You may not think the following is a big deal, as I won’t be talking about top 10 rankings, but the number one spot, but when you are a company as large as Toyota and you don’t rank number one for specific car searches, there is a problem in my opinion. If I was over web/marketing at Toyota I would not be pleased. *Im sure this is a timley post and in a month or two this will no longer be the case, but none the less I think it is a big deal.

Do the Following Searches in Google:

2008 Toyota Sequoia

2008 Toyota Land Cruiser

2008 Lexus 570

2008 Lexus lx470

2008 Toyota Tundra (this one is blew my mind with all the attention it is getting)

*there are plenty more

Like I said in about a month or so this shouldn’t be the case, hopefully it isn’t but the Tundra has been around for a long time and it still isn’t number one. (Currently #3) You will see the same 5,6 sites poaching the traffic on alls searches, Edmunds, How Stuff Works, Auto Blog, etc…

I remember hearing the same thing about AT&T and Cingular getting criticism on the iPhone cause of the same thing happening in Google results.

This brand poaching would not be hard to beat. Most of these companies put out press releases on partnerships or on future products or vehicles, all they would need to do is put that press release on what will soon become the dedicated page for that product and throw some links to it from their homepage or another high profile page. Optimize the Title Tag to say something like,
“2008 Toyota Tundra Press Release” then after the product is public and ready for sale, switch the content with the new fresh content, and take “Press Release” out of the title tag.

I don’t understand why Companies haven’t figured this out. Google wants to rank you number one, if you create the product or service, it will not be difficult to rank. I would think that ranking for your brands, products and other proprietary info should be at the top of the list of the marketing team.

I can see an exception if companies don’t want to officially say they are launching a certain product or partnership, you don’t need to rank for 2015 Toyota Tundra right now, but if you have gone as far as to publicly release the information via Press Release, etc.. and there is no doubt as to whether you will be following through on the product, then throw up and page and get it number one, before everyone else does.

* I was logged out of personal, I checked multiple data centers, and like I said in a month or so hopefully this post isn’t relevant anymore. But you may see varied results.

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O.K. before you keep reading I have to apologize, I hate case studies and examples of sites that don’t show the sites involved. One of the things that Mat and I try to do to set us apart from a lot of blogs is to give specific ideas on how to do things, but in the case study below I can’t. We are growing and have a lot of clientèle that just won’t let us share their info, or even mention them as a client. That is fine, I guess if I was a 100 million a year plus company with very intelligent competitors I wouldn’t want our service providers giving away our secrets either.

With that said this will still be really cool to share and I will show you (doctored) screen shots from their analytics.

We helped a friend/client launch a blog in October and it has been some of the most successful blog marketing we have done to date in the realms of blog optimization and social media saturation to a brand new domain and website.

The blog is general and covers a lot of different topics mostly internet and advertising related, which helps. If you have a niche blog you can still have tremendous success in blog promotion, especially in terms of links and subscribers which is the most import aspect of a blogs success in my opinion.

The Stats:
The blog is exactly 39 days old it has a total of 21 pages, it has received over 165,000 uniques, over 3,000 links and over 1,117 subscribers. The subscribers and the amount of branding we have seen (see below) are what we are most exited about.

We have had campaigns that generate more traffic and links then this blog (I am working on another case study where I will actually show you an example of an article that had over 150k visits in one day, and has had over 3k links just to the article), but what is different about this site is the vast amount of subscribers and the consistent traffic. Barely any of this traffic is from Digg, the blog is receiving thousands of visitors a day on a consistent basis. So it has been a combined effort on behalf of the posts instead of one home run submitted to Digg with one traffic spike and virtually no traffic a week later. The lowest day so far as been over 1,600 visitors and the highest has been 14,922 with several days over 10k.

Graph screen shot of the blogs entire life so far:

Page Views to some of the URL’s:

Traffic Sources: (what is best about this is Direct Traffic to the domain, is over 14% which is over 24,000 visitors. Remember this blog is only 39 days, that is some sweet branding)

The majority of the initial traffic came from StumbleUpon, I think that is why the subscriber rate has been so good. We also get a tremendous amount of traffic from other hub sites picking up our stories and linking to them.

