Your Internet Marketing Expert

SEO Training Tip’s

John Regis — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 03:03:21 +0000

A quick introduction – I’m Rob and I work for Distilled in the UK office. This is my first post here on SEOmoz, so I hope you find it useful and I look forwards to your feedback.

Running well planned training sessions can be a great way to build the credibility of SEO at the same time as educating your organisation. But if you don’t put the effort in it can look unprofessional and sloppy. Who’s likely to care about implementing good SEO if you don’t even look like you care about it yourself?

Whether you work in-house, or provide training for clients and colleagues at an agency, here are my top tips for SEOs when it comes to planning and delivering effective training sessions.

Identify SEO Needs

SEO is becoming increasingly broad and complex – not everybody in your business needs to know the granular details of SEO from one end to the other. For example, a developer may be on your course to find out how to build SEO friendly sites, but they probably don’t need to know a wealth of link building strategies.

Call or email the potential attendees and identify what they are hoping to get out of the course. What are the key processes in their working day? How can you make them more effective or efficient through education? Don’t deliver a one-size-fits-all SEO course across your whole organisation – use these insights to build a course which addresses the needs of the attendees.

Prepare

There’s absolutely nothing worse than showing up at someone’s desk with no prep and trying to deliver some training off the cuff. They’re unlikely to actually learn anything, and it will not be a positive experience for either party. Make sure you prepare well in advance – give yourself time to create something truly effective.

Set up a good environment

The middle of an office is rarely a good place for training, so make sure you book an adequate room where you can set up an environment that is conducive to learning. You should also:

Ensure you have the right equipment (e.g. projector, laptop) set up before the session starts
Have all of your handouts printed and organised
Put out notepads and pens in case attendees have forgotten them
Making sure the lighting, temperature etc. is appropriate
Get some drinks, water, and biscuits – people love biscuits.

Essentially you should make sure that attendees have everything they need so that they aren’t distracted.

You should also make sure that the room is arranged appropriately for the type of course that you’re delivering. If it’s going to be technical you may need to show examples on-screen, so ensure people are facing the screen and have a writing surface for notes. If you’re doing a creative session (e.g. linkbaiting ideas, content strategies) you could encourage sharing and conversation by arranging the room so that attendees are facing each other. Finally, if attendees will be undertaking team tasks, small clusters may work best.

Structure

Build your training session around a handful of key learning outcomes – these should be relatively easy to identify if your needs analysis was successful. For a course about optimising blog posts, they could be:

How to use keyword tools
How to identify good target keywords
Where to use keywords in an article.

In addition, Aristotle’s (simplified) ideas on giving a speech are a useful guide for structuring training:

Tell them what you’re going to tell them
Tell them
Tell them what you told them.

I usually use this to structure the course as a whole, as well as for each key learning point. It helps keep the attendees on track and clearly defines different sections.

Finally, if the course is an interactive group session I’d recommend using an ice-breaker to get people sharing and talking. For some ideas, check out these resources:

Combining the all of the above, your session may look something like this:

Slides

Powerpoint slides should be clean, minimal signposts for your session – an indication of how the training is progressing. You shouldn’t be filling your slides with text and reading it word for word (although there are some exceptions – if you’re teaching someone how to build an XML sitemap, you’ll probably need some XML up there). Light-hearted images can help to maintain a relaxed atmosphere, but don’t overdo it.

Effective learning won’t come from your crazy powerpoint skills, but it will come from…

1) An Engaging Presentation Style
If you’re not a natural presenter practice in the mirror, in front of your family, in front of your dog – whatever works best for you. The more you do it, the better you’ll get and the more you’ll relax.

If you’re a really nervous speaker, try to develop a routine before you start (e.g. setting up the room, hooking up the projector) that will provide a distraction.

2) Interactive Exercises
Teaching other people, sharing ideas, relaying tasks back to the group can all contribute to a deeper understanding of a subject and higher retention rates.

