“You have to stop thinking like a marketer, an advertiser and a communicator and start thinking like a publisher. Create information your consumers want, and they will share it…”
- David Meerman Scott

Lee Odden’s blog has a great summary of a presentation by David Meerman Scott’s on PR and marketing.

I love this rule: “Nobody cares about your products (except you).” And I’ll add, get over it.

He also said to stop using your own corporate speak and use the language your customers are using. To find out what words they are using, look at customer reviews for your products or products that reach your audience. There is a lot of information online. I like using it to write my product descriptions. Amazon reviews is a great start.

David shared the top ten overused words from a recent study:

* Next generation
* Robust
* Flexible
* World class
* Easy to use
* Scalable
* Cutting edge
* Well positioned
* Market leading
* Mission critical

Stop the fluff. Get to the point quickly. And give us a reason to care. That’s good marketing - and good writing.

“Voices of Search” blog compiled a list of the most popular search engine marketing blogs. The good news is Newspapergirl made the list.  The bad news is I didn’t break the top 200! I guess it might help if I were actually blogging regularly. Marketing Pilgrim, who I write for (which is not a lot lately) came in at #30.

At some point I went from learning and reading about Internet marketing to doing it. Much of it doesn’t seem new or exciting but I still love it. To write well you must read well and lately my reading has been confined to the newspaper and books that have nothing to do with my work.

I’m glad to have made the list with many people I look up to and respect. Now if I could get my blog updated and redesigned and make it a point to post more often!

Until now you could only get relative numbers of searches from Google’s keyword selector tool. It was somewhat useful, but it’s much better now because you can get actual numbers of searches.

For example, Google reports that on average 100 people type the words, “learn affiliate marketing” into the search box.  This is for the exact phrase, not a combination of the words or the words in any order. You can look at the various match types to see what the volume is for each.  The numbers are rounded up.
The average search volume for the term “newspapergrl” - a highly competitive term is 28. At least their is search volume though! Try it out - type in words that relate to your business and get an idea of how many people are searching for various terms. Then look at the competition (here’s one way - by typing allintitle:”keyword phrase” into Google and noting the number of results).  Another way to look at competition is to use a free tool (this is the SEO tool I use that is an extension of Firefox) that tells you how many links to the site there are, how long the site has been around, etc.

If you want to dig further, SEO Book’s Aaron Wall has a great article on keyword research and SEO.

I get an email from HR that says “free pizza in the break room.” The second I read it I call out, “Free pizza - RUN!” I’m hungry so I sprint. Then the entire SEO team starts running behind me. I’m laughing as I run. I have flashbacks to the movie Run Lola Run. We arrive and it’s already a madhouse but we beat most of the crowd there.

At OrangeSoda we’re still hungry. I find that makes for the most creative juice. It fuels a startup. It might explain why people are leaving Google (cashed in on stock options) to go to Facebook (possibility of lucrative stock options). That hungry stage usually fades to complacency and order.

Interesting enough in my personal life I’m going from famine to feast and I have mixed emotions about it. It’s welcomed but I want to keep that hungriness too. Except I don’t like worrying about eating (irrational though it may be). I noticed my fridge is a lot less full these days because when I’m scared about money I stock up. Now I’m clearing out to make and keep space.
5 mins after the email I hear there are 2 slices left…and speaking of still hungry….

Since I got into Internet marketing and fell in love with it the holy grail was a work-from-home job. I thought now I’m free! I can make money anywhere. I thought to truly arrive you had to work at home for yourself. That’s what I wanted. Then I got it, mostly.

At first working for myself was an adventure. I exercised most days, I met and talked to friends during the day and worked until late at night. I had flexibility. I worked in my pjs or sometimes in a towel (I don’t recommend you do that very often).

Then it started to wear off. I missed working with a group of people. I had some big disruptions with one of the companies I worked for and suddenly what I’d spent months building started to fall apart. In just a few months I lost over half my income, crashed my car, and had a rough go of it. You can probably tell from the tone of this post about getting a job.

I chose two places to apply. I’m not in a position to move or I’d be in the hipper Sugarhouse area of Salt Lake. But being environmentally and family - conscious I didn’t want a long commute. For a few reasons, I also had lingering trauma over having a regular job. I knew I wanted to work for a place where I wasn’t fighting for Internet marketing by myself. I wanted a team and a friendly or at least not hostile IT department.

