Colin Alsheimer » internet marketing

The Arsenio Hall Show’s Guide to Images on Your Blog

Neil Lemons — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:00:21 +0000

Remember Arsenio Hall?

If you’ve slept since the mid 1990s, comedian/actor Arsenio Hall hosted The Arsenio Hall Show, a late night talk show that aired from early 1989 to mid 1994.

A frequent gag in Hall’s opening monologue suggested that he still lived in Cleveland, and drove himself to Los Angeles every day to host the show. While on these alleged long drives, Hall would ponder certain thoughts, referring to them as “things that make you go hmmm…” This running gag inspired a 1990 C+C Music Factory song by that very title. “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart. It also reached #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

What does the Arsenio Hall Show have to do with images on your blog?

An image that makes your reader go hmmm… at the beginning of every blog post can increase the likelihood someone will read it in the first place as well as the likelihood he/she will read the post in its entirety. Your audience will read the whole post just to see why the particular image was chosen just to satisfy his/her curiosity.

Picking a slightly odd or weird image, combined with an interesting title causes more brain stimulation. By relating the photo to something closer to the middle of the post, it triggers a rewarding, “I’m smart” feeling in the reader when he/she makes the connection.

This phenomena is similar to when the name of a song or movie is mentioned in the middle, the viewer/listener goes “ah, hah!” It’s more fun, if it’s not that obvious and rewards your readers who figure it out.

Stats back this up as well. Your audience is more likely to read a particular blog post if it has an image, and he/she is more likely to read the whole post IF it’s not a connection he or she thought they already knew.

Practical Tips

Use at least one compelling image every time you write a blog post.
Make it a little weird or off, relating two things that have never been associated.
Use Flickr.com and perform an advanced keyword search in the “creative commons” section for royalty-free images..
If you use Google Images, give the photographer or website credit.

What to avoid: Blasé corporate clip art. Cartoon illustrations. Not crediting the photographer or artist with a link.

Photo Credit: TodaysHotTrends.net

How HubSpot Created an Industry: The Ultimate Inbound Marketing Case Study

Colin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:00:56 +0000

Founded in June of 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot is a company that has seemingly taken the Internet by storm, racking up top ranked blogs, twitter accounts, viral videos, and millions in venture funding along the way.

The Ultimate Case Study

In the Inbound Marketing space everyone is looking out for the next great case study. Pioneers like Dell and Zappos are brought up anytime a marketer needs to show a client that inbound marketing strategies do in fact work.

But could we be missing the biggest case study of them all?

HubSpot, the company that owns the term Inbound Marketing, got to the top by associating themselves with a phrase that up until 2006-2008, had mostly been used in an entirely different context (typically referring to a form of market research).

In the process, HubSpot has created measurable demand for a classification of marketing that never existed before, while at the same time, flooding the Internet with relevant content for an (at the time) uncompetitive market.

How did they do it?

“All we try to do is build things we think people will like – both software like HubSpot and the free marketing tools at Grader.com and other things like our blog articles, Webinars, videos, and HubSpot TV – and then share these things with people and ask them what they think.” – Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing for HubSpot in a 2009 ZDNet inteview.

The HubSpot team is frequently known to mention that the secret to their success is “eating their own dog food”, and HubSpot must be full.

In the course of their marketing, HubSpot has created:

A suite of popular, free analytics & benchmarking tools (grader.com)
A top ranked marketing blog (#29 on AdAge’s Power 150)
A series of popular YouTube videos yielding over a quarter of a million views

They’ve also been instrumental in pushing the term “Inbound Marketing” by:

Sponsoring the Inbound Marketing Summit, featuring many of the top minds in the Social Media and SEO industries.
Creating the Inbound Marketing University, a resource and education site that’s very subtly branded as being run by HubSpot.
Creating a series of music video spoofs which extol the virtues and process for successful Inbound Marketing
Publishing the first Inbound Marketing book (affiliate)

Notice in the charts below, the growth in search demand for the term “Inbound Marketing” has a strong correlation with the growth of HubSpot’s business.

Inbound Marketing Search Growth

HubSpot's Explosive Growth

Wrapping Up

HubSpot has managed to grow a successful company by promoting and branding a set of marketing tactics that had previously been classified as two separate entities. They’ve created a self-fulfilling marketing machine: they generate demand for a marketing strategy they created, which builds interest in the services they alone can provide.