How to do it:
I would credit a handful of things the the sites success.

1.) The site owner has fallen in love with marketing and has done a great job with generating outstanding content. He has engulfed himself in Social Media and in his competing blogs and really understands how to generate good content for his audience.

2.) We mapped out and understood our audience prior to launch. We actually had a good amount of posts ready before launch so that we wouldn’t lose steam. After the first few pages being submitted to social sites we let the sites subscribers and community promote the rest of our content as it was created.

3.) The Domain is easy to remember, easy to spell and all that. By watching the direct traffic to the homepage and branded search terms in Google we are really seeing that a good domain can go a long way.

Again I apologize for not being able to give away more. I’m working on about 3 posts that all give away the farm with specific examples. Also remember this site/company did not exist before the last week in October, there wasn’t a huge brand name to piggy back off of or any prior marketing or advertising to build off of. This was brand new, raw straight out of the gates marketing.

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My daughter came home (from school) today with a list of 5 things she was thankful for, and was asked to share with someone at home, and have them share, and then ask someone as well. I thought it would be appropriate to post the 5 things I am most thankful for here, during this Thanksgiving season. I have never really done one of these kind of lists, but with my daughter asking me to share, I thought it the perfect opportunity to do so.

1. Family
2. Friends
3. To be a part of an industry, and working on stuff I actually love every single day!
4. That I live in this great country - USA.
5. Bill O’Reilly

I would love to hear about what other people are thankful for, (so feel free to comment), but I will ask my good bud Cameron to share with us his 5 things he is thankful for on his blog, and maybe we can get some holiday spirit going!

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Just wondering if anyone else noticed Twitter showing up on last nights episode of CSI (Las Vegas - (which I freaking love))? I do my best to help (new to internet) marketers embrace social media, I blog all the time about how important Social Media is (even for the veterans of Internet marketing that still have not jumped on), but if having Twitter show up during one of the biggest shows on television is not enough to convince you, then I don’t know what is.

(I must confess) Sadly, its been about a month since you saw Mat Siltala’s latest post on Twitter. I will try to be a better Twit (as odd as that sounds), but still trying to figure out how you all knowing when I eat and go to the bathroom is going to help anything … ? I know the power of Social Media, so I am not bagging on Twitter by any means, but just give me some useful ideas for Twitter (besides reputation management) and I just may consider coming back…

In the episode they showed how kids these days (or college kids in this case) are just posting their “every second” happenings on Twitter (and personal blogs). It helped the CSI’s locate every single person involved with the girl who got killed (because it was a perfect time-line of events - just how Twitter works). It was pretty real in nature of how Twitter is used by people, and how nothing is private nowadays. They even talked about kids liking and wanting no privacy, or “offline” time, and that privacy is “so yesterday”. It was a little creepy.

***UPDATE

I came across this Twitter today talking about what I mentioned above (Twittering about going to the bathroom) - I guess if I had an eventful bathroom moment like this, it would be worth Twittering about:

Used the restroom at Restaurant Row, downtown Honolulu, and there was a joint laying on top of the toilet paper. (From Twitterer Ashbuckles)

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Just wanted to share some pictures with everyone from our recent speaking trip at the E-Tourism Summit in San Fran. The picture I took of the city at night is probably one of the coolest pictures I have ever taken in my life.

All Chris needs is laser beams coming out of his eyes to make this picture better! I am no photoshop hacker though … (sadly)

This picture is the walk of death we had to climb everyday just to get to the hotel we were speaking at. I am out of shape bad!
Shot out the window from our hotel room in the morning.

This is the same view at night. This is probably one of the coolest pictures I have ever taken!

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These are ruff notes from my Presentation on Reputation Management last week at the E-Tourism Summit. Everyone was asking me to post them I think especially for the list of social sites to use as I tend to talk fast.

Reputation Management is the Future of Branding. Everyone uses the search engines in order to find out information about a product, company or individual. Google is becoming a reputation creator/verifier.

Securing the top 10, more importantly the top 5 results of your brand search are becoming more important than ever. When people research you in the search engines they will notice negative Titles and Descriptions ranking below you, they will often visit them prior to your website.

