There are LOADS of companies you can hire who make grandiose promises about site hits and where you’ll land in Google search results.

Some of those companies use “Black Hat” (ie: negative) techniques which can get you blacklisted by search engines – effectively the opposite of what you’re looking for. So how do you know who is reputable? What’s the best way forward?

Here are some tips:

• If you get an email from a company you’ve never heard of promising something too good to be true, it IS too good to be true. If it was that easy to have huge success, EVERYONE would be hugely successful. Also, if that company was as good as they say, they probably wouldn’t have to reach out to you out of the blue to drum up business. You’ll want a recommendation from someone you know, or at least a company that has great reviews on which you can follow up.
• It’s possible to get your site on the front page of Google, or visited by thousands of “people” but are these relevant metrics? If you’re on the front page of Google for a term that few people search for, that’s not particularly valuable. For example, if you’re a new author, being on the front page for your name might not give you much bang for your buck, but being on the front page for the book genre would be excellent. And if you have a massive increase in site traffic, but it’s not turning into sales or repeat traffic because the site visitors were mislead, that’s not helpful. Ask whatever company you work with to explain what they’ll do, and if it’s easy for you to understand that’s a good sign. If they spit out a bunch of gobbledygook and act like it’s over your head, they’re not who you want to work with.
• What does success actually look like? Ideally, this translates to sales of your product or service, but you need to define what you want to get out of a relationship with a search marketing firm and make sure you’re on the same page as them. Make sure you can measure results with whomever you’ll be hiring with a relevant metric for you.
• Design your site for PEOPLE not for search engines. Don’t fill your site with content just to attract search engines, and don’t listen to any firm that tells you this is a good idea. Not only will this result in a poor user experience, but search engines are smart enough to figure out if you’ve packed your site with keywords rather than actual content.
• If other sites will link back to your site, make sure they’re quality and relevant. Having links back to your site (especially from popular sites) is a great way to boost your ranking, but be discriminating. It’s not worth it to exchange links with sites that aren’t relevant to your business or where the content is questionable.
• It’s about communicating, not broadcasting. It’s about relationships with relevant, real people. Whatever path your web marketing will take it’s not something you do once and forget about. It’s also not about the old-school method of broadcasting how awesome your company is and expecting people to come knocking. Any valid modern method will involve cultivating and communicating content that’s relevant, helpful, and starts a conversation. This means you want to be involved — you want to be a part of the conversation with your existing or potential customers — not only so that relationship can turn into business, but also so that there’s not a disconnect between the way your marketing firm is representing your company and the way you want your company represented. In the best case you have complete faith in your marketing firm to handle your outreach relationships, but even then you’ll want to be part of the conversation.

You’ve assembled a great team to build your new website: Congrats – that’s huge! Besides providing content & monitoring their progress, what should you be doing to help the site succeed? (more…)

Social Media! It’s everywhere! It’s on everyone’s mind! Everyone is talking about it!

Some of it is hype & some of it is truth. I often get asked to distinguish the two, and almost everyone wants to know the “magic formula” for social media advertising success. While there are certainly some things you can do to gain success, there is no magic bullet or single prescription. And that’s the beauty of it. Social media is about people and communities, and each one is different.

Here’s an interesting link that describes some effective, recent social media ad campaigns: http://mashable.com/2010/09/14/social-media-campaigns/

When you look through the projects discussed there, it’s easy to think “Well, of course Gap and Starbucks have great social media ad campaigns! But not all of us have the time and/or boku bucks it can take to run a killer social media campaign. What do *we* do?”

My advice: learn from the best & play to your strengths. If a company like Starbucks; a nameless, faceless international corporation, can create content that feels sincere and personal, just imagine what a small business can do! Small business employees are close to their product/service – they’re involved in multiple aspects of the company – the kind of stories and experiences they can bring to a social media campaign are priceless. Also consider how accessible a small business is – if I can login to Facebook and contact the founder of a company with a question and get a quick answer, that’s a level of service and access that leaves me wanting to participate again and again. You don’t need a huge graphics budget & you don’t need expert coding skills. If you need help to get your brand established, or a brief consult with an experienced professional to design a strategy for you, a small investment with a skilled web designer is all it takes to get you up and running.