Exercises could be as simple as writing ideas for link targets on a board and explaining them back to the group, or using computers (if you have a training room that allows it) to research keywords in teams. You can also give attendees a short test on what you’ve just covered, although try to keep them fun.

I’d recommend working at least one exercise into each key learning outcome.

Learn about learning styles

Different people respond best to different methods of teaching. Honey and Mumford’s work on learning styles is well known and identifies 4 main categories:

Activists (those that learn from doing)
Reflectors (from reviewing)
Theorists (from making conclusions)
Pragmatists (by putting ideas into practice and experimenting).

These are usually identified by using a questionnaire, but I’ve seen very experienced trainers spot these traits on the fly and address them accordingly. For an SEO implementing their own training sessions this might be beyond the call of duty, but some reading about learning styles is another step on the path to becoming a training ninja.

Feedback & Follow Up

Finally, the one thing that I would absolutely recommend to all SEOs who want to get better at training is to ask every attendee to fill out a feedback form when the course is over (I’ve put together a generic feedback form you can use). Try to make the process anonymous so that you get their honest thoughts. It can be hard to take criticism at first, but you should look at each negative comment as an opportunity to get even better.

Soon after the course send a follow-up email with your contact details, soft copies of course materials, links to resources, and a thank you to the attendees for taking the time to come along.

Hopefully this post will give you some information that you can go away and use to deliver better training courses to your colleagues and clients. Of course, I’d welcome any feedback and suggestions in the comments below, or you can always catch me on Twitter.

8 Ways to Optimize Your Google AdWords Campaign

John Regis — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:28:10 +0000

You may have noticed that Google makes it easy to set up an Google AdWords campaign, but not so easy to get a return on your investment in pay-per-click. There are a lot of levers you can pull in your AdWords campaign to influence results. Here are eight ways to optimize your Google AdWords campaign for better ROI.

1. Know Your Target Audience Google AdWords Profile

Knowing your target audience, in the context of Google AdWords, goes beyond maintaining a list of demographic parameters that describe the identity of your customers. You also need to keep in mind one important question – how is my audience using Google? Trying to get a feel for their behavioral patterns and letting that behavior inform your selection and use of keywords will give your Google AdWords campaign an edge over your competition.

2. Speak The Language of Your Audience, Not Your Own

Keep in mind that your target audience may or may not use the same vocabulary that you do to describe what you sell. Your keywords should reflect the way they talk about your offerings, not the way you do.

3. Select Primary and Secondary Google AdWords Keywords

Each keyword in your campaign has a cost that depends on how many others are bidding on it. Your primary keywords are directly related to your product/service. In case of highly competitive products, your primary keywords may prove to be quite expensive. It’s equally important to choose secondary keywords that are not directly related to your product. Secondary keywords widen your reach and can bring down your pay-per-click advertising costs if you choose less competitive segments.

4. Select Smart Site Google AdWords Placements

Apart from bidding on keywords, AdWords also gives you access to a wide range of partner websites where your ad can appear. You can choose categories of websites that your target customers are most likely to visit. For example, if you sell digital cameras, you can advertise on photography sites or sites that target gadget-lovers.

5. Use long-Tail Keywords For High conversions at lower cost

Online users are gradually using longer key phrases rather than keywords. These longer phrases have lower search volume than common keywords. However, long-tail keywords increase your chances of clicks and conversions since they are very specific. For instance, “digital camera” is a generic keyword. A long tail alternative would be “best deal for Canon 1000D.” If you’re struggling to find relevant longer tail keywords, there are a number of free Google Adwords Keyword tools that can help you discover profitable, traffic-driving terms.

6. Monitor Conversions, Not Just Clicks

While you pay for clicks, tracking overall conversions from each keyword can help you derive better value out of your campaign. This, however, requires good integration of Google Analytics and AdWords with your CRM and sales management system.

