Whether the online marketing assignment is for a multinational company program or niche small business campaign, over the last five years RSS feed marketing by blog and associated content strategies have become essential SEO tactics.  Now more than ever it’s easy to see why. Without authority social users rebroadcasting links to a website’s content, the site risks seriously low discoverability in critical social, news and search channels. Obviously, compelling third-party users to rebroadcast your content, requires marketers to actually publish recurrent content!

This post shares programmatic tips and excerpted verbiage from aimClear’s business blog marketing plan product, which we’ve refined over the years to offer end-to-end content publication strategies and feed management for clients. It is the “sister” product to our community management services, and suitable for inclusion in contract scope-of-services exhibits.

When building a business blog marketing plan, the goal is to actualize the client’s natural footprint, in search and social spaces small enough to dominate and large enough to yield fruit. With thoughtfully-executed programs, marketers help sites attain crucial discoverability in tightly associated content areas. The plan’s goal is to blueprint the process to build turnkey, client-owned authority publications.

The focus is to:

• Create a reasonably attainable ramp-up plan
• Work hand in hand with other team agencies, especially community management and promotional groups
• Focus on data-driven, outbound blogger, publication, community, and other outreach
• Frame SEO expectations
• Set ongoing scheduling expectations
• Conduct and provide ongoing research to support content creation/goals/targets, and partner agencies efforts, I.E. community management, etc…
• Be the team’s ongoing eyes and ears, regarding inevitable paradigm shifts in search, social, (de)evolving channels, etc…
• Build in clear reporting expectations
• Include aimClear’s feedback on “sharing” materials created by other team members, in advance and forensically
• Plan interactions between team agencies production teams, in advance and forensically
• Define interactions between team agencies executive teams, in advance and forensically
• Accommodate other team-generated articles and other assets
• Specify the costs, all inclusive

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aimClear will provide:

Month One

• WordPress or other platform feed development and/or assistance to team agencies, to adapt, implement and deploy team-provided design
• Advance and ongoing search and social research, to support feed content and  ongoing community management
  • Identify and recommend target bloggers, communities, publication and other targets
  • Identify and recommend, topics in accordance to MOM’s priorities

• One business day “retreat” with team and partner agencies’ teams to develop foundational feed and content concepts
• Create publication calendar and planning for month two launch

Months 2-12

• Launch publication
• Monthly publication calendar each for each next month, starting with month 3 calendar,  in advance on third Monday of each month
• Provide associated research and input for community management team at the time each content block is posted
  • Targets briefing
  • Demographic research
  • Ideas and recommendations

• Weekly check-in phone meetings, inbound/outbound briefings to/from partner agencies, at the production team members level
  • Topline results from previous week
  • Review upcoming week’s production schedule
  • Handle inevitable modifications of team’s priorities
  • Provide advance input and feedback on team-created “sharing materials,” videos, audio, infographics, etc…
  • Monthly in-person meetings, executive level
  • Review previous month’s results,
  • Provide feedback to other teams
  • Receive briefing on team’s upcoming priorities
  • Brief team on important developments, at the industry and mainstream communities level, regarding search and social paradigms
  • Discuss team-created “sharing materials. This line item is designed to support the team, in creating social media assets aimClear believes will work.

• Weekly and monthly reporting
  • Results impacting SEO
    • Links
    • Organic prominence
    • Traffic
    • Conversion,when team agrees on conversion goals
    • Technical SEO recommendations
    • Semantic SEO recommendations, including evolving social mashup tools, widgets, etc…
  • Results impacting social
    • Outbound referrals to social
    • Video views generated
    • On and off page engagement surrounding content (PostRank type metrics)
    • Written input for CM team

• Approximately 96 hours per month production, 3-5 content blocks per week (authors will use pseudonyms or, if agreed to by team, their bylines)
  • Minimum of 3 “features,” 450-900 words, well researched, targeted, etc….
    • Edutainment
    • Human interest
    • Topical and niche’
    • Non editorial reviews
    • Other
  • 1-2 serialized “convention” posts, designed to engage 5-8 targets each by aggregating content with added value
    • Link roundups
    • Video roundups
    • Important and complimentary news items
    • Conference coverage (travel and other expenses not included)
    • Featured bloggers, communities & companies (with team’s pre-approve)
    • Other as team concurs
  • “Package” (write setup, headlines, etc…)  and release team-created sharing materials
  • Rewritten releases, linking to original PRWeb and/or other releases
  • collateral promotions materials
  • Additional team-written materials as teams agree
• Approximately 16 hours per month executive publication management to provide thought leadership and management to the project
  • Internal leadership at aimClear
  • CEO to CEO phone and other strategic contact with team member agencies, in person and by phone

Feel free to use, excerpt and modify this language in your contract scope documents, with attribution, © 2011 aimClear ®.

Each speaker gifted the audience with insights, offering a glimpse into his or her own legal contracts, pricing and methods of providing search marketing services. They gave us an opportunity to, frankly, “learn from their failings.” It was like being invited to a private party where the host hired sushi chefs to entertain guests, but they entertained us with legal warranties. Dessert was served when the same chefs began strip dancing, allowing us to see beneath their contract kimonos. Are you salivating yet?

Will told me that Marty wanted SMX attendees to leave the session feeling confident about talking shop with their attorneys, armed with a deeper understanding of the language used when writing business contracts. (Later, Will added that Marty also admitted quite candidly, “The only reason I asked you to be on this panel is to get a copy of your contract.” )

Yes, that’s right. Everyone in the audience had the pleasure of ogling 37 pages of excerpts from contracts used by Marty Weintraub, Will Scott and Lisa Williams.

(Palms sweating, heart racing.)

No electronic versions of the contracts were shared. Why? Simple: they didn’t want us to straight up copy and paste contract language into our own SEM contracts. Rather, they encouraged us to seek advice of an attorney for the best of all parties. For those of you who could not make it to the session’s delicious legal buffet, pick up your chopsticks and savor a synopsis of a few of the juicy legal details.

Scope
It all begins with the scope! As Marty explained, you don’t just say, “We’re going to do SEO and this and that with a thousand lines of copy.” More must go into it than that. Our job as marketers, he explained, is to help clients understand that we are going to use various tactics tailored to their audience and need.

(At this point, Marty was waving his hands in the air. Despite the session’s extended metaphor, I was glad he wasn’t wielding a sushi knife.)

Demographic Research
Present the client with a scope of demographic research complete with market segments as well as what they sell and to whom. Include language that indicates you will perform radical user intelligence that moves past keyword research.

Sample Language: “…demographic research that spans multiple disciplines of online marketing…”

In other words, you will inquire about other people (competitors included), find search inventories, map them to social, and identify Facebook PPC segments as well as topical niche communities across other social channels.

The overall goal is to provide scope with language that describes how you are going to help them grow. Outline that you aim to find and develop social media, PPC, and SEO tactics that will allow them to develop as a company.

(Marty then shared one of those “head-tilt” comments about searching for and going after competitors’ legacy SKUs, and that you can go “do it” in YouTube to rank in organic search for their terms. Cha ching!)

Digital Inventory
Facebook is a channel, not a strategy. Google is a channel, not a strategy. Include a “Digital Inventory” clause that indicates you will identify which channels (segments) you plan to target. Make this research part of the contract. Deliver it as an XLS file divided into market segments and your estimated spend.

Reporting & ROI
Express to the client that you will use KPIs to advise and control effective channel to market to. Identify low-hanging fruit, if it exists. Also, identify how you are going to deliver reports. This may require building more specific meeting schedules (aka: time and money) into the contract.

Obviously the goal is reasonably prudent ROI. Consider including “WTF – bullshit to protect Marty” language.

Sample Language: “Our fee is not included in the calculation of ongoing profitability.”

Costs
If the task budget is simply “not to exceed,” where do you go? Marty’s suggested reply: “It’s based on if you are making money. And that shuts them down!” You may use flat-rate contracts, but do yourself a favor and cap hours. Don’t overinvest yourself. Be sure to use scope enhancement language, ala: “If you want us to do anything else, we will but here’s the rates…” Clearly indicate what’s extra, for example, advising client and vendors on how to make a website, and training them on how to maintain the site.

aimClear contracts spell it O-U-T:

• “Initial Retainer with project budget not to exceed $______”
• “Subsequent Retainer to cover how to handle when the initial retainer is depleted and if they fail to request a subsequent retainer…”
• “Monthly retainer and billings…”
• “Final take away is that for hourly work, minimum billing time is 1/10th of an hour.
• “Methods of Determining Fees with varying cost rates (no $ amount given)…”

(Ahhh… open that kimono, Marty!)

Will shared that Search Influence is a production house and works with smaller clients, about $300 to $8,000 per month and larger. Will’s juicy contract documents included sample “main street customer” packages. They scope by units of work at $60/hour, which could be an hour of someone writing a press release, for example.

(There were a couple gasps in the back of the room when the low cost was announced. Remember… “production house.”)

Will has been able to scope work out by focusing on systems. His team takes the tactics they know are effective and turns them into “systems to teach entry-level college graduate.” Thus, costs can be kept down.

Lisa revealed language for Project Based, Hourly and Pay for Performance. Her project-based breakdown is over a 12-month period. Her hourly is on a 6-month contract.

Sample Scope Language
Below is the scope language you can more or less cut and paste:

Adapt and augment existing demographic research focused on identifying market segments. Conduct social interest & KW research. Deliverables are .xls files segmented by master interest/keyword segments. “Master keyword segments” means keywords sorted to sufficiently delimit categories and sub-categories, suitable for future SEO & Social usage, but not segmented enough for responsible deployment in AdGroups. The focus for this phase is:

Perform Competitive Intelligence to research competitor’s previous and existing paid, organic and social marketing campaigns to see what was effective and their spending patterns…

Legals & Liabilities
As the saying goes, “good fences make good neighbors.” Such was Will’s approach with suggestions to use “overly-restricted language to limit liability.” He pointed out that it is “a lot less expense to pay your lawyer on the front end rather than on the back end or go to jail.”

(Ears popped up. Room got quiet.)

These key points really hit home:

• “We are all at the mercy of the people. We’re in an industry we don’t know for sure. We have no control other than study.” In other words, “It’s not my fault, so don’t try to sue me for it.”
• Ensure your legal contracts have a safety net that, in legal terms, says, “We are not responsible for more than anything you paid us.” Make sure your contracts ensure that in no event shall either party be liable for any lost profits.

Personalities & Contracts
Panel discussion made it obvious that each speaker had a different approach to the legal aspect. You could say they each wore different kimono styles…

• Lisa tends to cater to clients with a nice approach… “It’s all about you”
• Will lets his lawyer take control of contract… “It’s all about me.”
• Marty is right down the middle… “Let’s dance, baby.”

Laughter broke out when Will remarked, “We sweet-talk to [clients] in the proposal and put the screws to them in the contract. Our proposal is 12-point type, single column. Our contract is 8-point, double column.”

The moral of the story: no matter how good your relationship (or friendship) is with client in beginning, remember clients don’t like losing money. If they feel at risk, they may lose their sense of humor. As Will smartly warned, “Don’t lose potentially thousands of dollars by limiting your liability.”

Sample Legal Language
Here’s some more legal language you can cut and paste (well, sort of):

CONTRACT TERM AND TERMINATION:
1) Search Influence’s (Hereafter referred to as SI) services shall begin only after this Agreement has been signed by all parties, Client has completed and signed SI’s Automatic Credit Card Billing Authorization Form, and SI has successfully received and processed Client’s first payment as set forth herein above;

2) This Agreement …

Terms
Project Based. Consultant shall invoice Client on a by-project basis for all work provided and approved. Client shall pay all invoices within 15 days of receipt. As outlined in ____ Proposal, the payment schedule shall read as follows:

• 25% at time of contract signing
• 25% after acceptance of online marketing plan
• 20% after achievement of first 3 month goals
• 20% after achievement of first 6 month goal
• 10% after achievement of first 12 month goals

Consultant dedicates at least X hours for project during X period with the understanding that work needed to achieve goals will be completed by Consultant and additional hours as needed for set goals (as outlined in ____ Proposal). Additional work required not inclusive of set goals will be billed at $X per hour…

Compensation & Business Model
Lisa is one confident SEM marketer. She does Pay-for-Performance with select clients. For real. Few among the audience raised their hand when asked if they were brave enough for such. Regarding costs of Pay-for-Performance, Lisa shared that “the metric you need is sales, and what we want to focus is on sales. It’s not [a good fit] for every client.”

The common sound byte of concern is that “there are too many problems for attribution.” Lisa agrees. However, it’s viable for her when she’s working with the right client that has potential. Mediaforte Marketing, for example, takes their regular fees plus a percentage. They have doubled their fees using PFP. As an external resource for the audience, Lisa pointed to Stoney deGeyter’s article in Search Engine Guide that the SEO pay-for-performance model is not viable.

