A prominent speaker and authority in search engine marketing is coming to Utah to speak next week.

Image by Danny Sullivan on Flickr via CrunchBase

It’s Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land. If you’re a small business or want to learn more about online marketing, you should attend.

Social networking is great for building brands and can lead to sales, but when you are at the top of search engines for key terms relating to your business you can capture people who are ready to buy. I believe both are important.

Danny is coming as part of SLCSEM a group of people in Salt Lake interested in search engine marketing. So far the events have been very high quality and worth attending. There’s an hour or so of networking and then the presentation. Last time the food rocked too.

State of Search Marketing with Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land
Day/Time: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 from 6:00 – 9:00 PM (MT)
Place: 209 E 500 S (the Leonardo – formerly the Salt Lake City main library, right next to the new library)
Salt Lake City, UT 84111

Sign up here: http://slcsem-feb2012.eventbrite.com

Related: Make it a day of learning from the best. Alan Hall is speaking at a free event the same day called The Profit Experts Symposium.

Mark Cuban is an Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. He has a new book out. It’s short at just under 100 pages and it’s cheap too, at $2.51. He hopes to sell a billion copies (he seems to think in billions). Imagine if he does sell a billion copies. I’m looking for the current numbers, and don’t know what Amazon keeps but even if he gets $1 a book, that’s one hell of a profit (over $1.5 billion).

You’ve heard of blog to book deals. The newest rendition of this is blog to ebook.  And you won’t need a book deal or publisher. All you need is some big success and a lot of friends. Cuban has over 330k friends on Facebook and 760k followers on Twitter.

The book is basically a compilation of Cuban’s blog posts you can read free on his blog. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming an instant bestseller. It’s titled: “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It.” I like this interview with Mark Cuban about his book and life.

I love this line, it just strikes me as so amazing: Of all your business ventures, the profit margin for this book is unmatched. Much of the book already had appeared as blog posts, and the production, promotion and distribution costs were negligible.

I love to use Twitter to find great headlines. Here’s a few about this story:

The Book World Is Changing: Mark Cuban Creates A Best Seller Out Of Some Blog Posts

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hopes for a slam dunk with his new e-book

I’m buying it to see how it differs (in format) from his blog and to read it in one concise place on my Kindle. But really I’m reading it to see what all the hoopla is about. And to learn.

Check out

Mark Cuban’s book on Amazon

In related news, the Justice Department is looking into if Apple is keeping prices for ebooks artificially high.

When it comes to SEO, there are hundreds of elements that come into play when search engine algorithms determine rankings. From Title tags to anchor text rich links, the tactics are many and varied.

However, one element of the ranking algorithm that is often overlooked is the server on which your site is hosted.

Believe it or not, the type of server you host your website on can have an impact on your rankings. While it isn’t the most important element, when you are targeting a competitive niche every little bit helps.

When it comes to servers, you have 3 main options:

1. Shared Hosting – Your site is on one server with dozens or hundreds of other sites, usually on the same IP address. This is the least favorable option from an SEO standpoint.
2. VPS, or Virtual Private Server – Your site is hosted on a server with other sites, but your IP address is unique. A much better option than shared hosting, but still not the best.
3. Dedicated Servers – Your site is on its very own server, with a unique IP address. The best way to go, for many reasons.

Out of the 3 main set-ups, Dedicated Servers are the best from an SEO point of view. Why?

For one, it essentially guarantees that your website won’t suffer from any “bad neighborhood” penalties from being on the same IP address as potentially low quality or spammy sites. A dedicated server also tends to provide better up-time and much faster page load speeds, all of which are known elements of Google’s ranking algorithm.

A dedicated server is also much more secure, since you have complete control over what sites, programs and code go on your server. If your company deals with sensitive data such as customer credit card information or social security numbers collected through your website, you can’t afford to not be on a dedicated hosting account.

Though dedicated servers aren’t the least expensive web hosting option, they are absolutely worth every penny…consider it an investment in your business’s future.

This is a guest post from Sam McRoberts is the CEO of VUDU Marketing, a Utah SEO company. He has been involved with online marketing since 1999 and has worked with hundreds of clients, from small local businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Sam was compensated for this post, but the views and opinions on the topic are his own.

7-Eleven could be like any other convenience store — boring and predictable.  But they’re not. They are relevant, creative and fun. It all comes down to their PR. When I was researching companies for my book I was drawn to how 7-Eleven follows my PR philosophies. While mine are online, they translate well to both traditional and social media.