7. Optimize Your Ad Copy

Just like headlines play an important role in a traditional media campaign, having highly contextual ad copy that’s closely related to the keyword being searched for plays a vital role in conversions. An ad for a broad term like “digital camera” might lead to information that would aid the purchase decision of the buyer. However, if the search term indicates intention to buy, the copy should be persuasive and lead the user to a landing page with an option to purchase.

8. Test Your Landing Page Designs

The key to continually increasing ROI from Internet marketing is testing. Beyond testing multiple versions of your ads, make sure to test variations on your landing pages. Google offers the Google Website Optimizer tool that can help you decide the best layout for your landing page. Decisions like where to place the “Buy Now” button and what color to make it may be aided by this tool.

8 Ways to Optimize Your Google AdWords Campaign

Facebook Innovations: The Bing Social Media Search (Live Broadcast)

John Regis — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:38:23 +0000

Here’s the rebroadcast of stream of the event:

facebookinnovations on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

How Do I Set Up A WordPress Blog

John Regis — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:20:30 +0000

I see that many people encounter problems in setting up a WordPress blog in their own domain (also known as a self-hosted WordPress blog). With that, what I’ll be sharing with you in this article is a step-by-step guide that you can follow through to set up your very own WordPress blog.

You may be asking me about the difference between a self-hosted WordPress blog and a free blog from WordPress.com – The main difference is that if you are using a free blog from WordPress.com, you are not allowed to use it for marketing purposes. However, if it’s a self-hosted WordPress blog, then you can promote other peoples’ products and services (or selling your own).

Before you can set up your own self-hosted WordPress blog, you will first need to have your own domain name (you can get one in Namecheap – which costs less than US$10/year) and your own hosting service (you can get one in Hostgator – which costs less than US$10/month for a Hatchling plan).

Step #01 – Accessing Your Domain’s Cpanel

The first thing you need to do is to log into your domain’s Cpanel.

You’ll be prompted to enter your user name and password before you can gain access into it.

Step #02 – Locate “Fantastico De Luxe”

After you’ve accessed your domain’s Cpanel, you need to locate and click on this icon called “Fantastico De Luxe”. – It’s in “Fantastico De Luxe” that you need to go to in order to install your WordPress blog.

Step #03 – Select “WordPress ” Under Blogs

What you need to do once you have accessed Fantastico De Luxe is to locate and click on the link called “WordPress” under the category “Blogs” (it is located on the left of your screen, where all the menu items are).

Step #04 – Select “New Installation”

After you’ve selected to setup a WordPress blog, you’ll see a menu on your right – You need to click on the link “New Installation” to start a new installation.

Step #05 – WordPress Setup Information

Next, you will see the following page – Where you need to enter some information about the blog you are going to set up:

Install In Directory – If you do not specify anything here, your WordPress blog will be installed in the root directory If you like your blog to be installed under the directory “blog”, then you need to specify “blog” (without inverted commas) here.

Administrator User Name & Password – You need to set up an account to access your blog.

Admin Nickname – What you want to be known as when you post blog entries in your blog (this is what your “Author’s Name” will be.

Admin Email – Specify your email address here.

Site Name – Name of your blog.

Description – A simple, 1 line description on what your blog is about.

Once you’re done filling up the details, simply click on the “Install WordPress” button below to proceed.

Step #06 – Setup Confirmation

Before your blog is being set up, you are required to confirm whether the information you’ve entered is correct.

If the information is correct, simply click on the “Finish Installation” button to install your WordPress blog.

Step #07 – You’re Done!

You’re done! Now, you can following the instructions to access the admin area of your WordPress blog.

I hope you find this step-by-step tutorial useful and hope that you manage to follow it and get your WordPress blog up.

Improve Your Rankings By Removing Links

John Regis — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 12:38:30 +0000

In the last couple weeks we’ve seen the introduction of Google Instant results and subsequently a heap of excited blog posts about the impact it will have on improve your rankings. As often happens, the news became a trending topic on the media industry-heavy Twitter, and the impact of Google Instant on people who actually use Google for something other than their job was slightly lost in the noise.

