Press release formatting is somewhat like an apple pie recipe … there are hundreds, and most of them taste as good as each other, but there is only one Sara Lee. When it comes to press release formatting, your grandma’s recipe just won’t cut it … as delicious as it might be! If you’re struggling with press release rejection, we look at the correct formatting guidelines for your documents.

Heading - Most press releases begin with the words ‘For Immediate Release’. This is usually typed in capitals. It is a hangover from the idea that news may be given to the media, but not be ready for the public to hear yet. This will almost certainly not be the case with your press release!

Title - Think long and hard about what aspects of your release are most important to the public. What are the benefits, rather than the features, of your release? Try to incorporate these into your headline. Write down several versions, so that you can go over them later and re-assess which makes the best impression and biggest impact.

First Line - Your first line should state the city, then the date, followed by a colon that leads to your introductory sentence. If you are located in China, your press release’s first line might be:
Shanghai, July 4th 2009: The Wing Wong Dim Sum company has announced a new multi-million dollar prize, offering a factory tour and a free lifetime supply of dim sum to five ‘Golden Noodle’ finders in their new competition.

Body text - Your body text should allow your entire release to fit on one A4 page, with a point size of 12 point for the writing. There is not generally a lot of text to put in press releases - journalists want the bare facts, and will call if they need more information.

Try to answer the questions ‘Who?’, ‘What?’, ‘When?’, ‘Where?’ and ‘Why?’ in your release. This helps journalists write their story, and if your press release is structured well enough, will sometimes allow them to use it verbatim. That’s great power over the press!

About section - Include a factual description of your company, and outline of products and services. At the very bottom, include all of the following methods of communication - contact name, company name, phone number, email address, fax number and URL. This allows journalists to easily contact you about your press release if they wish to use it.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Successfully marketing blogs requires a sharp, multi-pronged sword…and the willingness to cut through plenty of obstacles with it! Much of your blog promotion success will depend on your blog design and content - yet even the most beautiful, thoughtful, fresh, informative blogs can fail if nobody knows about them. Here we look at tasks completely separate from your content and blog creation that ensure your high-quality blog gets high-quality traffic.

Blog networking

Reading other people’s blogs, and then either commenting on them or placing trackbacks to them on your own site, is an easy activity for marketing your blog. You can do this completely separately from creating your blog content.

Guest Posts

Contact other bloggers within your niche and ask them to do guest posts on your blog, in exchange for you working on theirs, or even as a paid project for them. Your blog will gain status in the eyes of subscribers to your guest blogger’s page, and the reverse is true also.

Making Contact for Link Exchanges

Contact other blogs in your niche and ask if they’d like to add you to their blogroll, in exchange for a link on yours. You’ll be surprised at how many blogs there are out there - that is why this is listed as an ongoing rather than initial activity.

Related Social Media Advertising

Spend some time every week working on a strategy for marketing your blog based on social media - this will probably be in consultation with an internet marketing firm. Set up and personalize a MySpace page, create a Facebook group or two, have some of your friends mark your posts in StumbleUpon or Digg.

Blog Carnivals

Spend some time finding blog carnivals, subscribing to their feeds, and creating articles to submit to them. Blog carnivals can help a blog go from zero to 50,000 visitors a month, according to Steve Pavlina.

Tweeting About Your Blog

Create a Twitter account and tweet regularly, on topics related to your blog. If you find great resources before everyone else does, the default traffic can really help in marketing blogs.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

If you’re starting to realize that you need to put some effort into search engine optimization for your website, you’ve probably come across banner ads as a part of many SEO companies’ plans of attack. For the Google-shy among you, banner ads have nothing to do with physical printing, hanging, or finding a spot to put it! You will have seen them a hundred thousand times on the net, but probably not realized what they are, their purpose or where they come from. We give you a basic rundown.

Advertising is the internet’s main reason for being - it’s lifeblood. If you’re an advertiser or website-promoter, banner ads can create a significant proportion of your customer base. If you’re the owner of a well-trafficked or niche website, banner ads can create a significant proportion of your website’s income. A banner ad is essentially a link to another place on the net - only instead of being plain text with a blue underline, it is a graphical button, sometimes with animation and often with textual content included.

