Internet Marketing for Independent Professionals

It occurred to me on my way home from Mashable’s networking party (thanks for the comp ticket, Don) after SocialMediaCamp tonight that much of internet marketing now revolves around reputation management.

• Your ranking in the search results is based in large part on what other web sites think of you, as measured by Google’s PageRank algorithm and similar measurements at other search engines.
• Your ranking at Google and other search engines is increasingly based on whether you are listed in local directories like Yelp and CitySearch and what your customers say about you there.
• Your ability to land clients increasingly depends on your profile at professional networking sites like LinkedIn and what people say about you there.
• If you write a blog or post comments to other blogs, your readers will quickly develop an impression of you based on what you write and how you deal with comments and criticism.
• Similarly, your postings to discussion forums and how you comport yourself there feed your online reputation.

And the list could go on. The point is, For better or for worse, and whether you like it or not, the web is where many people go these days to assess your professional reputation. There are many implications that arise from this, perhaps the most germane of which is that you should take a proactive approach to developing and maintaining your web presence. Here are a couple of good articles on how to do this:

Reputation Management Emancipation Proclamation - 10 Ways to “Own Yourself” Online

Ten Ways to Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results (this one is mostly how to clean up your online profile if it has been sullied)

No posts for the past week or so due to a Seeds of Compassion wrap party immediately after the end of SMX Advanced and then full massage days, plus a lot of scrambling to address the issues identified in a technical review of Bodywork U on “Developer Day” at SMX Advanced (thanks Vanessa, et al.). I just hauled out the last load of stuff from my old massage office and am now off to BarCamp Seattle.  Then mom’s in town for a few days, plus there are music rehearsals this week for the Solstice Parade ensemble I’m playing with, so it may be the end of the week before I post again.

I feel like I’ve got my money’s worth already at the Search Marketing Expo, and there’s still a whole day to go. Great speakers and really smart and interesting conference attendees from around the globe - over half of my conversations were with people who flew in from Scotland, Germany, Japan, and Denmark, just for the conference. I felt like a travel wimp, having traveled only a few miles on the 26 Express bus to get to the event on the Seattle waterfront.

According to their web site, “SMX Advanced is for the experienced search marketer who wants to enjoy sessions conducted at a high-level and continue to stay ahead in the fast changing world of search. If you’re fluent in search marketing, SMX Advanced is where you can converse with others who speak your native language.” I’m happy to report that, despite my focus on my massage practice for the past five years, I can still hang with these folks and even occasionally make useful contributions to between-session chats.

I parked in the “organic track” (presentations geared for people who are trying to get listed in the organic, as opposed to paid, search results at Google, etc.) room, which was also the location for Danny Sullivan’s opening remarks, his keynote interview with Microsoft bigwig Kevin Johnson, and Danny’s “You and A” with Google’s Matt Cutts. If not for the great food and exhibits downstairs I might never have budged from the room.

Kevin Johnson, President of Microsoft’s Platform & Services Division, likened Microsoft’s position in the search world to where they were with server software 15 or 20 years ago, a niche player dismissed by their competitors (back then wags were saying that NT stood for “Not There” or “Nice Try”) and struggling to gain market share, but they stuck with it and are now a multi-billion-dollar player in that segment. He thinks that by focusing on searches with “commercial intent” and by improving the user experience that MS will gain ground in the search space. Time will tell. . .

The first session was “Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques.” Roger Montti opened the session with some great advice on how to identify high-quality potential link sites. Jay Young of Link Fish then shared his unrepentantly dark-grey-hat take on the subject. As a fan of white-hat search marketing I was a little taken aback at his urging us not to fear Matt Cutts and to go ahead and buy links and to “spam the shit out them” with comment spam, but I must say it was very refreshing to see such candor (which I told him when I ran into him at lunch; I also told him that I’d love to see him debate Eric Ward sometime about link-development tactics, a conversation which might go something like this one at SEOmoz a while back). Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts then weighed in with one of the densest presentations I’ve ever seen, rattling off insane amounts of detail on identifying and getting links from good sites, as well as tips on blogging and using social media to get in-links to your website.

Next up was “Bot Herding,” a session which focused mostly on PageRank sculpting, the practice of tweaking your (mostly internal) link structure with “nofollow” attributes in meta tags and links, JavaScript, and other methods to transfer “link juice” to important pages on your site. This session was technically interesting, but, as Evan, the Google engineer on the Q&A panel (and later Matt Cutts) noted, this is a second-tier strategy. Your time can be much better spent on more fundamental search engine optimization tasks (developing good content, e.g.).

The “Buying Sites for SEO” session was geared toward folks interested in buying sites to get links to their site and/or to build existing site networks. Much of this session was devoted to ways to conceal your affiliation with a site you have bought for SEO purposes. I was much more interested in the general principles of how to research and ascertain the value of a web property.

