One of the things I tell clients is that the best marketing doesn’t come from you, it comes from others. Whether you’re selling a novel you’ve written, your services as a writer or editor, or indeed just about anything else I can imagine, if someone has not yet heard of you (your book, your company, etc.), then it’s important to make sure they get the best possible picture of it.

I was reminded of this all over again recently, when I received a flurry of emails requesting my services, as well as an appreciable uptick in sales of one of my novels. What really stood out with this year-end activity was the stated reason for contacting me. In the case of the services, it was all about the testimonials from others that are posted on my website. In the case of the book, it appeared to correspond with a number of recent favortable reviews.

It’s all about word of mouth.

We’re fortunate to be living and working in an age where social media can help our marketing efforts. As marketers continue to puzzle out the precise return on investment they’re getting from their social media work, and fret about how to monetize Facebook, it’s refreshing to consider this newest use of the oldest form of marketing: word of mouth. We all ask our family and friends to tell us where to shop, what hairdresser to use, which book to read next. Participating in a forum where that pool of people offering suggestions is much, much larger can only be helpful to the marketer … as long as he or she is willing to put in the time and effort to ask past and current clients (or readers) for help.

The reality is that only those people who really loved or really hated something will speak up about it spontaneously. Most of the rest of us need to be prodded.

So for 2012, try something new. Ask your audience to help you. If you did a good job for them, then they undoubtedly will; if your novel was a great read, then they undoubtedly will. Make the effort to reach out and stay in touch: you’ll not only have a lot more marketing success, but you’ll also be … beyond the elements of style!

Note that I said “seen as an authority.” The sad reality is that the internet has changed the way we perceive others. The person who has invested years of her life to become an expert is easily supplanted by a Jane-come-lately who knows how to wrap Google around her little finger.

Authority is about perception. What people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

So whether you really are an expert, or you want people to think you are, here are some steps to getting there:

• Forget selling, it’s about teaching. The “hard sell” may still work when it’s a Jeep or a Honda you’re selling, but it doesn’t work in the internet world. What is valued online is content, knowledge, information. Use your website and your social media posts to teach people about your field of expertise. The more they see you teaching, the more authority you’ll be given.
• Content is king. Providing lots of foundational content that changes frequently will help you become the go-to authority in your field.
• Provide strong headlines. Most writers don’t think in terms of headlines, but they’re essential. Without a great headline, no one will even get as far as reading your content.
• Find your ambassadors. Every time you have a positive experience with a client, reader, or customer, use that person for a reference, referral, or testimonial. If you don’t ask, they won’t offer. Remind them to tell others about how great you are.
• Make them ask for you. In the heyday of direct-mail marketing, the power was in the list. Guess what——it’s still true! Whether you manage an opt-in email list (you can call it a newsletter if you’d feel more comfortable with that), have people subscribing
  to your blog, or accumulate followers on Twitter, the more people request contact from you, the higher your authority ranking will be.
• Don’t neglect SEO. Search engine optimization is still real. It needs to be integrated with social media, but it’s still one of the most important things you can do to boost the authority of your site.
• Take care of your people. Getting followers and subscribers is just the beginning. You need to be available to them, keep your updates current with them, and interact with them. The more you do, the more they’ll follow.

And that’s it. Not all that difficult, is it? The key to becoming (and staying!) an authority isn’t any kind of esoteric knowledge, but just going through these simple steps … and then doing them over and over again. Try it and see how it works for you! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

So. Content and optimization go hand-in-hand. Web content is ideally produced with search engine optimization principles in mind; going back in later and “editing for SEO” generally produces results with which no one is happy.

The first rule is to create good content, quality content, content that says something. Many websites contain contentless verbiage, which will not help either in terms of being user-friendly or in terms of being SEO-friendly. Good content attracts attention, inbound links, and other referrals. When the site is getting discussed on other sites, in blogs and in emails, the search engines notice the activity. More “buzz” brings more people to the site.

Some other SEO considerations to take into account when creating content:

Changing content: the more frequently you can add new content to a site, the better it is for your search engine ranking. A constant influx of new content keeps the web crawlers revising the weight they’re giving your site. One easy way to do this is to maintain a blog, or several blogs, on the site, and update them regularly (daily, if possible; weekly as a minimum). Blogs add additional weight when they’re equipped with RSS feeds and submitted to specialized blog directories. Other options for changing content are articles placed on the site, a rotating set of tips (that can include your targeted keywords), a letter from the CEO, etc.