Proactive Rep Management a Good Offense is the Best Defense

1. Keep it off line, kiss butt, beg, apologize, do whatever you have to in order to keep your dirty laundry off line. It takes 5 mins to set up a blog and post something, and your cost to silence that piece of content will go up considerably after it goes online.

2. Own your name, every .com, .org, .net and domainsucks.com, etc…

3. Social Profile Pages can be good to help fill the top spots with pages referring to you: Squidoo, Stumbleupon, Newsvine, Delicious, Yahoo 360, Mashable, Claimid, Blogger, Twitter, Mybloglog, Amazon profiles, Ezinearticles, Blog Catolog, Naymz, Zoominfo, Myspace and Facebook, Wikipedia, and Forums.

4. Use What you have: Subdomains, Blog About Us, PPC

5. Use your key terms in the titles of press releases or other PR. Prnewswire and businesswire will rank for your name if you mention it in the Title.

Defensive

1. First put out the fire, respond in the comments of the blogger flaming you, respond on your blog to the allocations, kill the story before it spreads. Be the first to see the story. Make amends, a refund to that client will cost a lot less then hiring an SEO firm to suppress the page.

2. Set up Tracking for your branded searches, IE brands, products, employees,

Use Serph, RSS, Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, Ice Rocket, Watchthatpage.com, Rollyo this will aggregate ROR and other sites that don’t offer rss.

3. email or call the blogger and ask them to take it down, you would be surprised how often this works.

4. If it is ranking in Google you may need to pull out the big guns, if so you can rent pages at sites like Presalepageman, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire ie:Trust, links and lots of content. Match keyword counts.

5. Rent Blog posts through Payperpost, Review Me, and other outlets

6. Good viral campaigns can work wonders for Reputation Management. When blogs mention your viral piece, or tool they will often mention your Brand in the Title tag and the Copy. *this has been a very good tool when going after stubborn pages.

For additional Info Check our Previous Blog Posts on the subject and Andy Beals Beginners Guide

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These are notes from a presentation that I did on blogging at the E-tourism summit in San Francisco. They are raw, but I feel there is some good info that can be taken from these notes.

1. Importance of blogging - The question I get asked while being here at this conference is; Why Blog? You do not want to make the mistake of setting up a blog for setting up a blogs sake. A blog can increase the health of your site, increase (what I like to call) your Google saturation (the more pages you have indexed the better, and help out rankings and trust if done right. If you are not willing to put the time into what it takes to run a successful, well thought out blog it really is going to do nothing for you but waste time. When you set up your blog correctly (and make it search engine friendly) it gives you the opportunity to be found and ranked for more long tail key phrases, such as “social media for Firefox” in this example - http://www.97thfloor.com/blog/announcing-new-tool-social-media-for-firefox-extension/

If you go to Google and do a site:http://www.97thfloor.com/blog you will also see how many pages that Google has indexed, and how many opportunities there are for ranking for additional key phrases.

The biggest struggle that I see people have with blogging is coming up with content, and ideas to blog about … especially in boring industries. You do not need to worry. The travel industry will be a piece of cake. For example if you are in charge of a tourism website for the Grand Canyon then you can do a weekly “10 of the most beautiful pictures you will see this week from the Grand Canyon” You can also work in a little link bait with a catchy blog title like “The 10 costliest places to spend the night” or “10 travel destinations where you get the most bang for you buck”

where to find ideas:

SERPH
Google Blog Search
Ezine Articles (find articles that have had most views and reviews/comments etc - you can do this easily by viewing the author details)
Google Alerts.

2. Setting up a blog
-no matter what blogging software you use - wordpress, typepad
-don’t do subdomain, or new domain … just do a directory - example 97thfloor.com/blog because if you get a popular story on digg (or any social sites you want your domain name getting credit for that story) THAT IS WHY its so important to have it in a directory rather then a sub domain or other domain etc…

-more important for branding because it can tie back into your site.
-help out the rankings (the site will rank better because any links you have inside the blog posts will help your site out)

-most blogging software categorizes blog posts through categories and dated archives and what it does is create a duplicate content issue. (basically same post shows up several places on your blog)
- you will want to tweak your blog so it categorizes one way or the other, or do a robots.txt files that does it all. If you do a Google search for robots.txt you will get some good sites explaining how to go about setting up that properly.

