2010 March | BizRock Marketing

SEO Step 1 – Keyword Research

The first step to search engine optimization is always, always, always the same – Keyword Research.

I can not tell you how many people don’t do this first. You have a general idea of what people are searching for, but you are wrong. You need to do some research.

Here is what I do:

1. Look at the product I’m selling and try to put myself into the mindset of someone looking for that product or service.

2. Come up with a list of keywords that I think someone might use to find the product or service.

3. Here’s where the research comes in – I then take that list and put it into Google Adwords (Free) or WordTracker (Annual Subscription) – There are hundreds of other keyword tools out there, but these are good for me. SEOMoz can also be a great investment.

4. Use the tools from step 3 to find suggestions, Look for long tail keywords to target. If you are a local business you can often get an advantage over the big players.

5. take those keywords and search them up. This is where you find out who your online competition is. Look at their sites, keyword densities, titles, h1 tags.

6. Now you have a bunch of information to look at and a bunch of keywords to target. Put those keywords on a list and give them to your staff. The more aware they are the more aware your company is.

I’m not saying SEO is simple, but it’s not exactly rocket science.

Best of luck to you!

Publicity Stunts

Publicity stunts can be a great way of getting your name mentioned and bringing attention to your products or cause.

-But-

You need to think of the overall message. If you have someone doing jackass type stunts or causing people to get stuck in traffic they are going to be speaking negatively about your brand. Also, it needs to be legal (mostly).

Your publicity stunt needs to give people something to talk about that’s interesting and maybe a little weird. You also need to film it for youtube and other video channels as well as blog about it.

Get as much as you can out of everything you do.

Here’s a couple of cheap and interesting things you could do:

1. Easter is coming – Go hide some eggs. Maybe buy 1,000 plastic eggs and put some wrapped candy and your business card in each. hide them throughout the city.

2. Get a mob of people to all wear shirts for your company and do something silly – You can find a lot of people on Craig’s List, Facebook, Twitter that are bored and would do a bunch of silly things for a free shirt. Maybe all sing Tomorrow from Annie in Washington Park – could you imagine 100 people singing the sun will come out on a drizzly day?

3. National Pillow Fight day is coming in April – Get people to wear your shirt to the event. 10% unemployment means 10% of people are sitting around bored. They might love to go hit people with pillows. You could also get pillows with your logo on them, but many of the organized pillow fight events already have sponsors for the pillows.

Small Businesses Should Use WordPress

I have been telling my clients for years that they should take a good look at wordpress before investing in a new website.

Seriously. You can get the fundamental root of your site up in 8 hours of work instead of hiring teams of people to do it.

http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/03/28/top-10-reasons-for-building-small-business-websites-with-wordpress/

I do a couple of websites a week for people using wordpress as the back end.

Want me to build your site on wordpress?

For 200 bucks I’ll install, configure, add the pluggins I use, and give you a 30 minute lesson on wordpress.

I will not do the graphic design for that price When you start getting into the look of the site you are talking more about a marketing plan, market research, SEO, Customer Relations.

Of course I do those services as well, but I get paid a lot more for that type of work