OrangeSoda Internet Marketing Blog

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I’ve noticed a trend with clients - some have news and new information coming out all the time. Others struggle to come up with ideas. For search engine optimization and to establish yourself as an expert in your industry, you need quality content. One of my favorite methods to get new traffic to your web site is through an online press release.

Online press releases are press releases released online. Instead of just posting them on your site, your news is distributed through sites like Google News, Yahoo News, and on related sites and blogs. The best sites charge for this service.

Before you can release news online, you have to come up with something newsworthy. If you can’t come up with a news angle, your story is better distributed as an article - or else an advertisement.

“What makes a story newsworthy? For the media to consider your announcement newsworthy it must have a strong news angle and be interesting. The angle (or news peg) is the story hook; the news event; the controlling issue; the reason for the media to publish your story. Your news release needs tell people your story.” - PRLeap blog on “writing a press release”

There are usually newsworthy things happening in your business all of the time, but you’re not used to recognizing it. Look at your stats, sales, and what is happening in your business or industry and why. That’s usually the start of a good story.

First: brainstorm. Are you hiring more? Less? Are you involved in a good cause? Were you featured on a TV show, popular web site, or magazine? Is there something unexpected in your business?
Tips to Get Ideas for Newsworthy Stories:

1. Tie into the season or time of the year – like if you installed heated driveways, you would note how summer is the time most people plan for a heated driveway.
2. Tie into larger stories like politics, trends, social developments (like gas/energy prices, housing prices, credit slump or even trends and hot topics in your industry. You can look at industry magazines or web sites for ideas on stories that you could put your take on).
3. Human Interest – create news around how a client or person was personally affected by your business, etc.
4. New Development – a new feature for your product or web site, a new site or blog, trends in your industry or business, new hire, new investment, awards, partnerships, speaking engagements, events, contests, sponsorships, etc.

If you still can’t think of anything to write about, find news stories from your industry and give your unique take on the news.

If you’re a new business of any size, that has a web site, your business and marketing plans need to include SEO (search engine optimization). SEOMoz has a great rant about how often startups don’t even mention SEO as part of their strategy.

SEO is how you make sure you’re in search engines and that your site is found for words that relate to your business. Most people find web sites through a search engine, they type in words, usually starting out vague and getting more specific as they go. For any business online optimizing for search engines should be a paramount concern.

But even before that, you’ll want to do some keyword research to see that people are actually searching for or interested in what you plan to sell.
The author, Rand Fishkin, says: most never even examine the possibility that there might already be people searching for the product/service/website you’re creating, and that by getting in front of their eyeballs right when they ask for it, you might have a good chance of succeeding.

What you can learn from keyword research:

• What terms people are searching for
• Demand or popularity of those terms
• How much competition there is on each term
• Get ideas by looking at related keywords

When you’re at the top of the list when someone types a term that is related to what you sell, you are getting very targeted traffic - people already interested in what you offer. The results last for years and the ROI for SEO tends to be the highest over other types online marketing.

After Chris Finken’s post last week about call tracking, I wanted to follow up with a post by Seth Godin about not only tracking but call quality. Godin is one of my favorite marketers - entertaining as well as enlightening. He just posted on how important a phone call is to your business.
More than a call, it’s a chance to build your brand, and learn from a customer. “The most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call…The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. She’s focused, interested, paying attention and willing to trust you.”
Normally a phone call and especially an email takes low priority, but as Godin points out, it’s an opportunity. He asks:

• Shouldn’t every single inbound call be answered in one ring?
• Shouldn’t there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website?
• Shouldn’t you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in?
• Shouldn’t you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute?
• Shouldn’t there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?”

He concludes: the goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.