This post starts a new series: “Clever Internetizens” — it will be a series of interviews with people on the web who have a great web presence. They utilize their websites and social media effectively across a variety of disciplines. Today I’m talking with author & librarian, Sara Ryan (http://sararyan.com). Sara has written two novels, Empress of the World and The Rules for Hearts, and a bunch of comics including the series Flytrap. She’s currently working on a graphic novel for DC Vertigo called Bad Houses.

I was in grad school at the dawn of graphical web browsing. As soon as I learned how to ftp and change file permissions, I set up what was then known as a Personal Home Page. (Old. School.)

I used it mainly to recommend things I liked.

• How long have you had the website that you have now?

I’ve had sararyan.com since 2001 (here’s a snapshot via the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20010219040125/http://www.sararyan.com/). The design has evolved considerably since then.

• How did you decide what it should look like?

I knew I wanted a sort of collage/bricolage appearance, because I wanted to be able to add images relating to new projects without necessarily changing the whole design. And I think the site’s retro/antique look is paradoxically less likely to feel dated over time.

I also asked my readers; the Flickr and LibraryThing widgets and the prominence of the blog on my frontpage came as a result of their feedback.

And finally, I worked with highly skilled code monkey Space Ninja (spaceninja.com) to develop the details of the look-and-feel and make sure the site worked on different platforms.

• How often do you update it?

It varies wildly — sometimes I post several times a week, sometimes I take a hiatus for as long as a month. Probably the average is about once a week.

• How do you use it to publicize the work that you do?

Like most folks, I announce events and link to interviews. I also make a lot of work available on the site. I have several short comics that you can read online (you can also buy them as chapbooks), and I’ve recorded myself reading my first novel, Empress of the World, in its entirety as a series of podcasts. I’m working my way through my second novel, The Rules for Hearts, too.

• How else do you publicize your work?

I like Twitter.

I’m on Facebook as well, in a low-key way. I respond to comments on my wall, but I’ve never set up fan pages for my books or used it to send event invitations. I can’t quite bring myself to cross that particular self-promotional Rubicon.

And I crosspost my blog entries to LiveJournal. It’s not as popular as it once was, but a fair number of folks still hang out there, especially genre writers, so there’s a certain sense of community.

My overall approach: I don’t force myself to participate in spaces that, for whatever reason, don’t feel right. Lots of writers are on GoodReads; I’m not. Lots of writers have Google alerts set up for their names and book titles; I don’t. And sure, I might miss out on seeing some nice reviews, but I also don’t have the stress of wondering whether a particular mention will turn out to be depressing or delightful.

• How do you balance and prioritize the tasks of writing and self-promotion?

In a sense, the balance is easier for me to maintain than for some of my friends who write full-time on a book-a-year schedule. They always need to simultaneously promote the current book and write the new one.

I have longer stretches between books, so the level of self-promotion ebbs and flows fairly organically. And sometimes I’ll take a hiatus from the blog (as I did in August) to devote more time to writing.

• I love that you’ve posted individual podcasts of you reading your work – what prompted you to do that?

I noticed that my computer had GarageBand!

Seriously, I like reading out loud, and podcasting seemed like it would be easy and fun — which it has been, in part because I, um, don’t worry too much about sophisticated audio production values, e.g. I just record and post.

I started the Empress podcasts as a way to build up to the publication of Rules, and continued because people seemed to enjoy them.

• You regularly blog about other authors and books you recommend – what prompted you to do that?

I read a lot; I like talking about what I read with friends; I like treating blog readers as friends.

• How much do you share about projects you’re working on before they’re published? Does it help your process at all?

I share much less than I once did. I’m less likely to report on word or page count, more likely to discuss process in a broader sense. I wrote a while back on the differences I’ve observed in revising a graphic novel script vs. a prose novel, and I have a post in the works about unexpectedly useful reading.