-blogging software does not generally come search engine friendly so you need to make sure that you are tweaking your blogging software to include things like search engine friendly URLs, and meta data and social media optimization tools like sociable.

3. RSS - What it stands for - really simple syndication
-blogging is even more important then Google rankings because you need readers.
-if you want people to read, you will need some way for them to subscribe to you.
-RSS is like the new newsletters/ opt in/email marketing from the old school days
-Google Reader - people use it as an aggregator to read all their subscriptions.
- its like subscribing to a newspaper. You can subscribe to 4 different newspapers in the same town, and they all go to your house (for example)
-Bloglines is another aggregator like Google Reader that you can use to read all of your feeds.
-if you get accounts at these places then there is a good chance the people subscribed to their services like (bloglines) will find you as well.

Use RSS for marketing by setting up profiles pages on social communities like SQUIDOO and MASHABLE and include your RSS from your blog to gain additional links pointing back to your site. (make profiles on these sites using your brand name because it will get them more exposure too.)

4. Blog Marketing
-finding top bloggers on sites like Technorati - do a search for your keywords and find the top bloggers, and use them to see what they are blogging about. If you have something good, you can send them an email to see if they will mention it on thier blog.
-Stumble Upon - Use the stumble upon toolbar (they will need to get firefox or IE to use SU) and start submitting stories related to the travel industry. Submit to correct category, and use proper keywords to tag it , and seperate wtih category. (use the drop down and find the best possible categories)
how to use stumble upon - add friends - build up - find related categories
stumble upon ads and how to use them if you are to lazy to build up an account - SU is so much better then like digg or reddit because you can pay for visitors 5 cents up to 3k a day and get people to start reading your blog that way. You need people to find out about your blog - you need readers/subscribers and this is how to do it.
- you can get 200 visitors in an hour with a stumble account that is built up….but if you dont want to do that then just use the SU ads.

-when you are popular on Stumble Upon you will get other people saving your stuff on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site) and that helps search engine rankings because you are getting additional links.

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Like I said in the last post Mat and I are preparing to speak next week at the eTourism Summit so not a lot of SEO posts this week. I wanted to tap into some of the very successful business people that I know and do some interviews from time to time. Below is an interview with Bill Zanker from Learning Annex. The owner of the largest and most successful Large Scale Education Company on the planet.

Me: What gave you the idea to start Learning Annex?
Bill Zanker: I was a professional student and my father took me to lunch and said “You need to get a job. I won’t support you anymore.” So I took $5,000 dollars of my bar mitzvah money and started The Learning Annex. My girlfriend at the time was a pottery teacher and she convinced me to expand the curriculum so that’s how it started.

Me: What was the key ingredient to its success?
Bill Zanker: Listening to what the public wants to learn and getting the best to teach them.

Me: Was it your Goal to go after the Big Brand Names from the start?
Bill Zanker: It was always my goal to get the best instructors in every field to teach. So yes, big names and celebrities were always on my list to get.

Me: What is your Goal for the Future of Learning Annex?
Bill Zanker: It’s my goal to take the Learning Annex to the billion dollar level through other streams of learning both online and on television. It’s really an exciting time for The Learning Annex.

Me: What advice have you learned that can help any business?
Bill Zanker: One of the most important pieces of advice that I have learned is to listen to your customers. They will be able to tell you how your business is doing and what direction you need to go in.

Me: How do you define Success?
Bill Zanker:Seeing how proud my kids are of me.

Me: The Purpose of the new book?
Bill Zanker: Think Big and Kick Ass is a book I wrote with my business hero, Donald Trump. He taught me to think big and he teaches my students at my Wealth Expos the same thing. I convinced him to write his message down and I contribute by being the living embodiment that his strategies work. It’s been a great collaboration and a great success.

Me: Any other words of wisdom?
Bill Zanker: Have a great passion in everything you do and it will be the most fun and rewarding life you can have.

You can go here to find more info on Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life.

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