I thought of not blogging about this but I notice a trend that even big time execs blog about departing or starting new jobs. It’s fashionable and in the dynamic industry I’m in, the average time at a job tends to be about 18 months. Then note that I live in an extremely entrepreneurial place. Most startups I’ve worked for over the years are out of business. Or they have VC funding that can mean quick unexpected layoffs.

Besides, Andy Beal outed the news on Twitter. I have built a bit of a following there, thanks in a large part to him. So I drank the Orange soda and rode the beach cruiser around the office. I’ve joined a few fellow Utah bloggers and others doing SEO for businesses at a company called OrangeSoda.

A thank you for inspiring this change goes to Penelope Trunk. I talked about how over time Internet marketing went from being my obsession to being a job I love. That means more balance and better separation between work and home life.

Orange Soda has grown quickly as agencies outsource their Internet marketing services to them. When someone says “free food” people here stampede. It’s young, hip, and still hungry like the beginning days of the web. Plus I love the noise.

Aaron Wall of the SEO Book blog wrote a great rant about PPC vs. SEO. He talks about how PPC (paid per click advertising) is a continual race to the top - eroding profits and starting bidding wars. Who wins? Search engines. Remember that Google makes 99% of their $16 billion revenue on advertising.

Both methods have some barrier to entry, because they’re both technical and take a certain amount of skill. SEO (search engine optimization) on the other hand is more difficult to copy. SEO is sustainable.

You start a client on blogging or an SEO strategy and they get nervous about how much time and/or money it costs and they stop. If they continued they’d see that it’s a worthwhile investment. The links don’t disappear after your budget does. However, it’s not a straight line to profit like PPC can be. It takes a slower, less direct path.
SEO shows a work ethic and builds credibility. It separates the legit long-term businesses from the get-rich-quick schemers:

This is why I like SEO so much more than PPC. Most people are too lazy to spend years researching their topic, years building a brand, years building links, and years building social and customer relationships. We are afraid of failure, afraid of success, and afraid that we are investing too much in one place. But, if someone sees me ranking in the organic results they can’t just clone it unless they know SEO well, and are committed for the long haul. In many cases, knowing SEO well means having capital, time, passion, and a lot of marketing knowledge.

Then he wrote about how if you do well, it’s easy for someone (or your ad network) to steal or copy you. Aaron had this happen - someone stole his ad copy - and here’s his response:

SEO separates out real businesses from 95% of the people buying PPC ads. The guy stealing ad copy is too lazy to compete at that level. I’ll enjoy the logarithmic growth in profits (which have been at least doubling every year) while he keeps stealing table-scraps from Google and other affiliates until his accounts get banned.

This is why successful internet marketers who are the real deal start to give away their secrets. After they’ve built their business, they can afford to tell people how to do what they do. They know most people won’t have the skills or work ethic to get where they are. Some do, but it’s a small percentage.

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Yesterday my business partner and I had lunch with Courtney Tuttle, a blogger and Internet marketer (www.courtneytuttle.com).Up until a few days ago I didn’t know he lived close so I contacted him and the next day we met him. Courtney is just as generous in real life as he is in his blog. He openly teaches what he’s learned as an internet marketer. He’s built a successful small business with several virtual employees.

I asked Court for a quick interview about our discussion. Sometimes I’m writing more than actually interacting, so I followed up after to get things in his own words. Keep reading to see what other topics we covered and for some excellent advice.

Please enjoy:

Q: What is the best way to make friends with other bloggers?

The best way I’ve found to make friends with bloggers Janet is by writing about them. This comes very easily to people that are unselfish and can be a huge asset. I’ve written quite a few posts that are about bloggers that I look up to and some of those posts have turned into very cool and rewarding friendships.

For an example on his blog see Top 7 Internet Marketers you Can Trust - which features Wendy Piersall and other well respected bloggers. This post is how he got to know most of them!

Q: What is the most rewarding part of blogging - to you?

Educating people on topics that they don’t understand. There is so much bad information out there it’s almost scary. I have always been honest with people about what internet marketing is and people appreciate that.

Q: What’s your favorite (most utilized) internet marketing tool?

Honestly, I’m not a big user of many tools. I do use Wordze [to find the most searched keywords] for most of my keyword research.

But I make the final decision on what keywords I want to target based on my own evaluation of the sites that rank well in Google for the keywords I’m researching. I guess I should say that my favorite ‘tool’ is testing. I have enough sites to test literally thousands of ideas and that is how I learned most of what I know.

