aimClear Search Marketing Blog

First day on the job as CBS Affiliate Creative Director, General Manager & friend Terry Hurly offered advice which has served well for 15 years. “Marty, when you send memos, do interviews, or otherwise deal with media or your employees, give OTHERS credit-sometimes even if you did it.” He continued, use the words “us,” “we,” “our” and not “I,” “me,” or “my.”

Years later, as the aimClear growth plan gestated, a dear Friend Dan Thralow sent over Jim Collins’s famous book “Good to Great.” Truly great leaders (level 5) share a number of mostly-common traits. One of them is crediting others (looking out the window) for success and taking responsibility (looking in the mirror) for failures. External factors contributing to success could include luck, excellent team members, & market trends.

Failure often stems from lack of a coherent game plan, inviting the wrong team members onto the bus, & not facing brutal truths. Tactic or trap, writing from the self-center person can be an intentional grammatical style book decision. Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-pollinating bookmarks between social communities you’re active in is rarely discussed and can be an effective technique. It’s especially powerful when using redirects to track outgoing traffic from social bookmarks to the actual posts you are promoting, a modus operandi we’ll discuss later in this post.

Bill Hartzer visited cross-pollination in his post, “Claim Your StumbleUpon Blog through Technorati”, which details how to increase links to your StumbleUpon blog and pass “link juice” to pages you add, review, or “Stumble”. There are a number of other C-P (cross-pollinating) protocols to consider between communities. These practices are white hat methods to share valuable content between groups of friends who tend congregate in different and/or multiple places.Read the rest of this entry »

Ask an experienced public relations guru to explain his or her profession’s fundamental aim and you’ll likely receive some variation of the following lecture: “PR is media relations, investor relations, community relations, customer relations, internal relations, human interest, and crises management.”

PR Has Been Important Since the Dawn of Time.
No doubt cave people intentionally spun messages to achieve goals and solve problems. Could anyone argue that Jesus’ disciples were not public relations stars in their authenticity and holistic intent? Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, John Adams, and the Federalists seemed keenly aware of the effect their words might have on the American population. These folks knew what they were doing.

Throughout recorded history humans have “published” with the tools of the day. Be the venue shouting from treetops, distributing parchment manuscripts by horseback, World War 2 propaganda trailers before Clark Gable movies, faxed press releases sharing professional accomplishments, political billboards, annual corporate reports, or Nixon feigning righteous indignation from the Oval Office, humans forever spin.Read the rest of this entry »

Well known writer Rose Sylvia (aka flyingrose.stumbleupon.com) has started ppcThink, a new blog which promises to be an authority online publication focused on “Cutting Edge Internet Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Profits.” You may also know her work as long time moderator of Search Engine Forums PPC forum.

Zero to Sixty in Three Seconds
Rose joined the Sphinn community with vengeance about 2 weeks ago, bringing her StumbleUpon power-user savvy and blogging experience to the young search marketing social community. In 11 days Rose had 9 submissions that “went hot” and quickly became a top Sphinner.Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati is a real-time engine that tracks, measures, and ranks authority of blogs based on how they’re interlinked. Most blogging software like WordPress and Movable Type are easily configured to “ping” Technorati regarding new or updated posts. Bloggers (and other sites plugged into the grid) embed Technorati tags in the body of posts which provide Technorati a dedicated method by which to index and categorize blog content. Tracking over 70 million blogs, Technorati was relaunched in May to mixed reactions. A surprising number of new bloggers don’t understand and harness it’s data mining power.

Why is Technorati Important?
The answer is all about links. The value of your website and it’s power to propel keywords to top rankings is measured by multiple on and off-page factors. Search engines algorithmically evaluate how many other sites link to yours and assess the “quality” of your site’s inbound link portfolio. Technorati makes it easy to spy on another sites’ inbound-link-portfolio, making it an ultra-easy research tool for aspiring link builders.Read the rest of this entry »

Search Engine Strategies is a legacy event created by masters. One walk through the San Jose convention center second floor concourse past the Wireless Lounge makes it easy to comprehend the magnitude of what’s happening here. This week San Jose is the epicenter of search marketing.

To really understand what Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, and the entire SES crew have accomplished over these years one only needs to peruse the list of speakers. The array of talent, insight, resume bullet points, and fascinating personalities assembled here is impressive.

