Free ‘Cut Out and Keep’ Guide to Online PR

POSTED BY: Roger Warner   /  CATEGORIES: Content Optimisation, Keywords, Online PR Agency, SEO, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing
POSTED ON: 28 Oct 2008
TAGS: Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Keywords, Online PR Agency, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing

Like all good consultants, we can’t resist a good diagram. Venn, Pivot or Pie, we love them all. Here’s one we cooked up a little earlier today…

It’s our free ‘Cut Out and Keep’ Guide to Online PR!!

Go on, print it out and stick it on your office wall. It’s concise and perfectly formed …and if you follow all the bubbles step by step then we guarantee you’ll soon be generating a stack of buzz and some great new web traffic.

Here’s a quick tour….

1: Keywords

Keywords are critical. We recommend you do your keyword homework before embarking on any Online PR, social media or SEO activity. You ought to know what your audience is interested in before trying to woo them with your content. Use tools like Google Suggest to discover who’s searching about what (and why). Your goal is to latch onto established keyword markets and optimise your content within this context. If you’d like to know more about the science, then check out this post on keyword identification and content optimisation.

2: Content Optimisation

Once you’ve established your keyword markets, it’s content optimization time. Your content is both your bait and your destination, so you need to ensure it’s dressed for the occasion! Make it search crawler-accessible by cleaning it up at the code level, and structure it properly so that Google can really get its teeth into it. Naturally, everything should be keyword-rich, including server-side concerns like domain names, url paths and the like. And it should also be easy on the human eye, because your end game is to have people clicking, signing up and buying. Check out this post If you’re interested in learning more about the ins and outs of content optimisation.

3: Content Generation

Now that your house is in order, it’s time to generate a steady stream of compelling, keyword-rich content and host it on your site: video, podcasts, blogs, papers, articles – all those wonderful assets that’ll get your site visitors engaged and coming back for more. Importantly, all of these things should be presented on your site in an accessible (and standards-compliant) way so that search crawlers can get excited about them too.

4: Content Distribution

When your content’s in place it’s time to go tell the world about it. ‘Build it and they will come’ was never a great maxim for the web. Instead you need to get this content out and about and into people’s faces. How? By distributing your press releases via online news hubs; creating social media profiles on which you can post videos, presentations, articles and all your other stuff; and persuading other bloggers and/or media outlets to feature it on their sites. All of this will extend the reach of your ideas and messages. It’ll also make it easier for other people to do the talking on your behalf (services like YouTube are built to help content go viral via code snippets that make it easy to embed your content in other people’s site, and ‘send to a friend’ functionality, etc).

5: Content Engagement

At the same time, you should start interacting with other like-minded companies and individuals: get involved in their debates, exchange ideas on their forums, and participate in their social networks. All it takes is a little time and effort. Read blogs and comment on them. Link out to other sites and encourage them to link back to you. Make your content easy to comment upon and bookmark with social tools like delicious. If you can do this effectively, you’ll find your content becomes part of the fabric of the web – embedded in the discussions that are relevant to your brand (and/or ideas), and firmly set within some very specific keyword universes.

In Short

If you can execute the above, your PageRank will improve as a direct result. You’ll join new conversations and connect with new, influential people. And all of this will have a very positive effect on your site traffic: better quality visitors, who are more engaged and more likely to buy and/or interact with you.

Measurement

Finally, you need to measure your progress ….regularly, and using some concrete metrics like PageRank, SERP (search engine results page) performance for your chosen keywords, volume of backlinks, visitor bounce rates, time on site…. etc, etc.

But enough of the theory. Let’s go make some noise…..!

(Footnote: Online PR 101 White Paper to follow very soon. Watch this space…)

POSTED BY: Roger Warner   /  CATEGORIES: Content Optimisation, Keywords, Online PR Agency, SEO, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing
POSTED ON: 28 Oct 2008
TAGS: Content Optimisation Agency, Content Optimization Agency, Keywords, Online PR Agency, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing