In the world of online marketing, getting people to link to your website is an important marketing strategy. Google changed the rules with this idea when they included in their search algorithm that every link to your website is a vote for your website.

Since then, website owners have wondered how to get more links to their website so they can create a higher PageRank and thus appear higher in search rankings.

There are numerous ways that you should (and shouldn’t) do this, but here are a few that I like:

1. Make sure your website contains useful tips and ideas so that people link to it (either on their site or through a social bookmarking site like Delicious or StumbleUpon). The key here is to create something of value so they will be motivated to return to your site over and over for more of the same helpful information. In my experience, top ten tips or strategies work really well. A downloadable tool might help here.

2. Be newsworthy in some way. If you report on some kind of news, people will link to you. The challenge here is finding the news and breaking big stories. But it is possible. Stick to your industry; don’t try to break the story of the next celebrity hook-up if your industry is the oil and gas industry. Instead, look through your contacts for connected people and see what they are saying and try to break stories in your own area of expertise.

3. Create badges, buttons, counters, or widgets that people can add to their site. Lots of sites do that. People post badges and buttons to show that they belong, they’ll post counters (like site visitor counters or subscriber counters, for example) to show their audience size, and they’ll include widgets in their website to increase functionality. But each of these is a link back to the creator and provider of the badge, button, counter, or widget. A great example can be found at http://www.socialmediabuttons.com/. You can embed buttons and badges from their site onto your site to promote your Twitter or Facebook profile… but in doing that, you’re linking back to http://www.socialmediabuttons.com/ and thus giving them a "vote"! This method can work for you if you have a great idea for a widget or an audience who will happily "announce" that they are associated with you.

There are other ideas but these are the best for small businesses who are looking to increase the number of links they have.

Success in getting links to your website is not an occasional effort. It requires constant thought and intentional effort. Every time you sit down to write a blog, consider how you can entice people to link to you.

Brought to you by: Contemporary VA - Run your business instead of running in circles.

When you think of wine and wine connoisseurs, you probably think of quiet wine tastings by people in tuxedos (who might also be the kind of people to go to art gallery openings or museums). That’s fine for a slice of the populace but it’s a little reserved for most of us. But there’s one guy who is changing how we think about wine and at the same time he’s changing how we think about online marketing.

Gary Vaynerchuk (read his Wikipedia bio here and visit his website here) has enjoyed multimillion dollar success, national (even international?) fame and a multibook deal, all thanks to his online videos.

As the owner of a wine retail store in New Jersey (sorry NJ but you’re known for your wines), Vaynerchuk needed to promote his store, generate traffic, establish his expertise, and create a following. So he created WineLibrary.com, an online video blog where he tastes wines and talks about them.

I like wines, and I’ve been to wine tastings so the first time I saw a video I was expecting something like this: "This wine has good fingers with a hint of oak early and then a strong vanilla finish. You’ll enjoy it with a good cut of beef… blah blah blah".

But it wasn’t like that at all. One of the wines he featured he talked about how it reminded him of Golden Grahams, the breakfast cereal. He said other things, too, during his video but that stood out as the memorable thing for me. Since then, I’ve watched his videos – both on wine and on online video marketing – and find him to be engaging to watch.

Here is a recent video of his:
http://tv.winelibrary.com/2009/05/29/talking-new-zealand-wine-and-more-with-daniel-schuster-part-2-episode-685

If you have a business that you want to position, brand, drive traffic to, and grow, you might consider online videos as well. If you do, and you want to take some lessons from a page in Gary’s playbook, here’s what to do:

1.  Be consistent. He didn’t get where he is today because he did one video a month for a few months then stopped when he didn’t see any traffic. He has been taping consistently since 2006 (episode count is 685 or so) and is enjoyed by 90,000 people.

2.  Be opinionated and courageous. Your videos will fall flat if you try to explore both sides of the issue and let viewers decide. Have an opinion. Be brash. Tell people what to think. Tell others that they’re stupid. Don’t be afraid of backlash (just make sure that you can stand by your position and, of course, never ever slander someone).

3.  Find new ways to communicate. Gary doesn’t buy into the wine community’s lingo. He talks about breakfast cereal (and many other things – just watch his videos). He combines a New Jersey attitude with his wine tasting.

4.  Take a step up. You don’t have to invest in high end equipment right away. But your videos should probably be made slightly more professionally than if they were filmed on your laptop’s built-in camera. Invest in a camera with a microphone, take the time to script something about your topic, and go for it.

5.  Never one thing. If you’ve read this far and think that this is the only answer you need to be successful, you’ve missed the point. This is Vaynerchuk’s crowning jewel. It’s the thing he points people to when talking about wine. But he has also been active on blogs and forums and Facebook with good comments that are relevant to the topic.

Contemporary VA

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Webinars are a huge marketing opportunity and, in our opinion, underutilized. If you want to create a meaningful, multimedia interaction with prospects and clients, webinars should be on your list. In this blog, we’ll talk about the types of webinars, how to get started with a webinar, how to get the most from your webinar, and some resources to consider.

TYPES

There are a few different ways to present your webinar but we believe that the two most effective ways are pre-recorded or live-and-interactive.

Pre-recorded. Okay, the purists among you will point out that a "pre-recorded webinar" is just an online video of you talking. Fine. Sure it’s no different than creating a video that you might post on YouTube, but sometimes that’s all you need. You don’t have to go high tech, especially if you’re not comfortable with a live performance. If you want to have the freedom to do a couple of takes and then edit the best together, or if your content is demanding and complex, and perhaps not easily "digestible" in a live setting, try pre-recording your seminar.

Live-and-interactive. Live webinars, for those who are comfortable with that kind of delivery, offer a meaningful way to communicate and interact with your audience. You can have camera on your for some of the time, you can show your desktop or some other presentation tool, and you can field calls and written questions.

HOW TO GET STARTED

Creating your first webinar is easy. Don’t bite off more than you can chew to start. Consider doing a pre-recorded seminar where you talk at a camera, save the file, and then post that file on your website. That will get you started. Then, get a small group of peers together and lead an online meeting (which is basically the same thing as a webinar). This will give you the feel for the interactive nature and technical demands of a live webinar. Then, schedule a webinar and invite your customers and prospects to attend.

HOW TO GET THE MOST FROM YOUR WEBINAR

Make sure your webinar is about a specific topic and prepare what you want to say ahead of time. It’s helpful to know more than what you want to cover so that you can fill time if necessary or answer questions effectively.

Prepare your presentation materials beforehand but don’t distribute them. Expect people to sign in and watch. Afterward, offer people the option to download the presentation materials.

At the beginning of your webinar, after you greet everyone, tell people what the webinar is going to cover, how long you expect to be, and when you will answer questions. In other words, set the scope so people know what to expect.

Stick to the time you committed to. Don’t go over, especially if you have clients or prospects on the phone, and especially if those clients and prospects are business people.

If you are delivering a webinar for customers, create a limited-time bonus link and tell your audience that you will give out the bonus link at the end of the webinar, in order to encourage people to stay through entire thing.
Record your life webinar and add it to your website for people to view later.

RESOURCES

The three leaders in online meetings and webinars are: Webex.com, GoToMeeting.com, and Adobe Connect. These three offer rich interactivity and are very userfriendly.

Contemporary VA

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As a child, I lived in an older home that my parents were restoring. One of the features of the home that my father created was a huge fireplace that he made out of fieldstone. He went out to an old gravel pit in the country, he dug up a big pile of stones, and brought them back to our house.

To look at that big pile of useless stones, you wouldn’t think it was much except a big pile of useless stones. But my dad turned those rocks into a beautiful work of art that became the stunning focal point of our living room. (Insert nostalgic pause here). As my father worked, I discovered that the secret to turning a big pile of stones into a beautiful fireplace was in carefully placing the stones and then working on the spaces in between.

The web is like that, too. Websites and blogs and wikis are like the big pile of rocks. They are out there for people to visit but they sometimes lack context. They’re in a conceptual pile and don’t always fit comfortably together. In a way, that’s what web 1.0 was all about: "Digging up a pile of stones" by creating websites.

But now we have this pile of stones, what next? How do we lay them out so that they become a manageable and useable group of sites?

This is what web 2.0 is all about: bringing meaning and coherence to those individual sites by bringing them together… in a way, it’s about creating the spaces in between.

Sites like Plaxo allows users to gather and manage online identities in one place. So if you have a blog and a website and a wiki and a half dozen other sites, you can gather them together and keep the content in a nice, neat, publishable stream.

Squidoo is another site that has been created to fit nicely "in betweens" sites to bring meaning to the big pile of stones. Rather than hoping that our website and our blog will be understandable to consumers, we can create a Squidoo "lens" to help people find our information and understand it. Along the way we can add content, additional links, opinions, polls, and other interactivity.

These sites are huge for opportunities for business. They may not be something you’d use on their own (although there are some who do so quite successfully) but instead, they act as the space between to help us bring context and meaning to our web presence; and tie things together.

If you have a number of sites or blogs or wikis (or some combination thereof), and they all link back and forth, that’s great. That’s step one. But there’s an important step 2 that you shouldn’t ignore: The mortar.

Start with a Squidoo Lens. They are free and incredibly easy to create. You’ll be able to link to and from all of your other sites and provide a new way for people to find you, but a way that will also help them to understand what you’re all about before they visit.

Visit the IAC Virtual Assistant Squidoo Lens to see an example of a great lens in action.  You’ll notice that because IAC Professionals offers much more than Virtual Assistants (and probably more than the first things you think of when you think "VA"), the lens expands on their many offerings across the web.

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I was talking to my grandmother the other day and I related how I had recently reconnected with a high school friend through Facebook. Now, my grandmother thinks that a calculator is needlessly high tech when a slide ruler can do the same thing, so you can imagine how the Facebook conversation went.