The day wrapped up with a “You and A” (get it? like a Q & A) session with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team. As is always the case with Google presentations, the SEO crowd didn’t get the inside dope we’re all hoping he’ll accidentally spill at some point, but he did clarify a number of Google policies and reiterated the consistent Google message, which he succinctly put at one point as this litmus test: “Would a user be annoyed if they landed on this page.” This gets at the underlying theme of everything I’ve ever heard from or inferred about Google: just do what’s right for the user, and you’ll stay in Google’s good graces.

Tomorrow is Developer Day, so it should get even geekier. Until then. . .

Hang on to your hats. I’m going meta on you today, blogging about blogging. And I may even mention some bloggers who blog about blogging, so it could get pretty deep around here.

My last post on the importance of a strategic approach to internet marketing immediately elicited a long and thoughtful comment from an associate of the guy whose presentation I had written about. I loved this development for a number of reasons:

1. Keith’s comment is a great set-up for a future post on reputation management. I can only assume that Keith is a smart, proactive internet marketer who understands the importance of keeping track of what people are saying about you and your company online. (This is easy to do, by the way. To get started, go to Google and create alerts for your name, your employees’ names, your company and product names, etc. More on this in future posts.)

2. I just watched the blogging segment of Rand Fishkin’s excellent SEO training video a couple of nights ago. Rand recommends that you open your blog to comments only after you have a critical mass of regular readers (I think he said 300); otherwise you run the risk of having virtual tumbleweeds rolling across your comment-less blog for months on end. I thought about that but decided that getting any interaction with my readers would be worth the risk, so I have enabled comments here right from the start - and I’m glad I did.

3. I also got some insight into writing for a blog. As you’ve probably already noticed, I can ramble. Believe it or not, I actually published less than half of the words I wrote Thursday. Some of the dregs turned out to be useful in my reply to Keith’s comment. So I’ll save for a while the text files in which I draft my blog posts.

If you want to learn more about blogging, a couple of good sites to start with are ProBlogger and my friend Karen Anderson’s blog, Writer Way. These are both general blogs about blogging. As I find better examples of blogs related to massage education, massage practice, etc. I’ll post them here.

I went to a web-design talk presented by Refresh Seattle last night. I had heard good things about their previous events and was looking forward to seeing what the presenter had to say.

Kevin Tamura of Blue Flavor gave a good talk on the design process, using a case study of his redesign of the Refresh Seattle website. Kevin seems like a nice guy and certainly knows his stuff when it comes to HTML, CSS, the graphic design process, typography, color, design tools like Photoshop, and web-page layout. But I’ve got to admit that I was put off by the lack of a strategic vision and/or an explicit business rationale for the redesign.

As a business strategist, I was put off by the lack of a clearly stated business intention for the site and its redesign. Granted, this is a small site for a small audience and was done pro bono. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to think through your business intentions (announce events? promote events? showcase prior speakers? link to presenters’ websites? link to related content? demonstrate content-area expertise? articulate the organization’s mission?) before undertaking any design project.

As a content strategist, I was put off by the fact that the redesign called for a one-page site. How about archiving info on old events so that folks know what you’re about and so that search engines have more content to index so that they can infer what your organization does?

As a web usability advocate, I was put off by the lack of consideration for sight-impaired users. Web usability best practices call for fonts that the user can resize, but the design he showed uses fixed-pixel-size text sizes. It also uses unconventional “navigation” (if one can navigate a one-page site), including a confusing, albeit clever, block of text that flips back and forth between presentation info and the presenter’s bio.

Anyhow, this event got me thinking about the importance of taking a strategic approach to internet marketing. I’ll write more about this soon because I’m tired of seeing friends and colleagues waste their hard-earned money on sites that show off the skills of the designer or programmer that built them rather than helping them achieve their business goals. I want to make it clear that I don’t think that folks like Kevin are malicious or poorly motivated; they are simply ignorant of, or indifferent to, internet marketing best practices, which is what this blog is all about.

So what can you as a bodywork professional do with this information? Well, I strongly suggest that you always keep your business objectives at the forefront when you undertake any design or technical project. It’s very easy to succumb to the esthetic vision of a designer or the leading-edge technical prowess of a programmer, but always ensure that those whiz-bang factors take a back seat to your business priorities.

Ever wonder why you buy stuff you don’t need? Why you find yourself driving away from a dealership in a car that you paid too much for? Why otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people would join a cult? Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion can help you understand these and other situations in which people influence each other.

This is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. The author, Robert Cialdini, has incredibly broad and deep social psychology knowledge and a constantly fresh curiosity about why people behave as they do. Unlike many academics, his writing style is clear and engaging, so the book is actually fun to read.

Cialdini identifies six “Weapons of Influence.” Each of these weapons is based on predictable human responses in various situations. He calls the people who apply these weapons to their work - sales people, marketers, fund-raisers, et al. - “compliance professionals.”

1. Reciprocation obligates you to future repayment of gifts, favors, invitations, etc. Reciprocation explains all kinds of interesting behavior, like why in 1985 Ethiopia, which was desperately poor and in the throes of war and famine, would send $5,000 to earthquake victims in Mexico City. It turns out that Mexico had sent Ethiopia aid in 1935. Fifty years later, “the need to reciprocate had transcended great cultural differences, long distances, acute famine, and immediate self-interest.” Reciprocation also explains free samples in grocery stores and how airport solicitors like the Hare Krishnas are successful, as well as more subtle ideas, like the “gift” of a sales person backing away from selling you a high-priced item to sell you a lower-priced one.