People place banner ads on sites for much the same reasons as they market traditionally. Eye-catching ads are still a great way to brand your company, get people to visit your website, or sell a product. Unlike some other forms of Internet advertising, which also function as a backlink, banner ads are not valuable as part of the link-building arm of an SEO strategy. However, they do get genuinely interested visitors to click through to your website, often in a model where you can pay only for clicks.

One of the wonderful, yet strangely horrible things about banner ads is that anybody can make them! It is wonderful because they are so accessible, but sometimes horrible because there are so many visually painful images out there. All that needs to happen, in terms of process, is that HTML tags are used to insert an image at a particular place on a web page. This is one of the first things prospective web designers learn. However, banner ads have evolved to a level where expert offerings are those mainly seen on the Internet. Banner ads can really stand out for their amateur design - you don’t want that for your company.

Banner ads can be an excellent investment, especially on a pay-per-click model for some campaigns. Expert input is a must, though!

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

PPC campaigns are like most other things in life - there is not only a ‘black’ and ‘white’, there are many shades of grey in between. When it comes to your ad positioning and bidding strategy, sophisticated search engine marketing companies realize this, and you’ll often find them actually recommending NOT to go for the first position for your ads. We look at why this strategy can work, and other PPC bidding secrets of search engine marketing companies.

Positioning Strategy
When it comes to ad positioning, many assume that a first position ad is a ‘Win’, and every other position is a ‘Loss’. We constantly hear metrics stating that ads outside the first three positions are virtually invisible to consumers. However, experienced search engine marketing companies know that the truth is different.

Going for a higher volume of keywords and ads, in lower rankings, can actually deliver a greater cumulative effect that having one or two in first position. Being in first position makes you a target - and you’ll often find the cost jump down to fourth or fifth is substantial. Personally, I often scroll to the bottom of the natural results, and if there is nothing suitable there, I start looking at the bottom of the first page or sponsored results.

Bid increments
This strategy is valid for just about everything you might bid on - houses, eBay items, and certainly PPC keywords. Don’t bid an even amount - too many people use multiples of ten or five to create bid amounts. If you up your bid by one, two, three or four cents (or dollars, or increments), you have a fair chance of ending up in a higher ranking for an extra cent.

Maxing Out Your Budget
If your budget is hitting its maximum before the end of the day, this means there are clicks left untapped out there in the interwebs! However, using the same strategy as in tip #1, lower your bid on the high-priced keywords, rather than deleting large numbers of low-priced ones to ensure your daily budget is met.

Baseline Conversion Benchmark
From the start of your program, you’ll see some keywords that convert much higher than others. However, in order to gain consistent metrics to study, allow each keyword to reach a conversion benchmark before deleting it. This way you have an even field for comparison, and allow for fluctuations. Alternatively, some search engine marketing companies use a time-based benchmark.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Internet marketing services are now more in demand than ever, as businesses realize both the competitiveness of the Internet arena, and the importance of being visible on the web. Technology just keeps marching on, as soon as we get used to it - and Internet marketers are the ones who must remain on the ball! Here we look at the new rules for ‘getting to customers’, according to top Internet marketing services.

Alert based communications

This method relies on having instant access to your audience, through RSS feeds, email lists, Twitter, or other social channels. The audience for alert-based communications is bigger than you might imagine, and even if subscribers aren’t immediately interested in what you are doing, this tactic certainly keeps you front and center in their minds.

Customizing pages according to user profiles

Google is much maligned for collecting, keeping and using information on the communication and surfing habits of its users. However much people hate the idea of cookies, everyone has been delivered some value by them at some point. They are a new favorite tool of marketers, also. As user profiling becomes more skilful and comprehensive, the web can be increasingly tailored to a customer’s particular tastes.

Dashboard-based web analytics

Internet marketing services worth their salt know that it is one thing to put your efforts out into the wider web - but you also need to know how they are faring. Interactive dashboards in web analytics programs have come a long way, and you now have the option to personalize according to your own ROI parameters and most used information.

Local portals

Local search is one of the most important new phenomena on the web, and is currently under-utilized by most businesses. Listing your business in Google, Yahoo and MSN’s ‘Local’ sites is a great idea, and asking your customers to review it on the site is an excellent Internet marketing tactic. Local portals such as area guides, business directories and local government sites can also be invaluable promotional tools.