Remember that search engines crawl every page, so the same attention should be paid to every page as is paid to your home page. Some visitors will deep-link in, meaning that they never even see the home page, so make sure that every page has a point. Great content always answers the question: so what? … and then adds a call to action to that answer.

Great content engages users, stays on-theme, provides users with a logical path for site navigation, and provides high conversion rates. This is obvious in making the site user-friendly, but it also makes the site SEO-friendly in giving each page a “theme” (through a natural use of keywords and other content) onto which the web crawlers can latch.

Make the visitor the focus of each page (in a sense, this goes back to the “so what?” question: what can this page do for me?). When people put keywords into the search field, they’re looking for something specific: make sure that the appropriate page tells them whether or not you can give them what they want, clearly and unequivocally.

Along the same lines, write about benefits for the visitor. This isn’t the place to say how great you are: if you meet a prospect’s needs, then you’re great from their point of view … and that’s all that matters.

One way to make sure that your site is doing what you want it to do is to make a list of all the pages on the site. Look at each one individually. Is each one action-oriented? Does it answer the “so what?” question and provide a clear call to action?

Put it up, try it out. The great thing about websites is their flexibility. If something isn’t working, take it down and try something else. Solicit input from current clients/customers. What other content would they like to see there? What’s helpful and what isn’t?

Forget marketspeak. Those of you accustomed to writing copy IN CAPITAL LETTERS with lots of exclamation marks—lose it. It’s not good SEO and, frankly, it’s not a great use of language either.

You may wish to use a content analyzer at some point in the process. Content analyzers can provide useful data for making your pages more effective. Content analyzers can alert you to broken links and analyze your pages for duplicate content. (The analyzer shows the similarity percentage among all the pages on your site, so you can see what pages are similar enough to trigger a flag in the major search engines. Your site will be penalized if it displays too much duplicate content. The higher the similarity, the more likely you will be penalized.)

Know your audience. Know the people who are likely to be searching for your site, and the phrases and ideas to which they will respond. Again, this makes your site user-friendly … and web crawler-friendly too.

You want to start with great keywords, but be sure not to overuse them. If the content doesn’t sound natural, then chances are you’ve leaned too hard on the same group of keywords. Derivations of your targeted keywords can enlarge your audience, or encourage visitors to dig deeper into the site.

It shouldn’t have to be said, but make sure that all of your content is grammatically correct and conforms to the rules of American English usage. Errors may drive potential customers or clients away. On the other hand, be sure to include common misspellings of terms used in your pages in your meta tags—because people enter all sorts of things into the search fields!

Usability is a design issue, a content issue, and a search optimization issue. On each page, ask yourself: what is the most important thing that you want visitors to do? Make that the easiest thing to do, explained with the most clear and vivid language available.

It’s not only the quality of content that matters; quantity is also very important. People search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text you have, the more chance that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase being searched for. Moreover, some search engines also place importance on quantity: they assume that a large website has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality. (This may or may not be true, of course; but in this case it’s what the search engines “believe” that matters.) So take care to look for both quality and quantity of website content.

Stay away from the “free content” sites that offer gadgets and miscellaneous information (word of the day, quote of the day, etc.) unless that gadget or that information is clearly relevant to your site. The same goes for newsfeeds. Make sure that all of your content is both relevant and of good quality, really useful to anyone who might be a customer or client.

What about if your site isn’t naturally content-rich? Business sites in particular (both B-to-B and B-to-C) may see their sites as not being content-based. Be creative! Whatever you sell, there’s something you can say about it. A florist can provide articles about flowers; a furniture store can do a series on cleaning or repair. You can write about semiconductors, at a pinch. Look for the movers and shakers in your industry and invite them to write for you. If you really think about it, there are very few sites whose raison d’etre cannot generate some content.

Will this bring visitors to your site? You’d be surprised. Being seen as an information and authority site gets you bookmarked in customers’ browsers, and they will buy from sites they have learned to trust. If you cannot find content out there, and don’t have the time/skills to write it yourself, hire a copywriter to help you out.