Janet inserts - I haven’t tried Wordze.com but they really should optimize for the word Wordz - because they were nowhere on that search. Also, Court told me they have will show you what sites rank highest for the keywords you want to target and show backlinks. It also shows the rate at which they add new links. He also mentioned for less trafficked web sites, he uses StatCounter to get stats.

Q: What’s the best idea you’ve had for your business?

Getting help! Honestly I don’t know how I used to do everything on my own. I know have a group of people that help me with my day to day tasks, and that has really improved my quality of life. Increased time has helped me to think more clearly about what my business needs.

Q: How do you determine which keyword phrases to concentrate on?

Well there are a lot of different strategies that I use to select keyword phrases. For a niche blog, I choose keywords that have very little competition so that I can rank in Google very quickly. For a flagship blog, I choose the biggest and usually hardest keyword phrase in the industry because it will give me the most traffic once I get ranked in the top few sites.

Q: What’s your favorite linkbuilding strategy?

I actually don’t have a favorite because you have to have huge diversity to have success in your link building campaign. I would have to say that my most powerful link building strategy for CourtneyTuttle.com is the brand that I have created.

If you are really helping people to learn a business, they will show their gratitude and excitement by linking to you. If you aren’t giving them knowledge and skill that they can use, they probably won’t. They will start to believe in you and your brand if you can give them information that works and this will lead to praise and links. I would say that a pretty high percentage of my links are of this type.

Q: Has Internet marketing changed your life?

Well to be honest I have always approached internet marketing as pure business. I’m able to separate my life from that and other than having a nicer car than I used to, I don’t really think it has impacted my life at all. To me, business is business and life is life. I like to reserve my life time for friends and family and I try not to let my business get in the way of that.

Q: What technique for making money online consistently performs best for you?

Well I’m a web developer that likes to use a lot of diversity, but I would have to say that the content approach has always been the best model for me. My biggest skill is my SEO knowledge, and creating content sites works very well with that knowledge.

Q: How do you work for hours on end with absolutely no human interaction?

Well, to give anyone that reads this interview a little background, Janet and I had lunch yesterday and we figured out that in one area we are very different. Janet seems to really like interaction with people while she’s working. I prefer to work alone, as strange as that sounds.

To answer your question Janet, I’m just very different from most people in this area. I have a abnormally high amount of focus when I’m working on something, and distractions kill that focus for me. I can usually work two to four hours (sometimes up to 10 hours) without blinking. During some of these times that I have had huge moments of clarity that have helped my business to move forward.

To some people this trait is very strange Janet and I can understand why. Most people need constant interaction and I can understand that. As cold as this may sound, I simply don’t have that need. One thing that might to contribute to that trait while I’m working is my ability to turn off ‘work mode’.

I live with some good friends and we are always doing stuff at night. Last night, for example, there were about 15 people at my house to just hang out and watch the Jazz game.Tonight we’re having people over for game night - it’s looking like we’re going to have about 15 people again. We’re always hanging out with different people.

I don’t really feel like I have to have as much interaction during the day because I have more than enough at night. That means that during the day I can get more work done than I would be able to do otherwise and I can still be a good friend and have a social life. There are, of course, emergencies that can pull me out of work mode - taking care of family and friends has to come before anything else or you just can’t be happy.

I’ve been writing a lot more SEO press releases again and so it’s on my mind. I want to go over the steps of writing an SEO press release.

1. Assemble the facts, news angle, and begin writing.
   To me, the best quality press releases involve actual interviewing, on the phone. There is so much more information you get by talking to someone. Sure, you can use email and that works, especially because you can’t misquote and you have a record. However, when you interview the right person, their passion for the subject can shine through and you can capture that essence in your writing. It also makes the story unique. But it takes longer.
2. Identify the keyword phrase or related phrase you want to optimize your press release for.
   This can be easy if you already know the phrase but most of the time you need to do keyword research to see the competition and demand for a keyword phrase. You may want to go for a niche keyword that you can rank for more quickly. If you choose something like “Internet marketing” then you’re up against at least 100k other web sites who want to rank for that. That’s a long-term investment.
3. Incorporate the keyword phrase into the press release.
   You need to make the keyword phrase an anchor, use it in the first sentence, title, and body of the press release. Don’t overdo it or it will look like spam. There are times I take an existing press release from a PR firm and add SEO. Otherwise you may want to start out with keyword phrase first rather than adding it later. I like my press releases to read well and the feel of them to come through first and then add keywords.
4. Submit the press release to a press release distribution service.
   This sounds easy, but this is almost as much work as writing the press release. Each press release service has different rules according to how much you pay.
   Links - Some won’t allow links, most regulate how many links your press release can have. Even the process of creating links is different for each service (and not always intuitive).
   Optimization in the code (you can’t see this because it’s just for search engines) - You might need a list of 20 related keywords and write a summary with keyword phrases. This is SEO that no one sees but is very important.
   Categorizing your press release - You may need to categorize your press release by subject and geographic areas.
   Social media optimization - You may be able to add tags or other aspects, like Digg, Delicious, etc.
   Attachments - If the service (like PRWeb) allows attachments, images, podcasts, etc, you need to identify and upload those.
   Timing- Most of the time you need to submit your release a day or more before you want it to go out. For the media, you want to make sure that’s not on a weekend.