Early results suggest it hasn’t actually changed anything to improve your rankings on a large degree. I’ll stick my neck on the line (hey, why not?) and bet that it will have disappeared by February 2011.

Google Instant: Does It Improve Your Rankings

While the impact of Google Instant is interesting for SEOs, there are plenty of other interesting strategies to discuss that can actually have an “instant” impact to improve your rankings. Today.

How about a website ranking number one for [car insurance] with only four links pointing to it with “car insurance” as the anchor text? Pretty interesting, right? For such a competitive keyword you might expect somewhat more volume than this, out of a total number of inbound links less than any other site on the first page…

Last time, we discussed why you shouldn’t be afraid of URL links, and why they’re actually more likely to suggest a natural link profile. There have also been some other more detailed posts looking further into this and so it wasn’t much of a surprise seeing that a number of sites with very spammy-looking backlink profiles were penalized — it’s not like Google hasn’t been warning people about this for a while.

Right now we have instances of clients who are well-known within their markets — good websites providing useful content — but they aren’t ranking precisely because they have too many site-wide links, too many links that are dofollow, and too many contextual links will not improve your rankings.

By “too many,” I mean as a percentage of overall links, all adding up to a link profile that is completely unnatural. Will improve your rankings by actively removing links, and the only links coming in are branded, URL links from highly relevant sites.

SEO: Improve Your Rankings

The challenge to improve your rankings poses for some SEO agencies is that they have got their approach to link building so ingrained that they haven’t spotted some of these trends. Instead, they put more effort into building the wrong kind of links, making the situation worse for their clients.

This means that SEOs and agencies need to consider not just how to build quality links for clients but how to actively manage the link profile and ensure that the right links are being built.

For some, this will mean the normal contextual links, derivatives of them, and a few branded, long tail and URL links as well. For others, it will be weeding out site-wide contextual links, replacing them with higher quality branded and URL links, and even building some nofollowed links from social media and PR sites to improve your rankings.

Twitter Marketing For The Rest Of Us

John Regis — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:08:59 +0000

I have no doubt that Twitter Marketing is world’s most powerful and popular social networking platform amongst business and enterprise users. It’s quick, incredibly simple to use and a large number of businesses are jumping on to the Twitter bandwagon with each passing day.

However, there are a significant number of businesses and enterprises who’ve not adopted Twitter Marketing as yet due to one of the following reasons…..

I don’t have the time do to it
It won’t work for my business
It’s just too complex
It’s not worth the effort

Being a social media coach for the enterprise; let me tell you – all these arguments are lame excuses. Twitter represents one of the most innovative and powerful modern age marketing tools.

How Does Twitter Marketing Work?

Getting on to Twitter Marketing is quick and easy. Sign up, build your profile and then start looking for your target audience. Build a Tweet Plan and follow it without fail. Twitter works effectively for varied marketing campaigns – be it lead generation, brand engagement or pitching a specific product/ service to prospect customers.

Twitter marketing is not only quick; they are mighty efficient as well. 140 characters may not sound a lot but it’s more than ample if you’ve got the right marketing strategy in place.

It’s crucial to have a clear goal and well-defined objectives in mind. As compared to other marketing means, Twitter (Tweets to be precise) has a much shorter attention span. Therefore, you want to make the best out of whatever limited attention you get from prospect customers.

Twitter Marketing: Individual or Business Presence?

This is yet another dilemma of most Twitter marketing wannabe businesses. Should they register as individual users or is it advisable to register the brand itself? While some critics argue that it’s better to register as a person rather than a brand, I don’t really buy that argument. While I agree that people like to talk to people, I strongly believe that an effective marketing campaign is powerful enough to let people talk directly to the brand. If not, the campaign is not worth it.