Conclusion? Google is clearly rewarding good content, and a lot of the best-ranked sites out there have one thing in common—good writing. Make sure that you make it a priority. Content-based search engine optimization is usually hard work in the initial stages and—here’s your warning!—slow to show results. It is likely, however, to give you the best and most stable long-term results; and, once established, is relatively easy to maintain.

Want more? Be sure to visit Customline Wordware and sign up for Content Central, a free newsletter filled with tips, examples, and articles about providing SEO-friendly content! Or contact me at info@customline.com for your own content consultation. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

How does it work?

1. Write an article first. Make it a decent article, one that contains useful information for people interested in your subject. Make sure to include any keywords you’re targeting in the article, but don’t overdo it — some of the article directories won’t allow overuse of keywords.
2. If you’re an author, what you do want to do is submit fairly short articles highlighting something (an angle about your book perhaps) that it reads like a mini-infomercial. These are then copied by people looking for content for their websites, newsletters, blogs, etc. The trick is that when they copy the article they are required to keep the “resource box” or “author bio” intact. It is here that you list yourself, your book/website/blog, and put in the links (usually a maximum of three). You not only get links via the article directories that you submit to, but if anyone uses your article, you get more links.
3. Submit the article. At the end of the article, there’s usually a space for a signature line of sorts: this is where you can provide the link back to your website. Change the sig line you use so that you can point to specific pages within your website — search engines like that.
4. If you want the same article to be on your blog, go ahead — just be sure to post it to your blog first, before you put it on the article directory site. That will keep you from being penalized for duplicate content. Wait for a couple of weeks before re-posting to the articles sites, and change the title and some of the content.
5. Article directories are generally free, though some will charge for faster service or for more prominent placement. In my experience, it’s not useful to pay these extra charges; just keep a flow of articles going out and providing links back to your blog or website.
6. Remember that these directories aren’t like magazines or journals. There’s some editorial screening, but it’s mostly to be sure that the article is on topic and not over-using keywords. You may not be in great literary company on the sites, but that’s not the point: it’s to get the links to your site. HOWEVER … don’t think this means you can be messy or submit anything but your best work — that sort of thing will come back to haunt you. Besides, you may wish to give the article URL to potential clients, etc., to show your thought leadership in your vertical. Often, as I mentioend above, these articles will be copied by others looking for content, which is good — they’re required to maintain the link back to you and your name on the piece, and this increases both backlinks and your reputation — but it means that you really can’t make this a halfhearted attempt at writing. If you don’t have a writer on staff, contract with a freelance writer: you won’t regret it.

Where do you find these directories? Here as always, Google is your friend: in about thirty seconds I found this list.

Squidoo is its own little world. Here your article takes the form of what they call a “lens,” that’s like a mini-website. You can use photos, videos, all sorts of things in your lens; they’re fun to create and you can use the lens as a calling-card to potential clients or readers.

So there it is. Use article directories to boost your visibility on the web. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Moving at the speed of thought has become second nature to most of us, and even most traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises now have an internet presence. In fact, the very expression “brick-and-mortar” is an internet-age moniker, born of a need to differentiate where and how—online or offline—products are being sold. Today, online businesses are the expected, while “brick-and-mortar” businesses are the exception; we actually have to specify when a business is only offline.

Following commercialization and the introduction of privately run service providers in the 1980s, and the internet’s expansion for popular use in the 1990s, the internet has had a drastic impact on both culture—and commerce, including the rise of almost-instant communication by email, text-messaging, text-based discussion forums, and more. It has its dark side, as the inflation and collapse of the dot-com bubble showed how investors were unready for the brave new world. But still the internet continues to grow, driven by commerce, greater amounts of online information, and the knowledge and social networking known as Web 2.0.

And as long as there has been an internet, there has been internet chatter.

The ability to communicate in an instant brought with it a wave of what we might today consider chatter (albeit disorganized!), and, in its wake, businesses that capitalized on that chatter. For example, dating sites sprang up to match prospective couples online—to facilitate their chatter and allow them a safe forum in which to pursue it. So chatter as communication thus became chatter as business. And it has been growing ever since.

But how did it happen?

