Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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Ideas & Infographs: How to Build a New Age Marketing Machine

Filed Under Marketing, SEO, Successful Blog | 1 Comment

by Mihaela Lica

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The Right Balance of Human & Machine Outreach

Human powered search engines to artificial intelligence (AI), technology not only astounds us, but at times confounds us as to its proper uses. The same holds true for PR, marketing, advertising, even yelling at your next door neighbors for their dog barking. How and what you use to convey your messages is a crucial part of success, no matter what your goal. SPAMMING current or potential clients is only one negative where mechanized marketing is concerned, the “who” of method is just as crucial. How the message is received, this is the rub for all corporate, business, or personal community.

The infographic below reveals a good balance and some insight into how a new age marketing machine should be built. Using the right proportion of personable and technological (mechanical) power can work wonders for your business outreach. Conversely, the wrong mix will lose conversions, make some angry, and become an overall burden on your personal and business brand. You can’t grow your business to its potential, without thinking of how your message is perceived, adopted, and reverberated.

[Click the image to see the isolated infograph and again to see it full size.]

Understanding Marketing Automation

Marketing mechanization is then, in a real sense, just an extension of a good, standard communications strategy. Even “brick and mortar” PR & marketing firms do not SPAM their constituents with post office clutter, the balance is still crucial. Ask any great communicator today about chosing the right mix, and you will invartiably get the simple answers presented in the graphic above. Of course the long tail of overall communications strategies is complex, and for in depth professionals to implement, but you see the value.

Even in your personal mailbox, you can see the wisdom of correlating what you enjoy looking at, versus what really turns you off about newsletters and other communique. For the expert that comes up with the best balance? Well, the sky is the limit, wouldn’t you say? We hope you enjoyed the data above, and please let us know your views on best practices too.

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Author’s Bio:

Mihaela “Mig” Lica founded Pamil Visions in 2005 where she uses her hard won journalistic, SEO and public relations skills toward helping small companies navigate the digital realm with influence and success.

You can find Mig on Twitter as @PamilVisions

Thanks, Mig!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Steve’s Shorts: SEO, CRO, Social Media, Horses and Water

Filed Under SEO, Successful Blog | 3 Comments

We Interrupt Regular Blogging for Steve’s Shorts

Take a simple few minutes where a guy who is brilliant makes an observation about the social web that you might have already be thinking. This interruption brought to you by the evil conspiracy that is Steve Plunkett and Liz Strauss.

SEO, CRO, Social Media, Horses and Water
by Steve Plunkett.

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SEO is leading the horse to water

CRO is making the horse drink

Social Media is that horse broadcasting the location of the water hole and a personal judgment on water quality.

Hope you enjoyed this short moment with Steve.

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STEVE PLUNKETT, SR. MANAGER, CONTENT STRATEGY, SEARCH AND SOCIAL - @Rockfish Steve is an accomplished SEO Scientist responsible for diagnosing trends in all aspects of search engine optimization and Internet-user behavior. His areas of expertise include keyword research for psychological relevance, online reputation management, Internet conversion strategy, and digital and analog asset search optimization. He also specializes in organic SEO and user behavior in social networks. Steve has been ranked by PeerIndex in the top 1% for social media, Google and overall authority.

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Steve’s Shorts: SEO Lunch and Client First ROI

Filed Under SEO, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | Leave a Comment

We Interrupt Regular Blogging for Steve’s Shorts

Take a simple few minutes where a guy who is brilliant makes an observation about the social web that you might have already be thinking. This interruption brought to you by the evil conspiracy that is Steve Plunkett and Liz Strauss.

by Steve Plunkett.

cooltext467743303

The Seo process does not start with buying ads on Google.

It starts with examing what your actual business is and compartmentalizing it into a sandwich and some chips. the SEO lunch.

- Bread And Butter -> what is the core of your business, where is the majority of the revenue?

- Meat -> (I know.. butter and meat.. but play along please..) Describe your product/services simply, do you sell sporting goods, golf clubs, lingerie? what? Maybe you are a plumber that specializes in Bidet installation?

- Sandwich spread -> what are all the little things that bring it all together? do you customers come from one geographic area? Are they white males, aged 34-50, usually divorced and have busy professional lives? (not dating silly, cleaning services.. geesh!)

Now that you have your sandwich, you want some chips, right?

What kind of chips? phone chips, form chips, email newsletter chips, what is the preferred method of people contacting you? What is the desired action you want them to take.

Now eat your SEO lunch and what do you think about the questions above?

A Short Look at … What’s Next?

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Hope you enjoyed these moments with Steve’s Shorts.

steve_plunkett

M/C/C’s Director, Search, Steve Plunkett, is responsible for all aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) and Internet user behavior. Plunkett’s competitive personality makes him a perfect fit in the competitive world of SEO. As a child and a gamer, he worked hard ensuring that it was his initials at the top of every arcade game unit in his neighborhood. Today, he uses SEO to ensure his clients appear at the top of the search engine results –and offers an array of optimization services that are scoring big for those clients.

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The Only Way to Attract a Vibrant, High-Trust Community

Filed Under Comments, Community, Design, Inside-Out Thinking, Liz Talks Corporate, Marketing, One Way to CC It, SEO, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats, Tools | 35 Comments

Last summer at AdTech, a VP at huge corporate brand extended her arms completely — way out in front her — and used her hands to gesture as she said something close to this about her goal for building a community:

I want to build a community in which peers are talking to peers openly.