I think the danger of talking too much about a project-in-progress is that readers may wonder what’s taking you so long (!) and/or get tired of it before it even appears. And publishers often move a book’s release date, so if you’ve said Hey, it’s totally coming out on September 1st!, and then you find out it’ll actually be February 27th of the following year, well, that is no fun for you or your readers.

• What’s your advice to authors when it comes to their online presence?

Have one. At minimum, basic information about your books, a bio, upcoming events. Make it easy to contact you if you want to be contacted. In terms of social media, do what interests you. Don’t blog if it feels like homework, don’t tweet if it feels like a waste of time.

That said, don’t be afraid to try something new, either. It took me a while to get the point of Twitter, now I find it nigh-indispensable.

Thank you, Sara, for your thoughts and advice to those looking to create or optimize their web presence!

If you’re considering creating a Facebook fan page, or already have one and want to improve it, here are five tips to help you get the most out of your efforts:

1. Consider a custom tab.  If your page’s Wall tab isn’t particularly active, or you’re not very well known, creating a custom tab allows you to craft a landing page that lets people get to know you.  Facebook allows you to set this custom tab as the landing tab for all non-fans.  Just like your website’s landing page(s) you want your custom tab to quickly impart what you’re all about, and have at least one call-to-action (eg: visit your website, sign up for your newsletter, purchase something).

2. Specifically ask people to “Like” the page.  It’s been shown that Facebook pages that specifically ask people to click the “Like” button are much more successful at acquiring fans.  Lets face it, there’s alot to look at on the average Facebook page – people are easily distracted by ads, or notifications, or even your content – so reminding them to “Like” you page in a clear way help you cut through the clutter.

3. Create a great Profile picture.  You have the opportunity across all tabs of your Facebook page to display a profile picture – don’t waste that opportunity!  This is basically advertising space – and while you don’t want it to read like a banner ad, you want to use that space to reinforce your brand.

4. Make sure to get the optimized URL.  Pages with more than 25 fans can get a shortened URL for their page.  Not only is this easier to remember, it’s easier to reference throughout the rest of your online & offline collateral.  To get the URL once you have 25 fans, visit http://www.facebook.com/username

5. Keep your page updated! You can have a great Facebook page design, with a custom tab and a killer profile pic, but if you’re not regularly checking in to participate in conversations with fans, or share interesting content, there’s little reason for people to ever visit your page again.  Your Facebook page is an opportunity to keep you and your business active in people’s memories – if they see an update in their feed from your page, they’re much more likely to visit and participate and pass it on.

NOTE: Since this post was written Facebook has (of course) changed the way that Pages display. The below points remain relevant, however, even with new display parameters.

Recently I’ve been asked about which to invest in first for an online platform if you had to choose just one: a Facebook page or a website.  Like with most things, it depends!  There are a number of factors that will go into your decision, like what Facebook audiences have come to expect, how much content you have to share, and the overall goals of your project/business.  I’m going to break down these factors + the limitations of each, so read on to learn more about which is better for you when it comes to Facebook pages and websites. Read more …

Like with many things besides the pie vs cake debate (pie is clearly better!), there is no clear answer to the blog vs email marketing debate. There is also room for both – have your cake and eat your pie too! Lorrie (of Web Marketing Therapy) and Kate virtually sat down to create some guidelines for to help get you started.

Before we get into it, though, let’s break down what form they take most often:

A Blog: A blog is part of a website or a stand-alone destination in which content is published over time. It becomes a valuable repository (hopefully) of information and links.  Also, people can visit to read/view/listen to your posted content and interact with the author(s) by leaving comments at any time. People can use an RSS feed to subscribe to your blog, which delivers the latest content from your blog to their Feed Reader or their email inbox. You need a platform on which to create your blog, like Blogger or WordPress (my favorite).

Email Marketing: Email Marketing is a subscription-based service in which you send content (eg: a newsletter) via email to a subscription list. What you send can include text, links and images, but needs to adhere to some of the limitations of the email programs that will display them. Often, an incentive is offered to entice people to sign up for your mailing list. You need a service that allows you to create a way for people to sign up, manage the subscription list, and send emails to them.

So how do you know which to use when?

Read on…