Do you think the Inbound Marketing term is here to stay? Or is Inbound Marketing itself too narrow to cover the full scope of the Internet marketing activities that must be conducted for a successful online campaign? Further, has HubSpot built the foundation for long term success by pushing the idea of Inbound Marketing?

101 Free Ways To Promote Your Website

Colin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:00:16 +0000

Looking for some free ways to promote your new website? Here are 101 completely free resources that you can use to promote your site. These resources range in scope from the logical to the completely illogical, but all are free (or require standard household goods), and all can be used for website marketing.

Start a Twitter account
Create a Facebook page
Create a Facebook Application
Create a LinkedIn group
Learn SEO
Submit your site to DMOZ
Start a blog
Write guest posts on popular blogs in your industry
Answer questions on Yahoo answers
Answer questions on LinkedIn answers
Answer questions on Answers.com
Submit articles to Ezine Articles
Submit articles to ArticleBase
Submit your site to Technorati
Submit your site to AllTop
E-mail webmasters of relevant sites for links
Create exceptional content and submit to Digg
Submit more exceptional content to Reddit
Submit articles to Associated Content
Create a quiz or survey & publish the findings
Create a linkable widget
Create an embeddable badge
Leave intelligent comments on blogs
Participate in forums
Create a Squidoo page
Add a link to your e-mail signature
Submit your site to AdAge’s power 150 list (industry specific)
Submit articles to Sphinn (industry specific)
Submit your content to Delicious
Submit your sites RSS feed to RSS directories
Create videos, submit to YouTube, link back to your website
Repeat #30 on blip.tv
Repeat #30 on DailyMotion
Repeat #30 on Yahoo Video
Repeat #30 on MySpace Video
Repeat #30 on Viddler
Repeat #30 on MetaCafe
Create a podcast, submit to iTunes
Create a podcast, submit to Podcast Alley
Create a podcast, submit to Blog Talk Radio
Start a MySpace page
Take great photos, upload to Flickr and link back to your website
Add a link to your website in your LinkedIn profile
Add a link to your website in your NaymZ profile
Create a local business listing in Google
Submit your local business listing to Insider Pages
Create a local business listing in Yelp
Create a presentation, and submit to SlideShare
Get interviewed and talk about your website
Interview interesting people in your industry and publish on your website
Bookmark your content on Mister-Wong
Submit your site to StumbleUpon
Create a “how-to” video that’s relevant to your industry and submit to eHow
Create a FriendFeed account and tie in your RSS feed
Add a link to your Facebook profile
Send a note to all your Facebook friends about your new site
Send a message to all your LinkedIn contacts about your new site
Throw a launch party, find another company to sponsor it
Create a contest and give away items you already own
Create some art and submit to DeviantArt
Create an eBook and submit to Scribd
Write an academic article about your industry, use it as a reference on a Wikipedia page
Sign up for a Card.ly account
Join Meetup.com and start a group, list your website as a sponsor
Be the first to write about a piece of breaking news
Create a blip.fm profile and add your website
Create a WordPress plugin
Create a Drupal module
Create a Joomla extension
Create a Firefox plugin
Design a WordPress theme
Design a Drupal theme
Design a Joomla theme
Create a humorous article and submit to Fark
Submit your site to Propeller
Create a profile on iReport and submit a news story
Join NowPublic and submit a news story, use your website as a source
Write an article about open source technology, submit to Slashdot
Start a networking group for your industry, have people sign up on your website
E-mail your friends about your website
E-mail your family about your website
E-mail your coworkers about your website
Create a Craigslist ad offering your writing talents, use your website as example work
Become a writer for about.com, link to your website in a post
Become a writer for examiner.com, link to your website in a post
Give a presentation at an industry conference, mention your website in your presentation
Submit an open source software project to SourceForge
Create a Tumblr site
Create a Posterous site
Create a Blogger site
Start a band, get listed on last.fm, link to your website
Create a virtual product, and join an affiliate network to sell it
Volunteer for a local non-profit, get listed on their website
Network with other bloggers, get them to write about your website
Write your website’s URL on your car with soap, drive around till you run out of gas
Submit a note to Passive Aggressive Notes, include your URL somewhere in the note
Submit a secret to Post Secret, include your URL somewhere in the secret
Convince a celebrity to endorse your website
Get on a reality TV show, talk incessantly about your website
Create a funny sign about your website, stand outside a busy street corner with the sign
Start a cable access TV show and talk about your website

Would you add anything else to the list?

