Tag Archives: PageRank

How NOT to pitch a blogger

I talked about how blogger outreach is scary, and I talked about why this fear exists for most people before they start talking to bloggers. In great measure, these fears exist because of the horror stories that have resulted from wrong-headed approaches.

In the five years that we’ve been reaching out to bloggers, we’ve learned just as much about how NOT to pitch as we’ve learned about the right ways. The main thing to keep in mind is how you feel when you are on the receiving end of a misguided PR pitch. If you just stick with that mindset, you’ll avoid the lion’s share of pitching mistakes.

Now, I have been getting pitches for my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, since 2004 or so. Now, Marketing Conversation gets loads of pitches as well. Some of the insulting things that abuse me to no end include sending your pitch to “Dear Blogger,” or to “Abraham” when my name is Chris Abraham.

I can generally tell when a compliment is hollow: they’re either too general or way too recent and specific. It is very easy for even the least sophisticated of my fellow bloggers to sense sucking up or kissing up, especially if you haven’t done any homework or any research at all.

Also, if you don’t have your formatting sorted and it looks like you obviously copied and pasted back and forth and I can make out weird spacing and a strange mixture of fonts and sizes, I can tell you’re probably cutting corners and doing things carelessly and without concern for how I will perceive it–as though half-assed is all I am worth since I am not a Mashable or TechCrunch. People don’t like it when they can obviously tell that you’re going through the motions until something else better comes along. Bloggers will always call you out if they sense you’re just calling it in.

No, I also don’t blame the agents too much. They’re often understaffed, juggling too many balls, have insufficient experience, or lack technological skills and are just doing their best. The agencies are why these agents are oftentimes coming up short. And, at the end of the day, many agencies have given up on earned media because earned media can be risky and it can oftentimes be an all or nothing venture. Outreach failure is easily possible when there is very little cultural awareness and understanding of how best to appeal to these thousands and thousands of very real people who wield very real power and influence over popular consensus and perception.

Perhaps the only thing you’ve come away from this article is that you need to hire me in order to get some of that white-hat link-farming SEO love. So, let me warn you: it doesn’t work unless you spend a lot of time, money, energy, and creativity to actually put together a plausible and meaningful PR campaign.

Bloggers did not fall of a turnip truck. If they don’t see the value in the pitch, they won’t post; if they fancy that you’re just asking them to post because you want to vampire bat on their Google juice, then you’re likely to be in a whole lot of #fail and possibly a whole lot of pain. The white-hat link-farm organic SEO pwn effect is only secondary if you are, the entire way along, a total Mensch and have amazing assets, viral-quality video, a great pitch, an accurate target, and a gentle, kind, and generous follow-through.

It is sort of like dating. You need to remain present during the entire date and not even get angry or resentful–or hostile–if you are not invited upstairs for a night cap. If you’re caught just calling it in and going through the motions, just being on the date because you’re hoping to get lucky at the end of the night, you’re likely to end up either hurting someone else’s feelings or destroying your reputation. Enjoy the company, enjoy the date, enjoy the diversion, enjoy the desert, enjoy the wine, enjoy the walk in the park, enjoy the play, enjoy the coffee, and then be surprised and appreciative when and if you’re invited upstairs for a night cap.

If you are truly present in blogger outreach, and what you do is driven by what’s good for the blogger as well as what’s good for you, you might be pleased with the results.

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Authentic Internet inbound marketing the way God intended

Last week I asked my management team if what we do at Abraham Harrison is inbound marketing. Sara Wilson, my COO, told me yes, that our digital PR strategy of identifying thousands of topical blogs and then pitching them on behalf of our clients with the goal of securing hundreds of earned media mentions is surely the definition of inbound marketing–and maybe even the way that God intended. Or at least the deities who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, where markets are conversations.

Earned media is hard. How do you get loads and loads of unpaid citizen journalists to make a gift of their valuable time and platform? It must be just short of impossible. Far from it, and we have been doing it again and again, week after week, since the Fall of 2006, about a half-decade ago.

This commonly-held belief, that earned inbound marketing is well-nigh impossible, has caused “fickle and unreliable” bloggers and influencers to be avoided in place of predictable but artificial inbound marketing. This new version uses technology and SEO, fake review sites, fake blog sites, fake news sites, affiliate marketing, monetary incentives, text-link-ads, link trading. and entire “informational” sites similar to Wikipedia, distributed globally, on many different servers and under many different domains and sub-domains to emulate its “impossible” counterpart.

That natural flow of emergent citizen-sharing was supposed to be the original source of everything online: real reviews, real stories, real communities, real comments, and real content at the end of every real search. But until recently, when Google did a big check and adjustment to its algorithm, fake inbound marketing was outdoing the real thing.

What inbound marketing has become, in many instances, is a very elaborate and convincing hoax, a simulacrum, that aims to create an artificial world of viable content, at its cheapest and most shameless, to very useful content, at its best, but which has the single-minded goal of acting as a sales and conversion channel of commercial or political products or services.

Yes, earned media outreach and engagement also has an agenda. Yes, when I engage online, I am not reaching out in order to just meet new friends, I am also interested in convincing citizen journalists and online content providers to report on what’s going on with my client on their own personal or collaborative blog to their precious readers.