Marty added, “We are working with data we don’t know yet.”

(PFP feels to me how a sushi chef might feel inviting his or her customers into the kitchen. I’d want to say, “Be careful when playing with sharp knives.”)

Contract Points & Models
Lisa’s compensation and business models are focused toward having a good time with customers. A few paraphrased takeaways from her delivery:

• Creating expectations is critical.
  • Clients are confused about what we do. It’s a little bit of voodoo, art, and science. They have to trust us.
• Keep it simple.
  • The hardest part of tracking progress is attribution. By default, you assume all of the gains will be attributed to SEM.
  • If clients have other campaigns they can clearly track, Lisa goes into it together, sharing risk and benefits!
    
• Base it on data.
  • Compare against data from last month and last year. Subtract this year and use the delta.
  • Get to know what the profit margins are to see if you can push for 10%.
• Know your stuff. (Don’t bullshit.)
  • Be clear about what you know and what you don’t.
  • For the stuff you don’t know, communicate to the client that you can find people who have the expertise.
• Be friends.
• Fire clients, if necessary, or don’t even take them on.
  • Be able to say, “It might be best to go elsewhere…”
  • Inform them not to question every corner of what you do.
• Identify what you do when they mess up.
  • Incorporate language that addresses what will happen if clients are not following recommendations, questioning recommendations or not understanding what you recommend.
  • Sample language: “You may not change site architecture or change the URL structure. We are not responsible without written or express approval.”
• Practice dispute resolution.
  • Mediate to get through the issue together.
  • Be flexible.
• Keep the Relationship.
  • Provide a win for you and the client.

Key Takeaways From Beneath The Kimono
The panel agreed that one purpose of contracts is to ensure you get paid for your time. Don’t put in 50 hours of research into writing a scope or contract. But do make sushi and serve your customers to keep them happy!

In a nutshell, Marty, Will and Lisa “kitchen sinked” it for us. We were taught to not eat it (the legal sushi) all at once– even though there was so much food on the proverbial plate in this session it took all day to assimilate the delectable morsels shared. Fortunately, Alan Bleiweiss live blogged it for Bruce Clay, and you can check his SMX contracts coverage. (He actually caught the lawyer jokes!)

Want more about legal language? Marty suggested looking for Rand Fishkin’s stuff and putting that into your contract .

Guest Author Bio
Dana Lookadoo is an SEO Consultant with a focus on search engine optimization and audience engagement. Dana has been involved in Internet Marketing since 1999 and co-founded two Web firms and an SEO agency prior to rebranding to Yo Yo SEO – Word-of-Mouth SEO. She has worked with fortune 500 companies as well as small businesses and takes a collaborative “in-house SEO” approach to consulting. Connect with her on Twitter @lookadoo and LinkedIn.

One of the more challenging aspects of running an online marketing agency is mashing our process into legal agreements. Out of the legalese we typically cover in our documentation (fee structure, NDA, Term, Termination, Indemnification, Arbitration, etc…) none is more delightfully daunting than the obligatory “scope” exhibit.

Because our work is always data driven and research based, it can be tricky to make legal promises that set realistic expectations based on fact-sets as yet undiscovered.  We take the approach of building contracts with language that surrounds our process. This article shares sample scope from our “end-to-end social media research and pilot” contract, which includes organic social and social PPC.  The verbiage is self-explanatory without further introduction. We hope you find portions of the documentation, as well as insight into aimClear’s process, useful.

Exhibit A: Scope Of Social Media Services by aimClear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Exhibit A: Scope Of Social Media Services
Services will be mutually allocated and/or as directed by Client based on recommendations of aimClear. The objective is to plan and execute a strategic social media-marketing plan, deploy first-steps organic social, social PPC tactics and facilitate Client’s future ability to migrate programs in-house, post-deployment.

Interview Client for deeper briefing on product, goals and big picture. Audit existing paid and/or organic analytics, Facebook Fan Page(s) histories and associated case studies. Meet and integrate with client’s in-house creative, marketing, PR and technical human personnel as applicable by phone, email and chat.  Assess Client’s human resources and technology readiness as pertains to building internal direct marketing team(s).