Media contact sites

Creating private websites for media contacts is one of the waves of the future, according to Internet marketing services. Creating a more private relationship with the press can help you get your message out in traditional media much more effectively. These private sites often include information like press releases, photos, staff change announcements, etc.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

As a searcher, you know what a pain it is to click on a link within a site, or even in Google results, and be returned a 404 message, or a notice that the domain has expired. However, as an advertiser, that problem creates an opportunity for you! New technology can create redirected targeted traffic from these 404 screens, helping both web surfers and advertisers in the process. We look at how redirected targeted traffic could make you rich.

Many Internet marketing firms will offer redirected targeted traffic services. The traffic comes from networks of niche sites, each in different industries. When a visitor lands on one of these niche sites, they can be redirected using a proprietary algorithm. To be more specific, they will be delivered to your website! It is in a redirectior’s interests to have a wide variety of websites to redirect to, as it increases the value for their surfers and the possibility of repeat visitors.

Redirected targeted traffic can also come from expired domains. The Internet is a difficult thing to streamline, and there is significant traffic volume every day from domains that have expired, but still have banner ads, vertical search engine results, PPC ads, directory entries and other links pointing to them. Targeted traffic services help ensure this doesn’t go to waste - and the visitors are not inconvenienced in the process.

Some firms that deliver redirected targeted traffic have statistics showing that it is up to 300% more effective than banner advertising, popups or popunders. The quality of results depends on the technology used to ensure that visitors are ‘targeted’ properly, that is, that their search query matches your website offering. Look for redirected targeted traffic services that don’t claim to deliver all of your traffic at once, and those that give testimonials with specifics of return on investment for their customers.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Do a quick Google and you’ll find millions of pages offering advice on website linking for new pages and sites. You’ll find advice on how to get free links, how to get a hundred links in a day, and how to build your link popularity to bursting point. One little deal breaker that many forget to mention is the ‘nofollow factor’ - a little script in the source code that can waste weeks of your time. We look at the nofollow factor in website linking.

The rel=nofollow tag became popular years ago, when search engine optimizers realized that blog commenting, and other forums such as Yahoo Answers, Google Groups and the like, offered a free and relatively quick source of backlinks. In order to ‘purify’ their search results, and give better placement to sites that actually offered more value to readers (not only those that spent the most time getting free backlinks), they introduced the nofollow tag.

The nofollow tag basically tells a search engine spider crawling the site to ignore the link to your website in its link analysis. Actual humans can still click it (which means that nofollow links are not totally worthless), but in terms of organic SEO, nofollow created a big hurdle for search engine optimizers to jump.

Rel=nofollow is now the default setting on all Wordpress and Typepad blogs - a blog owner actually has to make the effort to remove the nofollow tags from his blog. While removing these tags and promoting your blog as a dofollow blog will get more traffic (through commenters looking for Link Love), it will also get you plenty of spam comments. For bloggers that simply don’t have the time to do the manual filtering, leaving the nofollow tag there makes good time sense.

For those that are investigating link building strategies, be aware that the following forums usually include the nofollow tag by default. It is also worth checking the source code of any page that you are looking for links on (just by right clicking), to make sure that you aren’t wasting your time when it comes to link building!
* Wordpress and Typepad blogs are nofollow by default. Many other blogs are also nofollow.
* Yahoo Answers, Google Groups, Wikianswers and other answering forums are usually nofollow
* Wikipedia and other user-generated content directories are often nofollow.
* Social bookmarking services like Digg and Delicious often use the nofollow tag by default
* Craigslist uses the nofollow tag - classifieds posted on Craigslist do not automatically help your website linking campaign.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

For those who have only just come to the realization that there are things you can do to manipulate the ranking your website achieves on Google, learning about SEO seems like a bachelor’s degree-type commitment. SEO gets more complex by the day, and increasingly, search engine optimization tips have to target specific users. General advice just won’t do. What are the main things that those new to the strategy need to know?

Research your keywords using Google AdWords keyword tool
Diatribes about on-site and off-site optimization all make one assumption - that you already know the keywords related to your business. Your keywords should be:
* Between five and thirty in number (although a larger focus may dilute your efforts)
* Include different tense and participle forms of each other (for example - ‘booking Hong Kong hotel’ as well as ‘book Hong Kong hotel’).
* Inclusive of your location. The only exception to this is when your business is purely Internet based.
* Keyphrases, rather than keywords. Contemporary wisdom says that long-tail keywords (phrases of three or four words each) will best define your niche and give you best results.