They create their own news, tie into current events and look for opportunities to “grease the wheels” when what they do captures national attention. I know 7-Eleven isn’t a sexy choice to love. I don’t see them as examples of social media success at all the conferences but I’m a big fan of their PR (along with Sharpie).

I wrote about how they predict election results by how many people bought their Slurpees in red cups compared to how many bought blue cups. They run their own campaign during every election and they can predict the outcomes with surprising certainty based on sales numbers.

At a press conference the day after the elections, President Obama made a funny crack about how he might hold a “Slurpee Summit” with the new Republican leadership. That set off a lot of free buzz and the company tried to make it a reality. Instead they gave free Slurpees at a DC location near the capitol and went on tour.

Note how much fun they had with this besides getting a story about it in USAToday (link above). I like this idea from the article:

“Strategy guru Mark Coopersmith says Slurpee should quickly go big in social media, nudging folks to have Slurpee Summits to solve problems.”

- USA Today: Obama’s ‘Slurpee Summit’ joke makes icy drink hot

My Thanksgiving had some ridiculous fighting about who was bringing what food and other trivial matters. I should’ve suggested we hold a Slurpee Summit and bought a round for everyone to try to lighten the mood (it all turned out well).

This is what I’d put in my book if I wrote it today – think of how you can start conversations and engage your community before, during and after a PR campaign.

Here’s how 7-Eleven did it. They ask a funny question:

Then they declared their own version of Black Friday: Purple Friday. They created a hashtag around it and got people into their store with a promise of free Slurpees. Some suggest it’s too cold and they should’ve offered free coffee in purple cups instead (you do lose a lot of sleep if you’re hitting all the sales).

You can create your own version of any holiday or current event too.

On Facebook they turned their profile picture purple:

7-Eleven (who is one of the few companies who might be better with a hypen in their Twitter name) got a TON of free coverage from both of these ideas. NPR, CBS News and lots of blogs picked up the story. Their stock even went up.

Let these campaigns from 7-Eleven inspire your creativity. What can you learn from these examples to promote your small business?

Related articles

• Slurpee Summit: 4 social media lessons (holykaw.alltop.com)
• GOOD RETURNS: 7-Eleven stock rises (politico.com)
• Black Friday Is Free Slurpee Day At 7-Eleven! (popcrunch.com)

More than 42 million women are involved in social media weekly, about half of them moms with children at home! Mommy bloggers reach many millions of these consumers, and they influence mothers’ buying decisions.

I call prefer to say mom bloggers or social media moms. Most people say mommy bloggers (which I don’t like as much because it sounds so patronizing for a grown adult to call someone else a mommy in any context. Would you like to be known as a daddy to your professional contacts or a dad?). Either way we’re referring to mostly stay at home moms who are actively blogging, tweeting and Facebooking. They have a lot of influence and if your product or service fits, you’ll want to pitch them.

Want to know what brands are working with mom bloggers? Just check out #GNO on Twitter or www.MomItForward.com or attend a conference like BlogHer or Evo. Can’t wait? you can attend a webinar next Thursday and hear from 5 mom bloggers who will share their PR tips from the trenches.

Leading “mommy bloggers” are going to talk about how to pitch them in a live 90-minute audio conference from Bulldog Reporter’s PR University.

“Pitching Mommy Bloggers: Top Women Online Influencers Reveal Best PR Pitches and Strategies to Drive 42 Million Consumers to Your Product or Service”

Day and Time: Thursday, October 14 (1PM EDT; Noon CDT; 11AM MDT; 10AM PDT) (Go to http://bit.ly/MomBlogs for more info)

Stephanie Azzarone, President, Child’s Play Communications; Blogger,
“MomMarketTrends.com”

Renee Ross, Publisher, “Cutie Booty Cakes”

Liz Gumbinner, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, “Cool Mom Picks”

Christine Young , Blogger, “FromDatestoDiapers;” Ambassador,

BackyardDiscovery; Contributer, WalMartMoms

Here’s what it will cover:

** What Motivates Mommy Bloggers: Key insights into the mindset fueling the momosphere—and how to use that knowledge to protect and promote your brand or product

** How each of our mommy bloggers approach what they do so you can make sure your ideas match their pitch preferences.

** Best ways to find, monitor and analyze online influencers in your particular market . . . and what to do with them once they’re on your radar.

** How mommy bloggers are using the recently updated Twitter, and PR can (and can’t) join the conversation

** New rules for crafting irresistible mommy blog pitches—the story elements and exclusive pegs that resonate with these bloggers and how to use them to generate wide coverage

** Hot Topics: Family, safety, children, economic pressures in recessions and recoveries—the concepts, trends, products, services and influencers that appeal most to the “mom market”—and how to incorporate them into your pitches and programs

This event will give you

• “rules” to follow when pitching mommy bloggers

• case studies of major brands that have been successful in social media

• PR faux pas to avoid with these bloggers

• how to communicate (without getting into trouble) in the “momosphere”

• how to build a PR campaign around mommy blogs.

Gather as many people in front of a speakerphone and a computer screen as you want for $199. No travel expenses. Use as a cost-effective, time-efficient means of training staff, while reinforcing key issues in a fresh, new manner that they will remember and act on.

I’ve been working on a national campaign that involves working with mom bloggers. It’s been very educational because I’m more used to being the blogger or participant than the one pitching. I’ve done live events with local bloggers but I’m doing more national campaigns recently.

I’m very interested in how mom bloggers have successfully worked with brands in product development and social media campaigns.

Do you want to learn more about how to tap into the social mom network?

I hope to ask a question to the panel about what charging for posts. Either way, I’ll be live tweeting from the call on Twitter – @Newspapergrl – please join me!

Related articles

• What Mom(my) Bloggers Want (ghdialogue.posterous.com)
• Mommy Bloggers: Tips for Marketing to the Mom Crowd (dontdrinkthekoolaidblog.com)
• Two levels of getting it right with blogger relations (getgood.com)
• Write a Review that’s as Sparkly, Interesting, and Delightful as You Are (blogher.com)

Orabrush YouTube Channel

UPDATE: Orabrush was just featured in this New York Times article.

Austin Craig sounds like a film guy – he writes, produces and even stars in shows. People recognize him and he’s become a bit of a celebrity. In the process of helping a local business he stumbled upon a new media career that wouldn’t be possible even just a few years ago — he’s a YouTube pitchman.

Austin has flown around the country to promote products in his fast, slapstick style that is popular on YouTube. Now he’s achieved fame and I predict fortune to. People he doesn’t know recognize him on the street and have even offered him discounts. It usually starts with, “Are you on the Internet somewhere?” Die hard YouTubers know him as the Orabrush guy and ask for an autograph.

Austin learned of Utah-based  Orabrush through a marketing class at BYU. The engineer behind the product that helps eliminate bad breath tried marketing his product unsuccessfully. He created an infomercial – which cost tens of thousands of $$$ but resulted in less than 100 sales. So Austin and his friend traded tongue brush marketing for a motorcycle. The first Orabrush video was Austin ranting and raving about bad breath.

I still get clients who want their video to “go viral” and this is a recent example of a company who has done that. But as you’ll see below it wasn’t just by chance. They have a good product and the videos were worthy of going viral but they needed a push. In other words, a little cash.

Like another Utah company, BlendTec of “Will it Blend” fame, YouTube put this company on the map. You may think the landscape is too crowded but remember Orabrush is just a year old. This is a recent success (as is the Old Spice campaign which amazingly enough won an Emmy. I love how even the knockoffs like this one from BYU have been successful).

The Orabrush YouTube channel has over 37,000 subscribers. It is the #7 most subscribed to video on YouTube by a sponsor.

They have a very well-designed branded page and a branded URL — www.youtube.com/orabrush. The videos get great ROI too. They brought immediate sales. They also got Orabrush into drugstores in more than 40 countries.

This is a great example of online PR where the most expensive solution wasn’t the best solution and online outperformed offline marketing tactics.

10 Ways to Achieve YouTube Fame and Success for your business:

1. Pay (or beg or trade) for talent.
   Personality and entertainment value is worth paying for. Consider hiring this out. It makes the difference between an average and a viral video. Where would Old Spice be without the Old Spice Guy Isaiah Mustafa?
2. Invest in promotion of your video.
   Like most viral videos the first few videos needed an initial push. The team heavily promoted the video with YouTube ads.
3. Study the most successful videos on YouTube and copy the elements that make them work.
   Dissect popular videos on YouTube to figure out what elements they share and use them in your videos. As I always say, the internet is an open book where you can see what everyone else is doing. Use this to your advantage.
4. Track and test to see what works for your audience.
5. Include a “call to action” at the end of your video and a social sharing element.
   Orabrush gave a free sample of the product. To get the free Orabrush you had to share the offer with your Facebook friends.
6. Consider making an “app-ertisement” — a branded app.
   Orabrush created a bad breath iPhone app where people blow into a phone to test their breath. Then they heard Austin’s voice spew pithy 1-liners.
7. Use user-generated content to get more user-generated content.
   Austin made another video of him testing the bad breath app on total strangers, Jay Leno style.
8. Make the video entertaining enough that people don’t realize it’s about a product until they’re hooked.
9. For branding create episodes tied to a common theme or character.
   In this case, they developed a tongue character who’s always down on himself to further brand Orabrush.
10. At the end of the video, ask people to comment, subscribe or watch another video.

I interviewed Austin along with my cohost Nigel Swaby for the Web Marketing Weekly Show. We should take some of Austin’s tips to heart to see how to grow our podcast by studying successful podcasts!

You can listen to the entire episode here. Oh, and I predict the next new media career niche is a YouTube talent agent!

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I love this infographics case study from Wordstream about how they just got into using infographics as an internet marketing tool. I’ve been recommending friends of mine to small businesses who want to get in on it. The potential for links and traffic is huge.

You can see how Wordstream tied social media into politics and the actual infographic here: http://www.vizworld.com/2010/01/infographic-coakley-brown/

I wish they would post some of their best performing infographics to illustrate their points. It’s a long post but worth the read as they give a lot of helpful tips. They tell you about the design part and how to do research.

Here are a few quick tips for creating a killer infographic:

• Make your infographic relate to your business.
• Don’t just use Wikipedia as a source of research – pick up the phone. “I’m not slamming Wikipedia. It’s great. But I don’t understand why some people in the field rely on flaky sources when it’s so easy to call a University or news source and say, “Hi, can I just verify something?”
• Create a killer headline. “A strong title, illustrative header section and recognizable theme are very important when trying to grab a user’s attention”
• Promote your infographic. Do some Google searches with your keywords and the word “blog” then send a person note to each. This related post has more detail about tweeting and promoting your content.
• They confirm what I’ve seen, the links and traffic aren’t as high from sites like Digg as they once were – finding an influencer to tweet or blog your infographic works wonders. But be realistic too. “While everyone would love a mention by a superstar (like Seth Godin), it’s probably not going to happen. I would advise talking to a few slightly less famous people whom are likely to help out if they find what you’ve done interesting.”
• Send out a press release about the news (something I always do before and sometimes after if it performs very well – they used Market Wire).

What should your infographic be about? Emotion sells.

And like really great link bait, infographics that go viral seem to evoke some sort of emotion, be it humor, fear, lust, shock, empathy, etc.

My favorite advice is this: For your link baiting to be effective, you must be willing to promote the living crap out of it. Even great content doesn’t go viral on its own. It often needs help.

This is important because some people give the bad advice that you just have to create good content & it will spread. It will — if you’re Seth Godin. The rest of us have to work for it – or if you hire someone – pay for it to be done.

It’s one thing to write a press release but you need to do the extra work to push the news or pay for the extra work to promote the content. Sometimes people get confused and think creating and promoting the content is one in the same.

I know I summarized a lot of the post – but it’s still worth reading them both – there’s a lot of details I didn’t cover.

I’ve had some strong results with Business Wire recently that highlight how capitalizing on trends is so effective. In both examples (next one coming soon) it was taking something that was already being talked about and piggybacked on it by sending out a press release while the issue is still hot.

Here is one of the press release case studies from OrangeSoda

Here’s the background story. A competitor in the local search space ReachLocal had just gone public. This is big news in the industry. OrangeSoda wrote a series of blog posts about ReachLocal’s IPO. It’s also a hot topic because Google had also shown interest in the industry. As the post states Google  reportedly offered “over $500 million for Yelp” and “a decent volume of smaller acquisitions and investments by consolidators like Deluxe, AOL, IAC, and YPG/Canpages.”

Right during all of this OrangeSoda sent out a press release on Business Wire about a new product release. It mentioned another fact that was big news – that OrangeSoda is now partnering to bring SEO services to local newspaper advertisers. That alone was a big story and got coverage in some blogs like Search Engine Strategies.

Now for the results (incredible)

Used with permission, here are the results:

• Over 200 sites and publications picked up the release so far
• Over 20,911 headline views and 1,533 full views.
• There have also been 84 links.

• 125 Tweets mentioning OrangeSoda and the press release (from both the Business Wire web site and bit.ly). This is how I found out about the story even though I work there.
• 40%  increased traffic to orangesoda.com (as of Thursday after the release).
• 166%  increased traffic to our blog (as of Thursday).

They continue to see increased traffic because of the press release.

Lessons Learned:

For maximum exposure time your news around what’s happening in your industry right now.

Write your press release in conversational or easy-to-understand terms. I didn’t write it but that’s the way I like press releases to read – like a story – not full of PR jargon.

You can get incredible results in terms of traffic, social mentions and links to your web site with a well-timed press release.

Online PR Book and Next Case Study

I spend an entire chapter talking about the importance of capitalizing on trends in my book, I Need a Killer Press Release, Now What??? and show you what tools I use to find trends in my Online PR Book. I also go over promoting your news online through social networks.

OrangeSoda really demonstrated how this works. In my next post I’ll talk about one of my clients who got some great print media and TV exposure for her book with a single press release. She had never sent a press release before but when the topic of adoption hit the news, she knew she needed to.

I attended the PRSA/IABC half day conference in Salt Lake City. It’s a first for me because I’m not a PR pro. But I find a natural home in PR because I believe the industry needs online marketing. It’s no longer something that specialists do – it’s part of the domain of PR. The lines are blurring so each is a blend of the other.

As David Henderson pointed out in his presentation with a dramatic image of ships falling off the ocean, the industry is at the edge and are hurling towards a huge drop. There is urgency to learning how to work faster and to use tools to help publish and share information in real time. The world is moving quickly on.

Journalists and those in the media are now expected not only to create but to publish and promote content. Just like online marketers. We’re being judged by the same sort of criteria – time on site, links, search engine rankings. When I go to my industry conferences we’ve beat that drum almost too much but in PR it’s still relevant.

So I’m very curious to listen to the comments and get a gauge of where people are in all of this. How engaged they are with social media, if they are partnering with online marketing agencies or bringing new talent into their agency.

As an example, Blendtec’s Kels Goodman was there talking about their wildly successful viral marketing campaign. At least 8 people had never seen (and maybe never heard of) a “Will it Blend?” video. This is surprising because this is one of the most important and successful online marketing campaigns in history. It’s a text book example and regularly cited in books and articles. It was made when YouTube was new (2006). And it’s in our own back yard – a privately owned Utah company. I lived a mile or so from them and had a good friend who worked there. This story is a triumph and it did have a financial impact eventually – but not in predictable ways.

The problem is despite our client’s wishes we can’t make something go viral. Most ideas won’t be. We lose a bit of control (being authentic demands it) and most of all we take risks. We connect dots and hope for success. This is not business as usual and we’re all on the roller coaster ride together. We can choose – either have fun or scream our heads off.

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• Top 3 Ideas from PRSA/IABC Utah Conference (newspapergrl.com)
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I’m reading Referral Engine by John Jantsch (coming out next month) and the part that asks a lot of questions has me soul searching.

He asks if:

• you’re easy to communicate with
• your value/marketing messaging is easy to understand
• you’re easy to network with, trust, buy from, work with, etc.

It triggered a lot of self-evaluation for me. It talks about making it easy to do business with you. Businesses that get referrals do this well. The problem is making it easy is actually hard. At least it is for me.

Some people I know do not have a voicemail message or they don’t have a professional voicemail message. Sometimes the message is – I don’t answer voicemails so try another way to reach me. In other words, more work for the caller. I think it’s sort of a hoop to weed out people who aren’t determined to reach them.

There are many different ways to communicate and for people to reach you – it can be overwhelming. Messages can come from different phone lines (home work, cell), Facebook, LinkedIn, IM, Skype, text message, Twitter, various email addresses (personal, business, etc). It gets confusing to remember where they are coming from.

The biggest thing I see in internet marketing that makes me not buy after a recommendation or a search engine refers me to you is your web site makes it hard to do business with you. It’s tough to see what you’re selling. I want to buy something from you but I can’t figure out if it’s worth the price you’re asking. There’s not much of a description or I cannot see sample content. When you write articles or press releases I think, that’s nice and move on. You don’t tell me what you want me to do next. You don’t offer to take me further into your sales process. So I never go.

On my own sites I struggle with this too. So I guess I’m saying that I realize the problem, but the solution? not so much. This book has made me realize that if making a referable business is important to me I have a lot of work to do.

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