Contests and Giveaways

I’ve come across several brands which have became runaway success by adopting simple yet innovative means of twitter marketing. Contests, Goodies, Freebies and Giveaways are a highly effective way of getting people to follow you and to retweet your messages. It is highly viral in nature and leads to exponential growth results.

Twitter Marketing Do’s and Don’ts

It’s easy to find thousands of so-called best-practices, do’s and don’ts for Twitter. With all due respect, I believe that Twitter is 80% common sense and 20% education. As an enterprise, it’s after all a conversation to sell or market something. The rules of conventional marketing don’t change – all you need to do is adapt them in accordance with the Tweeterverse.

How Do You Know Twitter Marketing Is Working Right?

For a start, your follower count is a good indication of how popular you are in Tweetverse. Secondly, it isn’t difficult to find out which Twitter followers are now your customers. If you can’t do it manually, there are several third party tools to assist you in doing the same. In addition, there are several free tools which help you monitor your reputation on Twitter Marketing.

New Twitter Is Here

John Regis — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:21:12 +0000

Twitter has announced that it’s rolling out a new version of its web interface. Some users will start seeing the new look as soon as tonight, though the company says on its blog that it “will roll out as a preview over the next several weeks.”

News of the company’s plan to integrate multimedia into the stream leaked out earlier this afternoon, but we’ve now learned that the redesign goes much further than that. The new interface resembles that of a far more sophisticated web app (as well as Twitter’s recently released iPad app)

The multimedia partnerships we hinted at earlier today extend to 16 different companies: DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, Ustream, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.

Much has been made in recent months of Twitter’s move into areas previously owned by third-party applications. Today’s announcement will no doubt renew such discussion, with many of the best features of Twitter clients like Tweetie, Seesmic Desktop, and TweetDeck now becoming a part of the default Twitter interface. As we also pointed out earlier this afternoon, it also makes Twitter feel a bit more like Facebook.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams prefaced his announcement by mentioning that Twitter.com is already far and away the most popular way for accessing the microblogging service, commanding 78% of unique users (which the company defines as “Of all the people who logged into their Twitter account during the month, what percentage did so via each service.”). Combined with Twitter’s growing need to serve up impressions to advertisers, it’s certainly no surprise that the company is now looking to keep people more engaged on its website.

Stay tuned to for additional coverage and analysis of the new interface. In the meantime, check out Twitter’s video demo and some early screenshots:

Twitter Home Screen

Twitter Profile Page

Twitter Inline Video

Newbie SEO Lesson – Descriptions & Page Titles

John Regis — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:19:48 +0000

There are dozens of SEO techniques that are used to get your website to appear higher in the search engine results of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. The process of SEO (search engine optimization) can be overwhelming. But, there are two elements we can take advantage of that will certainly help.

SEO Page Titles and Page Descriptions

Look at the image below. The results that appear in the search engines reflect your page title and page description. Having the right content in these two areas are bound to help your SEO efforts.

The page title is the headline link that appears in the Google search results. The page description is what describes what the particular page is about. You are allowed up to 70 characters (spaces included) for your page title and up to 150 characters (spaces included) for your page description. Utilize every bit of this space to describe what your page is about. And remember to maximize keywords that may be used by potential customers as they’re searching for you.

Here’s a free SEO character counter for you.

Depending on the platform you’re using to publish your website (Dreamweaver, WordPress, etc…) will depend where you’ll enter this information. Regardless, it will always be in the HTML code of your web pages (this is what Google and the search engines see). You can see the source code of any web page by selecting View>Source in your Internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc…). You can see how the results from the image above appear to Google in the HTML source code below.

If there is one thing to do that will improve how high you appear in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search results, adding keyword rich SEO page titles and descriptions is it.

Triple Your Mailing List Using PopUp Domination

John Regis — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:22:45 +0000

Watch How Popup Domination Plugin Increased Email Opt-in’s From 17 to 109+

This is insane, these two guys increased their mailing list opt-in rate by over 304% over night with one simple WordPress plugin and now their letting you and I get our hands on it.
You probably heard this before, The Money Is In The List!