2. Commitment and Consistency uses our desire to behave, or to appear to behave, consistent with what we have already done or said. Cialdini cites research that shows that if you leave valuables by your beach blanket and stroll away, observers to a staged theft will intervene only about 20% of the time, but if you simply ask someone nearby to keep an eye on your things the intervention rate rises to 95%. This idea also explains why so many American soldiers appeared to collaborate with their Chinese captors during the Korean war and why college-fraternity hazing rituals are so resilient in the face of public criticism.

3. Social Proof is inferring from others’ behavior how we should behave. The laugh track in a TV sit-com tells us that we should laugh, and we do, even if we know that it’s a contrivance designed to make us laugh. Evangelical preachers have been known to seed their congregation with “ringers” who bear witness at pre-arranged times in a service. It also explains disturbing phenomena like the infamous Kitty Genovese murder in New York City in 1964. Dozens of her neighbors witnessed the brutal and prolonged attack that killed her, but none of them called the police. Many social scientists and commentators at the time ascribed their inaction to apathy and urban depersonalization, but Cialdini offers another possibility; because all of the observers were looking for “social proof” of a problem from those around them, and since none of them offered any, no one did anything. This “pluralistic ignorance, ‘in which each person decides that since nobody is concerned nothing is wrong’” means that the idea of safety in numbers is wrong, that if you’re in trouble you want one person, not several, to happen upon you, and research bears this out. Social proof can also help explain the Jonestown cult mass-suicide and other imitative behavior.

4. Liking is simply the idea that we prefer to say yes to someone we know and like. This explains the success of Tupperware parties (you’re buying from a friend, not the company) and why used-car salesmen will inevitably find several things in common with you (”You’re from Omaha! My wife’s from there.”). It also explains the Good Cop/Bad Cop phenomenon (the Good Cop looks an awful lot like a friend compared with the abusive Bad Cop) and, in the converse, why people make death threats against TV weather people when crappy weather ruins their outdoor wedding.

5. Authority is the idea that we’ll do what people in authority, or who appear to be in authority, tell us to do. It is perhaps best illustrated by the famous Milgram experiment in which research subjects would willingly inflict horrifying amounts of pain on people at the behest of an authority figure. It also explains ad copy like “9 out of 10 doctors use. . .” and the use of TV actors to lend faux authority to a pitch. Authority can be conferred by position, obviously, but also by simply adopting a title; an anonymous call to a hospital ward by someone simply identifying themselves as “Doctor Smith” resulted in 95% of nurses unhesitatingly agreeing to administer an unsafe drug prescription (don’t worry; they were intercepted and told of the ruse before they could actually give the medication). Or you can dress to convey authority; in one experiment, people were more than three times as likely to follow the lead of a jaywalker in a three-piece suit than someone in more casual clothes.

6. Scarcity explains why something that wasn’t even of interest to you 10 minutes ago suddenly becomes urgently desirable, just because you’ve been told that the store is almost out of it (I just fell for this last week, buying my brother a marginally interesting Christmas gift just because it was the last one in stock). Naturally, sales people and other compliance practitioners use this weapon all the time with messages like “Hurry! Ends Sunday,” “Final Week,” “Last Chance to Save,” etc. It also explains why we really, really want stuff that has been banned, censored, or otherwise made scarce, even if we had little interest in it before we learned of the scarcity.

I’m sure I’ll still fall prey to these weapons, but not as often now, since Cialdini ends each chapter with a “How to Say No” section. And, of course, as a marketer and sales person I will ethically employ them. I’m sure they still work, but I would love to hear Caldini’s thoughts on them now (he wrote this book before the dawn of the internet) that media is so much more transparent. Anyhow, this is a great book, a good read, and very useful to both consumers and marketers alike.

It occurred to me the other day that most current internet marketing resources are designed for the hobbyist, the person who enjoys tinkering with their web site, honing their AdWords copy and e-mail offers, and pouring over their Google Analytics reports. Those folks are well served already, so I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon.

This site is for independent professionals and small-business owners who don’t care about internet marketing. Well, you care about it, the same way you care about your Yellow Pages ad, your logo design, or your utilities. But you’re not about to divert time away from your core business activities to learn the intricacies of print advertising, graphic design, or plumbing.

My mission is to help you benefit from the power of internet marketing without having to learn the details of every new business practice and technical advance that comes along. To be honest, I don’t know yet exactly how this will pan out. I will certainly blog a lot about this, and I will flesh out the “Internet Marketing” articles, always aiming to give you non-jargon-ey advice and step-by-step guides to the 20% of internet marketing activities that will give you 80% of the results you need. I may even succumb to the frequent requests I get to offer consulting services (but don’t call me yet).

Stay tuned. . .