Guest post by Derek Vaughan

Having been involved with PR since the days before new media, I have made numerous adjustments to my PR strategies to maximize the impact of my news releases in the digital era. Unfortunately, I have also seen many ”old school” agencies and PR experts who have overlooked these critical elements of the modern digital news release. Here’s a bit of what I believe they may be missing.

1. Using keywords in the headline

To anyone who’s ever used Google news or a blog post to gain website traffic, the need to have well targeted keywords in your titles is obvious. Search engines (including specialty search like Google News) automatically look through online content and begin with the headline or title of a piece to determine the overall category for the content and the search terms that may trigger that content to appear. Continue reading

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I love reading SEOBook and from the SEO perspective, I think Aaron Wall is quite the guru. I also think he’s got very cool marketing and business development insight to share. But it seems Twitter is where our opinions start to differ. According to his post on Twitter, this microblogging platform is a big page rank waster, mostly because of the no follow links. True. He also seem to think there’s little to gain from using Twitter. Aaron also quotes Seth Godin on the fact that, just like the phone, Twitter is only a connecting medium, not a marketing medium.

My question to you is: if you could (legally ) listen to people’s conversations on the phone, hear them when they mention your product or service, if you could start your own conversation with them, wouldn’t you be all over the phone? I know I would!

Twitter might be nothing more than a connection between many dots, but it’s an extremely transparent one. You can literally watch thoughts spread through word of mouth. Tweets and retweets and the circle keeps growing. Continue reading

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

The first week of spring is officially here and we have some chirpy blog posts for you to read. How you find them as inspiring and energizing as a sunny spring day.

Drew McLellan shared some amazing marketing insight after learnign a few tricks from a dog whisperer. Now that I’ve read the lessons, Drew, could you be so kind as to teleport the dog whisperer here, I think I need some help with my lab!

The newest, coolest thing when going to a conference is to live tweet it. So how exactly do you effectively present to a room full of tweeting birds? The answer comes from Tamar Weinberg on Pistachio.

Do you want a custom design for your blog? I know I did and my dream came true. But before you imlement this project of yours, please stop to consider a few issues explained by Alex Cristache of Blogsessive.

Stuart Bruce discussed PR, SEO and the fact that public relations, while employing quite a lot of search engine optimization, is not really about SEO, it’s about reputation.

We’re all obsessing about elevator pitches. While doing so, Frances Cole Jones, guest writer at Women on Business, point out that we overlook the importance of the FAQ page and the great results such a page can deliver.

What do you do when you want to launch a new product or service and have no idea what customers would think of it? Daniel Secareanu suggest the simplest and best solution: ask your customers.

You’ve all seen your share of teasers before something new hits the market. Michael Martine of Remarkablogger shows us how to get an audience drooling for a blog that doesn’t exist yet. His approach seems a lot more effective than a criptic add!

Google rankings involve a lot of things. It’s a secret recipe everyone’s after. And one of the reason no one has discovered it yet is that it’s learning and adapting to new tricks. Aaron Wall noticed a new trend: Google started placing heavy emphasis on branding.

When organizing an event, keeping the audience interested and excited about it is critical. Barbara Rozgonyi shares 9 ways to keep events alive with social media.

And we’re closing this week’s edition with a business puzzle from Corina Saceanu. Where’s the money?

What great posts have you run across last week? Please share them in the comment box!

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Naomi Dunford, who’s a never ending source of small business marketing ideas, is right when she says that SEO is scary. It is at first, second and maybe third. It is when you run into a complicated article and although you know the words, you really don’t understand them in the given context. It’s even scarier when you start grasping what kind of work you should really do to be able to say your site is pretty much optimized for the search engines without having experts laugh at you. And it is scary when you look at a new book you’ve just purchased wondering when exactly you’ll have the time to read it. It’s 50 pages, but still, you’re a busy bee!

Well, Naomi manages to solve the time issue for you with her SEO School ebook. After a few pages, you’re laughing so hard, you can’t stop yourself from making time to read it. It’s a trick! She wants you to read the book, fall in love with SEO, or her style (this works if you don’t read her blog), and gets you to learn what you need to make your website better.

Cover Shot Credit IttyBiz Continue reading

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

It’s been quite a while since the last round of monday reading tips! The vacation had that weird effect on my blog, but I’m back with new great posts, all published sometime last week.

To start with, I chose something that really isn’t my style. But given the increasing number of people getting married to fast and ending up divorced, this really made sence: some really importantquestions to ask before getting married posted by Lin Burres.

Zane Safrit of Small Business Trends showed us a great way to keep our best employees as long as possible: greeting them with open arms.

Hendry Lee of BlogBuildingU highlighted an important aspect of off page optimization that we should always keep in mind: links.

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer taught us a great lesson: how to work with brand enthusiasts and not against them. Looks like a very effective technique!

While Wall Street is going down, SEO seems to be growing fast. Tad of SEO 2.0 gave us 7 reasons why this was happening.

Meltdowns are something really hard to avoid. No matter how hard you try, they will still happen. Jonathan Fileds explaines last week that meltdowns are really not important, what’s important is how you handle them.

Robyn McMasters shared a writing lesson: keeping your text inclusive so that all your readers feel welcome.

And to round up this week, here are the top 5 reasons why blogging rocks our world day in, day out. Alex Cristache of Blogsessive is responsible for this one!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s list. See you all next Monday!

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