Ask anyone who was part of the internet’s early history, and he or she will be glad to tell you—and at great length. At lesser length, here’s what you need to know: the ARPAnet, the internet’s predecessor, offered users mailing lists as early as the late 1970s. While the ARPAnet was meant to be used for research, one could argue that these mailing lists were used for business purposes: users discussed their jobs, asked for and gave advice on computer tools, and so on. The ARPAnet gave birth in turn to USENET, an electronic conferencing network that remains in use today (now it uses the internet as its method of transmission) but started life as a network carried by modems over dial-up telephone lines. (Here is a terrific history of USENET.)

USENET software was free and adapted quickly to transmit material, so it became popular very quickly: electronic conferencing, bulletin boards, and groupware sprang up everywhere, with information being transmitted all over the world. This communication was, again, not meant to be business-oriented, but inevitably at times it was.

USENET

The commercial status of the early internet was uncertain. USENET culture was non-commercial, and while early acceptable-use policies attempted to sketch out boundaries for commercial use, commerce often came up against that culture. The culture, ironically, was not part of the original intent of those who developed ARPAnet and USENET—the networks were meant for education and research, and commerce that supported that education and research was essential.

In the end, commerce prevailed over culture, and so businesses began to take advantage of the possibilities offered by a worldwide communication tool.

And with the communication came the chatter. The first rule of internet commerce, as every marketer has learned, is that one cannot fool one’s customers in the networked world, and for one simple reason: they talk to each other. No longer did a disappointed customer merely have recourse to a letter of complaint to the marketer or to the local Better Business Bureau: the world had become that disappointed customer’s oyster, and he or she was going to make the most of it! Bulletin boards began to proliferate that decried poor products or customer service, and as search engines began to be developed, these opinions were suddenly at everyone’s fingertips.

Good marketers took it in stride. If you can stand behind your product or service, then you welcome customers’ interactions with each other. Business marketing to a sophisticated customer community may be a challenging way to do business, but at the end of the day everyone—company and customer alike—is a winner, because goods and services have to be top-notch in order to acquire any kind of longevity on the net. It both allows and requires a level of customer service that would have been impossible in the past; the chatter of both delighted and disappointed customers has equal bandwidth.

If you don’t believe that, then visit a social media site and listen to what people are saying. And then go back and take a long hard look at your own customer service practices!

The milieu par excellence of chatter is now, of course, social media sites. Here you can eavesdrop on and participate in conversations about every product or service you’ve ever heard of … and any number of ones you haven’t. Listen carefully, because your next Big Idea may well be there, disguised as aimless conversation that starts with something like, “what if we had…” or “I wish there were a way to…” That is the true value of chatter, and is at the core of chatter marketing: the ability to become part of a customer or prospect’s life, to anticipate and fulfill his or her needs, and do it so seamlessly as to appear to have been part of the fabric of their daily existence forever. “I don’t know what I did before…” is a great phrase to hear!

Of course, no history of internet chatter is complete without addressing the issues of governmental regulation—of the exchange of information, over and covert—and spying.

The 2005 movie V was a film about a totalitarian society ruled by a fascist government that maintained complete surveillance of its inhabitants (at a level that would make Orwell gasp). The movie has a scene in which a pair of spies drives down a residential street, holding a machine that records the conversations that people are having inside their homes as the mobile unit passes them. The machine, of course, rates the conversations as to their relative government antagonism, thus enabling the surveillance agents to act on that information.

Many bloggers have discussed in great detail and varying levels of rationality the similarities between this scene and the CIA’s investment in Visible Technologies, a company that monitors the output of social media in order to “read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon,” according to an article in Wired News. One blogger even joked that monitoring the internet for anti-government sentiment is a little like monitoring aquariums for fish.

Using technology to increase governmental control isn’t a particularly new concept—or behavior. Technology has always been co-opted into service for the military-industrial complex. The real problem—also not a new one by any means—is that technological advances are occurring so quickly that by the time the government is able to present new regulations—imperfect regulations themselves that could be stopgap, arbitrary, or based on political necessity— those regulations will probably already be obsolete.

It’s agreed by all political parties that the U.S., as well as many other, governments move slowly in response to new situations; with technology moving at the speed of thought, governments seem to not stand a chance to catch up. As an article about California state government oversight has noted, “complicating whom to regulate and what kind of communications to regulate is the Internet’s penchant for anonymous chatter. Also, should a 140-word tweet sent on Twitter be required to include a disclaimer such as ‘Authorized by ID#123456’ if it comes from a campaign worker or paid political activist?”