Choose these instinctively at first, thinking about what terms a customer would use to find you. Once you have a basis, type some of them into Google AdWords keyword tool for some options you may not have thought of.

Remember the 80-20 Rule
80% of your search engine optimization results will come from your on-site work (web content, tagging, use of titles, etc). 20% of your results will come from your off-site work (press releases, article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions etc). This is true regardless of how much time and effort you put into each - it is simply the way Google weights various factors in their algorithm. So, it makes sense to put 80% of your effort into on-site optimization!

Write your meta descriptions for people, not search engines
Your meta description is what Google displays in results when one of your webpages comes up for a search. Writing these for search engines (i.e., creating nonsensical keyword stuffed sentences), instead of people, will get you a good ranking but a poor click through rate (CTR). In other words, people will see - but they won’t care.

Whole blogs, books and directories have been written about SEO. These search engine optimization tips are only a starting point - but will help you create a solid base to work from.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Many first-time or home-based search engine optimizers underestimate the value of planning for directory submissions. Far from being a robot-task (although there is a fair proportion of robot work in there!), submitting your website to directories actually requires a fair bit of planning and a little know-how. These are the most common and easily avoided mistakes when making directory submissions.

Typing everything in by hand
Not only is it slow and frustrating, the likelihood of making errors increases by a hundred-fold. Any error in your directory submission will cause it to be rejected by human-checked directories, and you may not get a second chance at submission.

Download Roboform or a similar form-filling software. Look for one that allows you to personalize the fields for which you can specify text. The Autofill on Google Toolbar, for example, only recognizes certain specific field titles, like First Name and Last Name (but not ‘Full Name’). You’ll need one that can be customized, for greatest ease of use.

Site name tips
Including your site name in the ‘Title’ field will increase the likelihood that your submission is accepted. It lends credibility to your site, and helps assure the editor that you are not trying to keyword stuff your submission.

By the same token, try to match your site title to your URL, where possible. This is an important factor in natural search rankings on its own, also.

Category choice
It is tempting to choose a general category, in order to reach the widest audience. However, if the editors feel that the category is not the best one to describe your site, your submission could easily be rejected. If your site sells boutique condiments, submit it to a category like Shopping > Food > Condiments, rather than the general Food category.

Email listing
Free email addresses like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail occasionally cause listings to be rejected by directories. If your ISP provides free email addresses along with your bandwidth, use one of these. Alternatively, use an email address on your own domain.

Listen to the man!
Above all, fill in the form fields truthfully, and with the information the site is actually requesting. Many people use keywords in the name field of directory submission forms. These will not only be useless (they won’t be listed by human edited directories even if the listing is accepted), but may cause your site to be rejected.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Article marketers usually realize that the actual article content is essential for the reader, but surplus to the publisher … while the resource box is surplus for the reader, but essential to the company. It may seem that never the twain (yours and the reader’s interests) shall meet in article submission - however, there are some unique, fresh ideas to help bring the readers and your interests together. We look at how to engage your readers not only with your content, but with your resource box.

The content of your article should be good enough quality that the reader actually wants to know more about who wrote it. However, there are some tricks that you can use within resource boxes to help catch a reader’s eye even if it just skims over it. A resource box needs a skeleton to fill out first, though. The basics that you’ll need to include in your resource box are:
* The company name, and the name of the person writing the article. Including a person’s name gives the information a sense of trustworthiness, with the implied personal accountability.
* Your website address - even if your article directory doesn’t allow HTML tags within resource boxes, make it possible for people to cut and paste your address into their browser.
* Your USP (unique selling point) or elevator pitch should always be included- it is an essential part of your marketing and branding strategy.
* A call to action - tell the reader what you want them to do after reading the article. Why not personalize this part for each different article (or category of article) you write? It is a little more work, but much more effective.

Some extras that can really help catch your reader’s eye as they skim over your resource box include:
* A link to a free report, free mini-ebook, free demo, or free assessment and quote for one of your services. Being able to include the word ‘Free’ is what will stop that little eyeball from travelling further down the page!
* A link to your website through a keyword in the resource box, as well as in your web address. This strategy only works for article directories that accept HTML in the resource box, and shouldn’t be overdone. Choose one text link to make it stand out.
* Contact information for your business other than the website is another great thing to add the resource box of your article submissions. The risk of being added to a telemarketing list is small compared to the potential for non-web proficient customers to flood you with calls.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites