Zenologue

When times are tough, it pays to explore creative, low-cost marketing solutions. One such strategy is using the professional social networking site LinkedIn to build your prospect database, turn cold calls into warm leads, and establish yourself as a subject-matter expert.

Just create a professional profile, send invitations to people you know to connect, request introductions to prospects your friends or colleagues know, and you’re off! And the best part is that you don’t have to spend a dime!

Here’s the low-down on what you need to know:

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social networking site that’s specifically targeted for business or professional purposes. You can use it to connect with colleagues, meet new prospects, find vendors that deliver the services you need, and even establish yourself as a subject-matter expert. There are an astounding 30+ million people using LinkedIn today. This number has roughly tripled over the last year.

How can it benefit my business?

LinkedIn is best used to reach specific individuals. It’s not really intended for mass marketing purposes. This is why companies who sell B2B (business to business) find it more useful than those who sell B2C (business to consumer).

Specific benefits of LinkedIn:

• Pursue direct sales. See who your friends, colleagues, customers and vendors know that you need to know to reach your goals. If you sell IT services, you can identify IT decision makers within companies that you’re targeting. Then just ask your friend or colleague who knows him or her for a virtual introduction.
• Increase the visibility of your business or brand by using LinkedIn’s tools to demonstrate your subject matter expertise.
• Generate traffic to your website.
• Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) – your search engine ranking in other words.

How do I build my network?

Start by building your profile in LinkedIn. Then invite your contacts to “connect” with you. Once they do, their connections, and their connections’ connections are visible to you. Think “six-degrees” philosophy, only it’s just three-degrees deep. If only 25 of your contacts accept your connection invitation, each having 25 connections of their own, who also have 25 connections each, you have an instant network of 15,000 people in your network.



How should I incorporate LinkedIn into my marketing strategy?

• Generate sales leads by:
  • Searching inside or outside your network for prospects that you need to be doing business with.
  • Responding to service requests, such as when a member of the LinkedIn community publishes a request for an expert in your field.
  • Connecting with potential clients and gaining credibility before you ever call on them by conversing with them through the Answers tool on LinkedIn.
• Increase your brand’s visibility by:
  • Indirectly announcing your services to others via the LinkedIn Answers tool by responding to a question related to your service or asking a question that indirectly points to what you do. Be careful, though. Full-on self-promotion is a no-no in the LinkedIn community. It must be a soft sell.
  • Driving interested readers to your blog posting by answering a question and providing a URL to your blog for additional detail.
  • Getting your product or service recommended by another member of the LinkedIn community.
• Improve your search engine ranking by:
  • Driving additional traffic to your site through LinkedIn.
  • Creating additional links to your site which helps the search engines find you and can improve your ranking. For example, if your organization has 50 employees and 25 of them have LinkedIn accounts, why not send out a company-wide email through LinkedIn to those 25 employees requesting a link back to the company website? These additional links to your site could help improve your search engine ranking.

What LinkedIn tools should I be leveraging?

Wanting to get more advanced with LinkedIn? Consider these tools:

• Answers
• Services
• Search
• Groups

Answers: The Answers tool on LinkedIn allows any LinkedIn user to ask a question or answer one. You can interact with people both inside and outside your network with the Answers tool, which helps you meet new people online with similar interests and continue growing your network of connections.

After you ask a question, when the timeframe for the question comes to an end, you are asked to choose the best answer and flag it accordingly. The person attributed with the best answer gets an “expertise point” that is displayed on their LinkedIn profile.

Providing answers to questions posed in your industry and earning expertise points allows you to gain credibility as a subject matter expert which can often be a foot in the door with a prospect. To stay up to date on questions being asked on your topics of interest, just subscribe to the LinkedIn RSS feed.

Services: The Services tools on LinkedIn allow you to recommend others that you’ve worked with – past colleagues, vendors you’ve hired, etc. These tools also allow you to request recommendations from those you’ve done work with or for. The more recommendations you have, the better you look to a prospect viewing your profile.

Search: LinkedIn’s Search function allows you to search for people outside your network (e.g., by company name, type of company, or geographic location). LinkedIn will then tell you if someone in your network knows them, where you can in turn ask that person to make a virtual introduction. If not, you have the option of purchasing a paid account from LinkedIn, called InMail, to contact them directly. There are different packages available starting at $19.95 per month.

Groups: If you join a Group on LinkedIn, everyone in that group becomes your connection, thus growing your network. You can also start a group of your own to attract people with similar interests or backgrounds.

For support in developing your customized LinkedIn strategy and incorporating it into your overall sales and marketing plan, contact RedRover Company at lori@redrovercompany.com.

Marketing Marketing, professional photographer, search engine optimization, SEO

Does your web site have a sitemap? Search engine crawlers are just like travelers in a foreign land – they do a lot better when they have a map to see where they’re going. However, the sitemap is one of the most often overlooked components of a web site. It certainly isn’t particularly attractive or fun to read, but it sure helps Google and the other search engines find their way about – leading to a better picture in the search index of your web site.

If you have a Word Press blog like this one, there are various plugins you can use to generate a sitemap of your blog for you. I use two:

• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – to produce a user-readable sitemap
• Google XML Sitemaps – to produce a search engine friendly sitemap file in XML format

Otherwise, producing your own sitemap is fairly easy but requires some skill with XML documents. There’s a lot of information about how to write a sitemap at www.sitemaps.org and also on the Google Sitemaps page.

You can see the sitemap for the Zenologue Blog here to get an idea of what a sitemap looks like in action.

Although a sitemap doesn’t necessarily mean an increased search engine ranking, if you haven’t already done so, I strongly suggest providing a sitemap on your site that will help both visitors and the search engines. You can register the sitemap with Google and the other major search engines, enabling them to crawl and index your site more effectively and quickly.

SEO search engine optimization, SEO

Generating good traffic to your web site has been a huge topic for a long time, and much has been written and discussed about it. A great proportion of the traffic to our web sites comes from the search engines, when people are looking for something in particular. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t Google something, it just seems to be one of the major ways people surf the web. One of the factors that influences your web page position in the search results is your page rank, which is the topic of this post.

Let’s try a quick exercise – go to Google, or your favorite search engine, and type in “professional photographer your town” (replacing “your town” with the name of your town or city, of course).

Is your web site in the list? If it’s on the first page then you’re doing very well. If not, then don’t despair; there are ways to get it there if you follow some of the tips on this blog and you are patient.

Page Ranking:

Where your web site appears in the search listing for a given set of keywords is a result of the ranking given to your site by the search engine. This is a complex subject, but here’s my condensed version:

“A page’s rank is a score calculated by the search engine based on the number and ranking of incoming links, the number of outgoing links and the relevance and frequency of the keywords used on the page itself.”

Okay, not very condensed, and I’m sure there’s probably a better way to explain it than that, but I did my best. Even Google have a hard time explaining it in ways normal people can understand, and the actual formula is a secret – although some brainy people have produced good approximations of it by deduction.

In Google-speak, page rank is a scale from 0 – 10, with 10 being the most important. There are very few pages with a rank of 10 and (oddly enough) Google itself is one of those (perhaps a perk of being the actual search engine). No one outside of Google really knows how the system works completely (and it’s changing all the time anyway), but it’s pretty much agreed that the scale is non-linear. By this, I mean it takes a lot more effort to go from rank 2 to rank 3 than it does from rank 1 to rank 2. Most photographer web sites that I’ve seen rank anywhere from 0 to 4, with 2 being the most common.

When the rank of your page is being calculated, the number and rank of each of your incoming links is taken into account. High-ranking pages that link to yours are more valuable than those from lower-ranking pages. Highly ranked pages will therefore contribute more rank points to your page than lower-ranked ones will. This is what people mean when talking about quality links. It’s probably better to have 1 link from a page with a rank of 4, than 10 links from pages that only rank 1.

When finding sites to exchange links with, consider the rank of the linking site as well as the relevance to the material on your own page. If you have the Google toolbar installed in your browser, you can see the ranking of any page you visit. Deciding on whether or not to link up is a valued judgment based on a qualitative assessment of the relevance and ranking. A high relevance with a low rank could still be worth linking to – just avoid low relevance / low rank sites as these may not add much worth to your rank.

Something else to avoid are “link farms” – sites dedicated solely to providing links to other sites, with no actual content of their own. These web sites might start off okay, but can be penalized by Google for trying to skew the system. Your site might in turn be penalized by association with them, so avoid them at all costs.

Get Your Page Rank Here! Get ‘em While They’re Hot!

When you link to another web site you’re effectively donating some of your page rank to the other site – this is why reciprocal links are so important. With a link back to your site, you each gain a link but don’t lose any page rank in the process. But a link to another site with no reciprocal link causes you to leak page rank. If you do want to link to someone who doesn’t link back to you, then you can use the rel=”nofollow” syntax in the HTML <a> tag. This will instruct the search engine spider to not follow the link when crawling your site. The basic syntax of that is:

<a href=”http://www.somesite.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Click Here</a>

In summary, page rank is a crucial component to your web site’s success in the search engine game, and it determines how high you can climb up the results ladder. The main way to increase your page rank is to exchange links with other quality sites with high relevance. Also, don’t forget that the actual content on your site is important, too – it must be rich content that people would find relevant to their search and that they actually would want to read.

SEO search engine optimization, SEO