Blogs Provide Insight.
The SES speaker profiles only link back to each speaker’s company and official SES conference website bio. We wanted to dig deeper to find blogs and blog posts which define the historic perspectives of this year’s SES SJ panels, moderators, and presenters. Read the rest of this entry »

She sleeps little and obsesses at 4:45AM over analytic-flavored black coffee. So much traffic from StumbleUpon again? He wakes every morning, checks bid management software to see Google API charges month_to_date, and shoots off a quick support inquiry (Support Ticket #25486705-4456-432) to Australia. There’s time for her to read 3 Search Engine Land articles in on her iPhone while going to the bathroom. She emails herself post title ideas.

It’s 5:10AM CDST and he blogs for 43 minutes before breakfast. Blogging means Digg, and Reddit, and Netscape. Wikipedia bugs him. She settles comfortably into her Vaio shortly before 5:13AM. These serious writers, Mr. and Mrs. Good Morning America, feel ebb and flow in colorful word-play ideas, creativity, tech-think research prowess, and wit. Even the driest topic has at least one amazingly poetic core value. Any subject can be link-baited.

Make Every Word Pay.
The Fanatical Business Blogger’s ZEN is spending as little time as possible writing while maximizing the possibility of inciting a viral response. Stream-of-consciousness external linking and bread crumbing tactics exploit inherent human tendencies to congregate in human buzz pockets, be voyeurs and remain anonymous. Social media mirrors physical life. Committed to blogging means to TOTALLY do it, No Matter What. Average content doesn’t count. If you’re a new business-blogger and you’re considering (or committed to) aggressive business blogging to gain respect as an author, then be prepared to really work hard.Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Word and WordPress make strange bedfellows at first gape. However our clients have increased productivity significantly by speeding up the blogging process with clever use of MS Word (Office 2003 and 2007). Anyone who has ever tried to paste formatted text from Word to WordPress and observed the awful results is probably wondering exactly what the heck this post is about.

Linking and Text Scraping is Much Easier with Word.
It’s true that you can’t select fonts, bold, italic, images, or other fancy typography tricks in Word and successfully paste content into the WP visual editor. However there is a method to compose text and create links in Word, clean the formatting, and successfully paste the copy into WP while maintaining the link-formatting integrity.Read the rest of this entry »

Our clients are awesome. The products they sell, services they offer, and charismatic vision-personalities at the marketing table amaze me. A number of of aimClear’s clients could easily commit to and become accomplished SEMs in their own right. We’re grateful they hire us to be their SEM research eyes and ears. We love the KPIs we are tasked with.

Still search marketing is not an exact science and amounts to very hard work. In the early days of a blog it can feel like you’re writing for nobody. PPC requires constant creativity and vigilance, organic SEO based on keyword research is only for those fastidious few.

Late last week a well respected UK linkbait blogger posted a “response” to linkbaiting we sent his way. I questioned whether to publish this graphic but it’s SO DARN FUN. What we love about his post is that Lyndon speaks to the real issue at hand-keeping promises made by attention grabbing headlines. At the risk of perceived self-indulgence, here you go:

There’s not much debate about it. Predictable recurrent content is the new SEO. Call it a blog, blog powered online media room, press release, or a post to a content management system which is plugged-into-the-grid by pingbacks, trackbacks, and tags. Creating compelling content, of value to your readers, on a set schedule yields wonderful rewards. It’s hard work and is very labor intensive.

Much to my chagrin, sometimes even the most avid of journalist blogger-fanatics might not have enough time to write because of other important business. In my case we have new client blogs to launch, dozens of pay per click (PPC) campaigns to manage, conversions to track, analytics to dissect and conferences to attend.

Don’t Waste Precious Words.
Many beginning bloggers miss extra traffic opportunities by minimizing quick posts as throw away for lack of thoughtful external linking tactics and promotional strategies- which don’t take much time at all. Remember that stream of consciousness posts can sometimes send thousands of unique visitors to your site over the course of weeks or months. It all adds up.

Here are a few tips for sourcing quick posts for business blogs (when you really don’t have time) which can yield traffic. The following scenarios are actual case studies from clients’ blogs. The traffic counts are for the 30 days following each post. Try these simple techniques to make emergency too-busy-to-write-business-blogger-posts pay.Read the rest of this entry »