And it’s so true… The more people you get on your list, the more money you will make because you can promote more things and send more readers back to your site.

Check It Out Now. http://john-regis.com/popup domination

This guy earns 6 figures a year from one of his blogs and the majority of his income comes from his list, because of that he has included a BONUS presentation you can watch on exactly how he makes money with is mailing list.

To Your Online Success,

John Regis – Popup Domination – View Original Post Here

Should I Choose Facebook or Twitter?

John Regis — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:35:16 +0000

Pulling the trigger on whether to choose Facebook or Twitter can hurt. Especially if you choose the wrong one. It’s hard enough running a small business or being an entrepreneur. And now you have to find time to create a damn Twitter account or setup a Facebook fan page? WTF? This aint’ right! But, do you? Uh….yeah…probably.

Well, “which one John?” you’re pleading.

Let’s start here. It’s true that the most talked about social media these days are Twitter and Facebook. And of course, you have no time for either. But, we both know you gotta’ choose one if you want a complete web presence for your business. Problem is, if you have to choose, which will it be?

First, the facts:

Twitter allows you to post updates and messages of 140 characters or less. Such as a link to an article/blog post you read and and want to share with your audience or even mentioning a special sale or event. You follow other users to get their updates, and they can follow yours in return. Isn’t that sweet. It’s crazy simple to create a Twitter account and even easier to “tweet” a message whenever you want.

Facebook is a more robust social networking site; which is cool. But, it’s a bigger hassle to setup than Twitter. After you’ve signed up for an account, you can then start your business fan page and invite people to “like” your fan page. Your fan page can act as a hub for important business info. You can post videos, ask your fans questions, announce sales, etc. It is an online space for fans of your business to talk with you and about you and your services. Cool, huh?

Now let’s decide which one YOU should use.

Your going to want to use Twitter if:

Your customers need daily updates on specials or news. For example, a restaurant may want to Tweet about the soup of the day.
Your interested in saving time. When you have 50, 500, or 5,000 followers on Twitter, you’re sending a message out to all your followers at once.
You like to converse. Twitter allows quicker access to direct communication with followers. By replying to a follower (using the “@” symbol before their user name), you can connect with them directly.

Now, when it comes to Facebook, it’s cool for daily updates and messages to all your fans, just like you can with your Twitter followers. But, you’ll also want to consider it if:

You already use Facebook in your personal life and you’re familiar with how it works. That is a relief.
You want to use multimedia to promote your business. Facebook gives you a great opportunity for your business to share videos, pictures and more. Just don’t share your pajama pictures on your business page. Ah, what the hell. Go for it. It’ll just create a personal connection between you and all your Facebook fans. They’ll love your doggie slippers.
You want to create a community of supporters. People who “like” your Facebook page join a community where they can comment together on your posts or post their own content. Yeh, that can be dangerous, but I’m counting on the fact you run a good business and take care of your customers.
You want to provide more information than just 140 characters. Remember, that’s all you get with Twitter. Facebook is better if you want to post articles with images or longer messages.
You already have a personal page. This way, you can invite your friends and family to become fans. That means you have a nice starting fan base to grow from.

Many experts may say, “there’s no right choice.” Really, that’s just bullshit. Of course one is better than the other. Problem is, as much as I wish I could ask you right now about your type of business I can’t. What good am I?

But, I can say this…

If your business has a more personal touch to it and it’s not too stuffy, give Facebook a whirl. In other words, if you’re a gym or a woodworking shop, Facebook sounds nice. However, if you’re an accountant or plastic surgeon, Facebook may be too comfy for your audience. Now, Twitter would be great choice if you’re a consultant or your business is more national, than local. But, Twitter wouldn’t be the best choice if you’re a landscaper or Main Street clothing store. Know what I mean?

Whatever you decide, just pick one and try it for a couple months. Let me know what happens.

Feel free to ask question or add a comment below.