Photo Credit

How To Set Up a Custom Domain With Your Posterous Site

Colin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:00:49 +0000

As Posterous has grown in popularity, more people are using the powerful platform as the basis for their personal (or business) blogs. While I think that using Posterous in this way is a great option, my inner SEO cringes when I see people using the standard “mysite.posterous.com” domain for their site.

Did you know you can use a custom domain with your Posterous site? It’s not very difficult to set up, either. Using a custom domain (like www.mysite.com), means that you have the opportunity to build up long term SEO value in a domain that you control.

This becomes invaluable if you ever want to switch to a more robust content management system like WordPress or Drupal, or if you ever wanted to sell your website. Basically, no matter where you point your domain you can always take the backlinks and authority that you’ve built up with you.

Here’s how to set up a custom domain with your Posterous site:

If you don’t have one already, buy a domain from GoDaddy.com
Tip: Use this link (affiliate) to save a few dollars on your domain purchase ($7.49 .com domains).
After purchasing your domain, go to My Account, then click on Domain Manager.
Click on the domain name you just purchased.
Click on Total DNS Control (it’s at the bottom of the domain dashboard).
Total DNS Control Section
Edit the points to IP address for the A (host) Record and set this to the following IP: 67.207.139.81
A (Host) Record Option

Editing the A (Host) Record IP Address
Log in to your Posterous site and go to the settings page.
Posterous Custom Domain Options
Enter your domain name into the custom domain field making sure the verify name server option is checked.
Posterous Custom Domain Input Field
Save your settings, and voila! You now have a custom domain for your Posterous website.

Questions? Things not go according to plan? Leave a comment below, and I’ll do my best to help!

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How To Set Up The Ultimate Listening Station Using Google Reader

Colin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:00:11 +0000

People are using the Internet to talk about your brand and your products – are you listening? Do you know how to listen? Listening is easier then you think, and you don’t have to buy an expensive monitoring tool to do it, either.

Want to know what people are saying about you on Twitter? Facebook? Blogs? Forums? No problem.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to set up the ultimate listening station using Google Reader, a free tool.

The Setup

For this hypothetical example, we’ll be setting up a listening station for the New England Patriots, since lots of people like to talk about the Pats online.

1. Sign up for a Google Reader account (this may require signing up for a Google account, if you don’t already have one)

Your Brand New Google Reader Account

2. Set up Google Alerts for relevant keywords. Choose the comprehensive search, and set the delivery option to feed. Click create alert, and then on the following screen, click view in Google Reader. You should now be subscribed to your Google Alert in your Google Reader. Repeat as necessary.

Note: you may experience some overlap between your Google Alerts and the other feeds we’ll set up below. This is OK.

Google Alerts Set-Up

3. Go to Twitter Search. Run a search for a relevant keyword term, like “New England Patriots”. Click on feed for this query on the right hand side of the screen. Add to your Google Reader account. Is your search for a particular geographic area? Use Twitter’s Advanced Search to narrow your search by geographic area. Repeat as necessary.

Twitter Search Results

4. Facebook has a search feature, but does not allow you to subscribe to searches via RSS. But there is another option. Go to Social Mention and select Facebook by clicking on the select social media sources option underneath the search box. Run your search and subscribe by clicking on the RSS feed icon on the right hand side of the search results screen. Add to your reader account. Repeat as necessary.

Selecting Facebook on Social Mention

RSS Subscription Option

5. What about forums? There’s probably a lot of discussion about the Patriots on sports forums, right? Go to BoardReader, run a search for your target query. On the search results screen, hover over the show tools link, and select RSS. Add to your reader account. Repeat as necessary.

Note: at the time of this post, both BoardReader and BoardTracker were having technical difficulties, and I was unable to get RSS subscriptions to work. The above info is how you would set it up if it were working correctly.

Forum Search

RSS Subscription Icon for BoardReader

6. Now for the blogs. Several options exist for searching blog posts. Google Blog Search and IceRocket can both get the job done. For this tutorial I’m going to use Social Mention again. Follow the same process as you did for step #4. Only this time, select the blogs option to the right of the search box. Subscribe to the results via RSS, and add to your Google Reader account. Repeat as necessary.

7. YouTube. There’s probably a lot of activity on YouTube for New England Patriots clips. Go to YouTube. Search for your relevant keyword term. On the results page, click on the RSS icon in your browser’s address bar. Add to Google Reader, repeat as necessary.

YouTube Search

8. Flickr. At this point in time, Flickr does not allow you to subscribe to keyword searches. So we must turn to Social Mention once more. Follow the same steps as you did on step #4, only this time, select Flickr instead of Facebook. Subscribe to the RSS feed on Google Reader. Repeat as necessary.

