website visits came from search; 40% were direct; 2% — yes, a mere two percent — were from social.”

That should not be a surprise. For the times when we react to social media, there must be some very personal connection. Unfortunately for most marketers, they just haven’t been able to put a heartfelt personal connection into their ads and posts.

But Erik Sass finds out something about an industry that has a higher percentage of social media uses, Half Of Financial Advisors Use Social Media To Communicate With Client.

No one needs to tell you that communicating with your financial advisor can be VERY personal. So, as I’ve said before, social media is a set of tools. But they aren’t the answer for every situation. Remember, if you intend to use social media, make sure you can get a heartfelt, personal connection into it!

 

Related posts:

Constantly Evolving World of Social Media

Social Media Disaster For Progressive Insurance

Facebook Apps for a More Effective Page

Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Twitter | 24 Comments »

Why Do I Need a Blog?

March 13th, 2013

Sharing Your Knowledge Can Have Many Benefits

A blog can increase your search engine ranking thus helping you to generate leads from the web. How? By establishing many links across the Internet when your content is posted or linked to from other sites.

If you update the blog with new posts every week it can also create a community of loyal followers who will subscribe to receive weekly posts. However, blogs require ongoing updating and need to be marketed to realize their benefits.

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Posted in Blogs, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, WordPress Websites | 26 Comments »

6 Ways to Build Your Brand with Video

February 28th, 2013

Video has become a super hot medium for online marketing. Not only do high-ranking videos improve search engine rankings, but having video on your website can be an effective way to engage your audience, drive web traffic and convert customers. In this post, we discuss six ways to build your brand with video.

  1. Customer Testimonials
  2. Product Presentation
  3. Product Demonstration
  4. Case Study
  5. Corporate Overview
  6. Training — Step-by-Step instruction or how-to

There are some impressive statistics that show the growing power of video today.

  • Drive web traffic — Banner ads with video generate 6 times as many post-ad site visits as standard banner ads. (Source: MediaMind)
  • Increase sales — Enjoyment of video ads increases purchase intent by 97%, and brand association by 139%. (Source: Unruly). Also, a recent study from unBounce shows explainer videos can increase conversion rates by almost 20%. (Source Unbounce)
  • Go Mobile — Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016. (Source: Cisco)
  • Use a Proven Medium — In the US, 181 million people watched more than 39 billion online content videos during September 2012 (Source: comScore)
  • Increase email click-through — Including the word ‘video’ in the subject line of an email will boost click-through rates from 7-11% and emails that contained an embedded video achieved a 21% higher conversion rate according to Business 2 Community.
Video is a powerful tool for telling your story and is a compelling way to engage your audience and speak from a variety of viewpoints. With video you can show your product and tell why it is different: build your brand.

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Posted in Branding, Online Marketing, Video | 15 Comments »

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