Adapt and augment existing demographic research focused on identifying market segments. Conduct social interest & KW research. Deliverables are .xls files segmented by master interest/keyword segments.  “Master keyword segments” means keywords sorted to sufficiently delimit categories and sub-categories, suitable for future SEO & Social usage, but not segmented enough for responsible deployment in AdGroups.  The focus for this phase is:

• Perform Competitive Intelligence to research competitor’s previous and existing paid, organic and social marketing campaigns to see what was effective and their spending patterns.
• Identification of Google keyword inventory for main service lines & map relevancy in various social channels including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and other niche’ topical communities we discover to be relevant.
• Identify Facebook PPC & organic interest segments. For clarification, organic “interest segments” are FB groups, events, people, fan pages, applications, etc…
• Identify Facebook PPC segments. These PPC segments are used to place ads on Facebook right sidebar ads and take users to the same or similar landing pages as Google PPC. Facebook PPC is simply another PPC channel for direct sales and branding.
• Landing pages can also be within Facebook, which is sometimes a reasonable or great choice.
• Identify mainstream YouTube paid search segments susceptible to Client’s products, messages & brand.
• Review data gleaned from the research and choose select organic social, mainstream organic SERPs Universal SERPs and paid social targets from the service lines for first promotional efforts. aimClear suggests there be a face to face meetings as provided for herein, given the depth and detail of this project.

Set Strategy & KPIs (Marketing Plan Goals)

• Work with Client to establish reasonable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and controlling strategy to guide channel tactics.
  • Overall Strategy
  • Branding KPIs
  • Direct Response KPIs
  • Projected Costs & Recommended Vendors
  • Identify obvious and inexpensive opportunities to migrate Client’s existing public data to YouTube, SlideShare and/or other sites. (Help Docs, FAQs, other digital assets currently on or offline)
  • Define frequency and granularity of client-bound reporting and execute

As we mutually deem appropriate, evaluate and target organic and paid social: Facebook Social PPC, Facebook organic, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn paid & organic, etc… other mainstream and/or niche’ topical niche’ communities. All channel decision will be based on applicability, projected ROI and time available in scope.  The objective is to pick low hanging fruit first with the greatest return for the least investment.

For these mutually agreed upon first social and social PPC targets, further sort demographic segment-defining keywords to a deeper level of segmentation so as to be industry consensus best social PPC practices.

Deliver research to client. Deliverable is a tabbed.xls file of keywords, for the service areas, divided by market segments, Facebook segments and estimated PPC test spend. At aimClear’s discretion portion of the deliverables may be presented by WebEx online via .ppt.

Client will design, develop and host landing pages as advised by aimClear. Any delays the project incurs surrounding Client’s landing page production & associated analytics installation, provided aimClear is fulfilling it’s obligations as contained herein, shall not be considered aimClear’s material breech of this agreement.

Deploy first-target social campaigns, both social organic and social PPC. Conduct multi-variate ad-message/landing page testing.  The objectives are to determine best grid of channels, keywords, text ads and landing pages to meet Client’s traffic and conversion objectives. Work with client to select additional organic social, social PPC segments and interest group targets.

Recommended social PPC Test budget for the initial 2-month period is “not-to-exceed” $___K. It may be less. If aimClear does suggest that Client allocate additional budget, it will only be because pockets of profitability have been discovered to leverage. Any social PPC expenditures are fully at Client’s sole discretion. Social PPC expenditures can be handled either by Client’s direct credit card entry in Ad platform accounts or pre-payment to aimClear.

Continue testing. Determine cost & ROI of ongoing program including recommendations for scaling the program to other organic social and social PPC channels. Scale programs as time allows and reasonably prudent during initial 4 month engagement. “Reasonably prudent” means ROI positive, for opportunities that have actually been identified and with the management cost-feasibility calculated based on Client’s future self-maintenance.   In other words, aimClear’s fees will not be included in the calculation of ongoing profitability. The Cost feasibility analysis will be based on Client’s internalization of the programs.

aimClear’s, at it’s discretion, can cap the aggregate hours spent fulfilling scope in this agreement at ___ hours. Scope, should be viewed as “the proper order of steps for Client to undertake to optimize their near-term (__-__ months) ability to internalize organic social and social PPC direct marketing and branding programs,” as outlined herein.  aimClear will strive during term to reach as many goals in this agreement’s scope as possible. It is our hope that all the objectives outlined herein can be met within ___ months and, in our experience, they can be.  However because some of the objectives are contingent on Client’s cooperation and capabilities, both Parties understand that an additional engagement/agreement may be appropriate.