Searching Flickr Through Social Mention

9. Any other unmentioned website or media platform. Go to the site. Run a search for a target keyword phrase. Look for RSS subscribe options. If an option does not exist, check a website like Social Mention.

Organize Your Findings

By now, you should have several feeds set up for a variety of searches. Here’s how to organize your Google Reader account for easy reading.

1. Go to Google Reader.

2. Click on settings.

3. Then click on Google Reader settings.

4. Click on the subscriptions tab.

5. Start organizing your feeds into folders, in this example, I’ll group feeds into folders by keyword. You could also group by medium, or if you do this for multiple clients – by client.

Google Reader Subscription Settings

6. When you’re done, your reader might look something like the picture below.

Organized Google Reader Account

And that’s it! You’re now set up to monitor your brand or business across a variety of popular platforms and it’s all free.

Got any questions? Leave them in the comments!

Photo Credit

The Single Most Effective Tactic For Online Marketing Success

Colin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:27:23 +0000

Create great content.

There’s just no other way around it. If you want to have success online, you have to be creating great content and you have to be doing it on a regular basis.

Look at some of the best and most highly trafficked websites online, Mashable, Chris Brogan, Search Engine Land, Copyblogger. What do they all have in common?

Great content.

I find it funny when I meet with people to discuss online marketing, and they don’t want to create content. Either they don’t have time, they don’t know what to write about, or they’re worried about what people might say.

Trying to achieve success without creating content is like trying to lose weight without going to the gym. It’s not going to happen.

What kind of content should you create?

It depends what your goals are. If it’s search engine traffic, text based content like blog posts might be the best approach. If it’s social traffic, blog posts, video, audio, and images would be good choices. If it’s for lead generation, try a white paper or ebook.

The really successful ventures will find ways to create all of the above.

But I don’t have time

Make time. Or hire someone to do it for you. This is an activity that you must work into your schedule. Start with at least one new piece of quality content each week. That will be enough to keep the content on your website fresh, keep the search engines coming back to index your site, and hopefully – build your presence online.

Note: if you work in a highly technical or tightly regulated industry, be sure the writer you hire has a solid knowledge of your industry, otherwise it can get dicey.

Pro tip: don’t wait for inspiration to come to you, instead, head down to your local bar or coffee shop and have an all night brainstorming session. Then, create an editorial calendar for yourself. Then stick to your schedule.

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Gary V (almost) Crushes It

Colin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:31:10 +0000

The good:

A classically (and inspiring) American tale of rags-to-riches success fueled by hard work and business smarts.

The bad:

For those who are active in the space, it fails to bring new ideas to the table and takes a very high level approach.

Who it’s good for:

Those who are new to the social media scene, or those who are looking for some motivation for change.

The Review:

I was really excited to read Crush It (affiliate link). After all, it was Gary’s keynote about hustling that really inspired me to get myself into high gear. I was so excited, in fact, that my girlfriend bought me a copy of the signed first edition for Christmas.

But after spending a holiday plane ride home reading it, I was left with a lingering sense of being underwhelmed. I expected to come away from this book wowed, inspired and energized. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.

That’s not to say that Crush It was without good ideas. It has many, and some good takeaways.

Mostly:

If you want to be successful, you have to be passionate, and you have to enjoy what you do.
Let’s be honest here – if you’re not enjoying your work, you won’t be successful. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you need to make a change.
If you’re not working to build your personal brand, you better get started.
True job security is mostly a thing of the past. Even some of the best workers get laid off from time to time. Safeguard your career by building your personal brand.
Choose a publishing medium that fits your personality.
These days, it’s not hard to produce and publish great quality in many different formats. If you’re a great writer, then blog. Are you charismatic? Try video. As Gary says in the book – find what fits your DNA.
The best marketing strategy ever is to care.
This is the best passage from the entire book, and I’m glad Gary emphasized it as much as he did. Caring is important no matter how you approach marketing, but it’s especially important in the social space. You need to genuinely care about the people around you, or it just won’t work.

To me, the most interesting part of the book was Gary’s mini-biography. For those who don’t know, Gary immigrated to the United States with his family as a young child, and spent the majority of his childhood in poverty. From a young age, he was a businessman, from lemonade stands with multiple locations to a baseball card king, so it’s no surprise to see him in the position he’s in now. The story proves the point that with a lot of hard work and passion, you can do just about anything.