I’m sure she didn’t mean it the way it looked … Her hands were so far away from her. — or sounded … peers talking to peers?

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I couldn’t help thinking … Where will YOU be? Studying me? Is that what you think of me? I’m not a peer. I’m a person. I only do well in places where people “get” me.

Users. Consumers. Buyers. Customers. Leads. Eyeballs. Peers. Those are faceless, flattening labels. They come from the time of one-size-fits-all.

People are individual human beings complete with aspirations, intentions, ideas, opinions, habits, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions.

Which community would you join?

More Communities and More Time for Them

Online social communities aren’t a new thing. People have been linking and sharing via blogs since the 20th century. Organized social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn have become a part of our lives.

Our communities are becoming more about communicating and being creative about what interests us. It’s all about making it relevant to the people we want to attract. As this Pew Internet Slideshare describes …

Social Media – Making it Business Relevant
View more presentations from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.


We’re participating more. We’re spending more time in communities. We’re building more of them. How do attract people to the communities we’re building that are perfect for them?

The Only Way to Attract a Vibrant, High-Trust Community

Just as a building is not a business, a community is not a collection of profiles or a url. People won’t visit our community because it’s pretty. People will come because it offers them something they value.

From two people to more than plenty, a community is a social structure that shares personal values, cultural values, business goals, attitudes, or a world view. What binds it is a culture of social rules and group dynamics that identify members. In the most concise terms, an online social community is a group of like-minded individuals connected by relevant interactions and protected by a high-trust environment.

A high-trust community is an agreement, a pact or contract, like love or friendship. We can’t order, build, or wish our way to one. What we can do is attract people who want to join what we’re doing. The only way to do that is clear passionate commitment, obvious generosity, trustworthiness, and a touch of intentional serendipity … which looks something like this.

  1. Be a person (or people) who likes people. People work with, talk with, and relate to other people not a business.
  2. Articulate a clear and passionate vision worth investing in. Live your commitment. Get your hands dirty.
  3. Seek out people who would love what you’re doing. Find them where they are already gathering and talking. Join THEIR conversations. Get to know them.
  4. Be a beginner, but keep the vision. Learn from everyone who’s been anywhere near where you’re going. Learn to sort wrong from unexpected or different. Ideas that jar you could be the best ones.
  5. Invite everyone who “gets” the vision to help build this new thing. Look for ways to include their skills and their passions.
  6. Keep participation efficient and easy. Curb the urge to add cool things that get in the way of conversation and sharing.
  7. Let trust sort things. Model the standards of behavior. Keep rules to a minimum.
  8. Be visible authenticity. Lean toward full disclosure, but avoid over-exposure. Most of us look better with our clothes on.
  9. Protect everyone’s investment. Forgive mistakes. Ignore little missteps. Eradicate what is destructive. Know the difference by holding thing up to trust, values, and the community vision.
  10. Stop doing what isn’t working. Be lethal about keeping things easy, efficient, and meaningful.
  11. Promote your members … and honor your competition! Secure communities need both to thrive and get new ideas.
  12. Encourage mutation. Let the environment change to meet the changing needs of the people it serves.
  13. Celebrate contagion. Make it heroic to share what’s going on!
  14. Be grateful and always about the people. The community wouldn’t be a community without them.

An online community isn’t built or befriended, it’s connected by offering and accepting. Community is affinity, identity, and kinship that make room for ideas, thoughts, and solutions. –What Is a Social Community?

We create vibrant, high trust community by letting other folks raise the barn with us, by being their first offering trust and a passionate vision, and valuing the trust and energy they give us.

What attracts you to a community? What keeps you coming back again?

-ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Dear Google, I’m the Relationship Blogger

Filed Under SEO, Successful Blog, Tech/Stats | 64 Comments

Dear Google,
It’s Liz.

I’m a little confused about our relationship. After two years, you dumped me from Page Rank 6 to a Page Rank 3.

I would have thought it was text-links I had — they’re gone now. I’m sorry. The world knows I’m not an SEO whiz, if I was one, I wouldn’t have 40-some categories in my sidebar. At least, that’s what folks tell me.

But you dumped my LizStrauss blog too, and it doesn’t have any ads and never did.

It’s disheartening when I think of how I advocate NOT GAMING the system.

You might remember when I said

Links and relationships are intertwined and inseparable to me. It’s about people and connections that last.

Did you misunderstand the SOB program after all of this time? Not all of these folks have all of the links you might expect, but they will, because they show the key traits of a successful blogger. I know they will because they write good content and they make good relationships.

Is it that I write creative entertainment sometimes? Isn’t that better than just regurgitating someone else’s content?

Everyone knows that a link exchange on this blog is out of the question.

I’m the kind of blogger who wants a relationship not a one link stand.

And then there was my personal stance on link trains and other valueless link posts.

Dear Emperor: A Test for Your Next Link Post

If the recent birthday party invitation to 646 blogs threw you, please know that it lived up to the “Dear Emperor” standard. So will the link posts like this first one that celebrate the links the party guests brought to show their most successful and outstanding experiences — a birthday only happens once a year. You can believe I’m checking them. I do that for you, for me, and for my readers.

So Google, that’s our history. I know you know me better. I’m the person behind the numbers. I don’t link promiscuously.

I’m the relationship blogger. I want folks to respect me in the morning.

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