Back in 2008 (well, this is a post on history!) a presidential directive expanded the intelligence community’s role in monitoring internet traffic to federal agencies in order to protect against cyber-attacks, a directive that was met with some concern. Yet that seems to be the tip of the iceberg. Where does legitimate surveillance —which is nothing other than listening in to internet chatter—end and gathering data for more nefarious purposes begin?

It is, says Stanley Chodorow, from UC/San Diego, “inevitable and worrisome. At some point, probably beyond 2014, the courts, at least in this country, may try to control the use of internet devices by law enforcement by barring evidence gathered in certain ways from being used in court. But that process will be very difficult and take a long time to evolve.”

The most telling response—and the one most interesting to marketers—is a comment made by Dan Ness of MetaFacts: “The interests to build in identification of everything from CPUs to clothing using a wide variety of markers—electronic and otherwise—will outpace the ability or interest of the populace to block or thwart these systems. Attempts by constitutionalists, libertarians, the privacy-minded, and individualists will lag behind commercial and security interests in their ability to enact policy to protect against this increased surveillance.”

And there it is. Comfort and convenience will always win out over privacy.

On the other hand, eavesdropping on internet chatter has been, apparently, one of the most successful twenty-first-century weapons against terrorism. Internet chatter picked up by various government agencies has enabled law enforcement in several countries to stop terrorist plots and keep disasters from occurring. It’s interesting to speculate how the Cold War might have been fought had there been an internet to use for covert communication; it’s certainly being used today by all sides in the global security arena.

The arguments over internet freedom—and more generally, freedom of speech and expression—run the gamut from tremendous economic issues (like whether a company has the right to market its wares online without regulation) to control (who really “owns” internet space?) to territorial considerations (who has the right to tax internet sales?) to criminal considerations (who has the power to shatter monopolies?).

All of the issues are complex—in fact, much more so even than they would appear at first glance—but all of them have one disquieting (or wonderful, depending on your point of view) reality in common: the internet has no borders. There is no king or queen of the world wide web to try offenders and enforce internet law … and the very existence of such a person or entity would be supposing that everyone could agree about what the rules, laws, regulations, precepts, etc. of the internet ought to be, which is clearly impossible.

The other side to politics online is the ability for grassroots organizations to mobilize quickly and efficiently. Petitions are signed, political candidates vetted, and internet chatter is used every day to sway opinions. So while the government may well be listening to the Average Jane, Jane is in turn conveying information to others about the myriad organizations and causes that she cares about. She has become a chatterbox (see chapter six) for her political, religious, and social allegiances. And the power of that chatter cannot be underestimated.

It’s worth taking a moment here to talk about blogs, arguably one of the major milestones in the history of internet chatter. Opinions that are being written and circulated on blogs are an increasingly powerful force: online word of mouth can make or break a brand, TV show, celebrity, company, or activity. Blogs record daily the pulse of the internet community and, for the marketer, represent a way to take that pulse in order to be forewarned about shifts in opinion, trends, and consumer behavior.

Consumers have become empowered by the internet, and there’s no going back. They express their skepticism of advertising, demand price points, and even mobilize for action.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics and other industry giants are trying to capture the chatter and make sense of it, sifting through hundreds of thousands of comments every day. The company can report on the number of times a subject was mentioned, who mentioned it, and the communities where it appeared. So it’s not a matter anymore of seeing information used by political entities; marketers have entered the fray and are staking an informational claim of their own.

The story of internet chatter is the story of the internet itself: an uneasy conflict between the internet pioneers, who would prefer to see the web remain a free zone where problems are handled cooperatively through self-regulation, and those in government, commerce, and assorted other players who would prefer to use the internet to further their own interests.

The reality is that the internet has always been defined by (and drawn much of its energy from) the tension that exists between chaos and control. That’s its history, and the history of the chatter that occurs daily in social media sites and networks, websites and blogs, forums and emails and chat rooms. That tension lies in the birth of the internet and is what will chart its future. That tension is both the strength of the internet and its greatest weakness.

And there’s no probability that this particular bit of history is going to change in the near future. Understand that, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!