I’ve crafted a great press release for search engines and for people. I know that my editorial score will be high so there will be upwards of 50k (conservatively) clicks. Then they change it so it sounds right to them (but messes up the search engine optimization piece). Sometimes legal, a few VPs, and directors have to buy off. That can seriously affect the success of your release (and takes much more time).

I’ve written press releases for newspapers and the media and we just faxed or emailed them to a list. Not much thought after writing except to target the release to the right people. Writing for search engines is much more technical and takes quite a bit more time.

Feel free to add information that I may have overlooked, or reference your posts about SEO press releases. Within the SEO industry we know a lot and none of this is news to you. However, I wanted to distinguish the difference between regular press releases and SEO optimized press releases.

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I just read a feature about blogger John Chow on the Unusual Business Ideas that Work blog. I met John Chow at Blogworld a few months ago. The post talks about how much he’s made from blogging - $25k a month. He started out making $300 a month. He spends about $550 a month in expenses. He’s only been blogging for a little over a year.

The article talks about how he makes money giving away his ebook free (with affiliate links). The article says he uses more than 100 ad networks, like AuctionAds and Kontera ContentLink. 100 ad networks - my head hurts thinking about managing that!

“There are no rules or limits in blogging,” he said. “Your earning power is only limited by the traffic you can attract.” Which is the same with web sites, only blogs take a lot less effort to update.

Today my business partner and I met Courtney Tuttle (you should read his blog too). We discussed how web sites attract people once and they usually don’t return. Blogs create a community that people return to again and again to read the latest. That’s why blogs and social networks have such marketing power.

They sum up with this: Blogging isn’t just a pastime or marketing gambit anymore; it’s a living.

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I wanted to link to an earlier post about Walmart and then I discovered something: my blog is messed up. None of my permanent links work [this has since been fixed]. I can’t quite express how I feel about the fact that almost 3 years of work and writing is inaccessible to the search engines right now. [Now I can express this - I'm glad they are back!].
I won’t detail the things that have broken lately - but I’m fixing them just as fast as they break. When things like this happen in my life it is a sign - a sign that it’s time for some changes. If you read my blog you can see this theme build over time and it hit crescendo recently. I have honestly learned a lot about this dynamic and what it means just by blogging about it.

Internet marketing has been my passion, almost like a love affair. I ate, breathed, and lived it. I wrote about it. When I started this profession it was an enormous challenge to learn. Reading and learning about it filtered into almost every aspect of my life. Over time, starting with being laid off last year, it’s become a job. No more and no less. Still a job I love, but not with the fervor that I’ve had for four years.

It was a grand adventure. I learned the best and worst about internet marketing. I tried a lot of things. There was nothing else I’d rather talk about. But I don’t stay up all night doing Internet Marketing that often any more. I value my sleep. I’m reading about other things. I value balance. This was a horrible realization at first, one that rocked my world. But over time I see it as a necessary and healthy one. It sounds like a break up, but be assured, in this case we’re remaining close friends. lol.

If I chose a word to describe this past 6 weeks it would be: broken. The word I want for the next 6: is restoration. After that I want it to be: resurgence.

I want to distinguish that I’m not burned out. I’ve read posts from other bloggers that signal it’s time to change professions. They are very negative and say that nothing works. Internet marketing works - it’s one of the best lead generation techniques I know. I’ve detailed why several times, but no other marketing technique can you get so targeted in your message, let you measure it so precisely, and do it for such a low cost.

What I’m saying is when my day blogging and consulting ends, it ends. My attention goes to other things. And that marks a big shift in my world.