At some point along the way, Gary mentions that he didn’t actually write the book. He dictated it. Unfortunately, it shows. The writing can get a bit rambling at times, and Gary’s typical enthusiasm and passion doesn’t always come through. In the book, Gary stresses choosing a platform that fits your DNA. I don’t think this format was a great fit for his.

And Gary, if you happen to come across this review, I want you to know that I respect you and your work.

The book just wasn’t for me.

There’s no future in SEO

Colin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:01:00 +0000

This statement may come as a surprise to some of you, as I happen to do a lot of SEO. And I do truly believe in its importance and power in the online marketing mix. But I do not believe in its future.

Why?

Because when you get down to it – SEO is not very difficult, and the profession has quite a bit stacked against it.

For one, SEO friendly development platforms are now very common. Drupal, WordPress and Joomla all get you started with an SEO friendly framework, all without any custom coding. Typically, this takes the need to optimize code (one of the most technical aspects of SEO) right out of the picture.

Secondly, the general public has become much, much smarter about how the web works, and more importantly, how search engines work. Plus, there are many great SEO resources online, which give you all the information you need to learn SEO – and most are completely free! SEO does take quite a bit of time to learn, however. But if you’re somewhat computer literate, and have an understanding of the English language, then you can do it.

When I meet with potential clients, and they already have a working knowledge of SEO, I start realizing that leveraging my career on a single marketing tactic is probably not the best idea.

Finally, when you boil everything down, good SEO is a foundation to be used with other online marketing tactics, such as content marketing, pay per click, or social media. When it comes to Internet marketing, a single tactic just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Because of this, I prefer to say that I practice Internet marketing, or, as my friend Cameron Gawley would say – Digital Strategy.

So what is the future?

The future is in the generalist. The marketer who’s good at executing and strategizing with a variety of online tactics. If you think you’re good at SEO, you better start learning social media, or blogging, or pay per click management, because it’s all important, and it frequently overlaps.

Having a general understanding of many online marketing tactics means you can provide a more well rounded campaign for your client or your company. It also means you’ll never run the risk of putting all your eggs into one basket – something I never recommend doing.

Hardcore SEOers will argue my point, as I have greatly simplified the full scope of an expert SEO campaign. But as search engines become more intelligent and the general public becomes more aware of how to market online, all signs point towards SEO no longer being a viable standalone profession in the near future.

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Team CJ Is Headed to SXSW 2010!

Colin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:06:16 +0000

It started as a podcast.

Then, in August, we asked you to vote.

Now, it's my absolute pleasure to announce that Team CJ will be on the official lineup for SXSW 2010, March 12-16th.

Myself and Rondo Estrello will be leading a Core Conversation on the topic of Citizen Journalism, and doing our best to represent the awesomeness that is Team CJ.

There will be many more details to come, but please congratulate Team CJ for a job well done.

Team CJ is:

5 Reasons Why I Love Social Media

Colin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:30:13 +0000

Part two in my mini series on the state of social media. See my previous post – 5 Reason Why I Hate Social Media

1. The people

My social media use has created so many opportunities for me to meet and converse with some truly wonderful people. I’ve been able to create some valuable and personally rewarding relationships with the people I’ve met over sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Social media has completely broadened my horizons. At my core, I’m an introvert. In college, I was terrified by the idea of networking. Now – I love it. I get to meet and talk with people! It’s great! But it took social media for me to completely realize this.

2. The possibilities

There is so much power behind social media. We’ve seen what it can do for social change, and how it can empower individuals to take on ideas and entities that are much larger than themselves. We’ve seen social media entertain, influence elections and save us money at the movies. Social media is limitless in where it can go in the future. That’s awesome.

3. The conversation

This goes along with my point about the people, but I’ve had some phenomenal conversations over social media platforms. Not to mention, it’s helped me to stay in touch with old friends and colleagues, who I probably would have lost touch with over the years.

4. The community

On a daily basis, I get to interact with thought leaders, innovators, industry experts, friends, family, artists, politicians… you get the point. Before social media, it would take some serious work to get to a point where I could engage with these people offline. Social media has brought the community – and those who lead it closer to those who want to participate and contribute.

5. The learning

Sometimes, I think I’ve learned more over the past year though social media than I did in my entire college career. It seems that those who are leading the social media charge have done a great job at fostering a community of those who like to share knowledge. As a 20-something professional, it means I get to benefit from the experiences and knowledge of those who are much older (and wiser) than myself.

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