Me: "Well, grandma, I friended Cassandra, she posted on my Wall, I tagged an old photo of myself, and then I beat her in a game of Bejeweled."

Grandma (staring blankly): "You lost me at ‘friended’."

Okay, so not everyone is on-board with Facebook (or other social media). My grandmother isn’t. But lots of people are, so businesses are, too. If your business isn’t marketing on Facebook, you should at least weight the opportunities and think about it. You might find that it’s not right for you, but you won’t know until you’ve given it some thought. I’ve listed the opportunities here and scored them on a scale of 1 (yikes!) to 5 (woot!).

Display ads. This is probably the best known and go-to marketing method for Facebook. They are Pay-per-click ads that show up all down the side of nearly every page. I don’t know about you, but for me they always show something like "shocking weight loss tea" or "I made $12,000 licking stamps". Score: 2. Yeah, that’s right, I’m scoring them only a 2 because I think most of them are pretty lame. If you have a really creative ad that doesn’t offer shocking tea or $12K, then you might be able to bump that score up to 3, but I think you should spend your energy somewhere else. Read more about it here.

Business pages. Imagine your own Facebook profile – complete with friends and a wall – but in place of your beautiful face, there’s a brand. And instead of your name, there’s a business name. Business pages look and act like friend pages. People become friends with various businesses and leave messages (and presumably, those businesses have the opportunity to leave messages, too, although I’ve never seen it). Score: 3. I think there’s huge potential here that Facebook and the participating businesses are ignoring. And not every business is going to be so compelling that someone will want to friend you. I’m hoping that Franklin’s Industrial Gaskets (proudly serving Wichita for 50 years) will gain a following. But I’ve been wrong before. Read more about it here.

*You can check out Contemporary VA’ Facebook Page where we update you on business related topics, project management, outsourcing and more to get an idea of how we utilize it.

Groups. If you can’t figure out what a group is, based on the word "group", go look up the word in the dictionary. A group is… well… a group. It’s a collection of people on Facebook who are interested in a similar thing. Maybe like a club. You can post announcements and pictures and links and have conversations. Just like any group ever conceived.

There are groups for everything. I’m not kidding on this: specific TV shows or movies, fans of just about anything, protests and social causes, groups to honor the recently deceased, and even groups to encourage non-Facebookers to get on Facebook. Score: 5. Yes, I think a group is one of the better ways to market your business. Now, OF COURSE you don’t want to start a group with a name like "The Group to Promote How Awesome My Business is". Instead (and this is where the strength of Facebook comes in), start a group about the need your products or services solve. So, if you sell luggage, start a group about travel (maybe travel disaster stories or lost luggage frustrations or great vacation memories, etc.). (You’ll have to sign in to read about groups).

Applications. Facebook lifts its hood and shows programmers some of its inner workings so they can create applications. Some are good. Some are annoying. Hire a programmer, create a compelling application (anything from a game to something people can collect) and get it posted on Facebook. In terms of opportunity, I’d score apps at 4. If you can create an engaging experience for your users, they’ll be exposed to your brand again and again. Read more about it here.

Contemporary VA

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One big difference in those who make a little money here and there online and those who turn it into multi-thousand and multi-million dollar enterprises is that the latter is continuously building their brand.

Notice I said their "brand", not just their product.  Sure you can "brand" a product, but you are the core brand of everything you do. 

Your core, and most important, brand is you or your company.  If you just throw things out here and there to sell, you may find that you don’t reach the success you’d like to reach. 

And I’m not talking about spending a bunch of advertising money.  You can spend all of the money you want on advertising and marketing but if you don’t consider the following, it probably won’t matter. 

When I say "build your brand", I’m talking about delivering value and connecting.   

The Internet Marketers that you see making the big bucks have built their brand by:

• Selling valuable things – no junk or worthless eBooks, etc.
• Giving away free things, information, teachings, etc. – not just consistently trying to suck every penny out of everyone
• Being a leader in their niche
• Building email lists instead of letting those valuable contacts slip away and treating those lists with great care – not spamming them or offering them a bunch of junk (that’s a quick way to run them off and FOREVER lose them)
• Connecting with their customers and followers and building relationships – building trust and respect.

If you don’t focus on these factors, you can bet you’ll be here today, gone tomorrow.  Of course, everyone is ultimately in it for the money but if you don’t care about your business and your customers, you’ll find they won’t care about you for long either. 

The most successful Internet Marketers I’ve seen are the ones who anchor themselves within the community.  They involve themselves via blogs, social networks and forums.  They find out what the community wants and doesn’t want.  They connect and, in turn, people start talking about them.  The word starts spreading that this person/company offers great value.  They become associated with the word "value"; what better association?

Don’t just focus on a few quick sales.  Focus on your brand.  Build your credibility and reliability and you’ll find longevity. 

Karen J. for Online-Marketing-Wizards.com