The most important difference between the simulacrum of entire virtual online content cities being formed intentionally by networks and affiliations to emulate as perfectly as possible the emergent and organic reviews, reporting, discussion, recommendation, and experience and true earned media is that only earned media is authentic.

Authentic, you ask, are you serious? Yes. Let me explain. My friend Pamela has known me for years. She was under the illusion that Abraham Harrison and I had the blogosphere hypnotized. To her, under my hypnosis, these zombies would be at my very command, writing and blogging anything and everything I decided to feed them, no matter how salesy or shilled. She believes that hundreds and thousands of bloggers were at my bidding, awaiting my call.

This is not how it works at all.

Controlling only the front end of the messaging

What really happens is that we take what our client has–their assets, graphics, copy, products and services, agenda, and message–and we deconstruct it into component parts and then reconstruct it into as simple and clear a message as we can and no simpler. We construct a very terse and very clear message model that evolves into a a pitch email, and then we come out the other side of the tunnel with a social media news release (SMNR)–rife with copy and videos with embed codes and photos and images that are easy to copy and paste, sometimes going so far as to include image embed codes–and three outgoing pitch emails.

We do the best we can with this because this is really all we control at this end–the front end–of the messaging. The only other thing we can control over the course of the campaign is how we react to initial blogger response, be it in the form of an email reply to our pitch or a blog post, a tweet, a video response, or a wall posting.

I won’t go into the art of dealing with blogger email and blog responses in this post; however, it does require the patience of Job and a constant reminder of the sage words of Philo of Alexandria, “be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Sometimes this isn’t so easy to remember but I have a professional team that does an amazing job of always being decent, respectful, responsive, and generous. Also, my COO and CEO like to remind me that it is very rare that a blogger ever bites us. Things can generally always be handled and addressed well before anything embarrassing or untoward evolved. These days, after really sorting out a series of best practices, there is rarely if ever a crisis.

Using clearness, kindness, and responsiveness, we are routinely able to garner hundreds of earned media blog mentions in addition to the hundreds of tweets and wall posts. Do we care about the relative popularity and readership of these hundreds of bloggers and tweeters? No, not at all. We don’t care about their compete.com score, their Google PageRank number, or their Alexa ranking. We don’t care where they show up on Technorati or on Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop. We really don’t care where they rank in Klout or Empire Avenue.

We just care that they have their very own platform, be it a blog, a Tumblr, a Posterous, a Facebook Page, or a Twitter profile. Full stop. That and a high probability of topical relevance, which is to say we take great pains to make sure we only reach out to people for whom our message, our email pitch, is at least minimally topically relevant and neither surreal nor out of left field.

In PR and with blogger outreach, as with everything, be a gentleman and everything else will follow. No tricks. No sleight-of-hand. Just honest reaching out with relevant material. Just the way God intended.

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Sometimes I get excited by something I post

Today my post came out over at Biznology titled The Long Tail of Blogger Outreach and I am really excited that you all read it even though I am no longer sure that “long tail” is the right way to describe it (thanks in large part to a 90-minute catch up chat I had recently with Richard Laermer, a huge mentor and supporter). Anyway, I guess this is the gist of the article:

People have only a finite amount of time, so their consumption of content, information, news, reviews and alerts are limited. The closer you can get to the media organ that your target market consumes primarily and religiously, the higher the probability that content will register with the reader, will resonate with the reader, and will feel like it is intimate to the reader and his local community and experience of the world.

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How this blog is ranked by Blog Rank in different verticals

Factors	Value
RSS membership	606
Number of incoming links	11,014
Unique monthly visitors	8,204
Number of pages posted on the blog	7
Number of links to pages ratio	1,573
Google Page Rank	5
Compete Ranking	198,331
Google Indexed Pages	0
Alexa Site Rank	337,787

20 Essential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Terms

I make too many assumptions as to what folks do and don’t know because I come from nerd and geek stock. Now, I am in the world of corporate and B2B communications with folks who are new to the “back office” of search and SEO. So, when I found this list, 20 SEO Terms You Should Know, from the Daily Blog Tips blog (thanks, Daniel Scocco) and via Chris Abraham:

1. SEM: Stands for Search Engine Marketing, and as the name implies it involves marketing services or products via search engines. SEM is divided into two main pillars: SEO and PPC. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the practice of optimizing websites to make their pages appear in the organic search results. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it is the practice of purchasing clicks from search engines. The clicks come from sponsored listings in the search results.
2. Backlink: Also called inlink or simply link, it is an hyperlink on another website pointing back to your own website. Backlinks are important for SEO because they affect directly the PageRank of any web page, influencing its search rankings.
3. PageRank: PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to estimate the relative important of pages around the web. The basic idea behind the algorithm is the fact that a link from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links (weighted to their value) to a page, therefore, the higher the probability that such page is important.
4. Linkbait: A linkbait is a piece of web content published on a website or blog with the goal of attracting as many backlinks as possible (in order to improve one’s search rankings). Usually it’s a written piece, but it can also be a video, a picture, a quiz or anything else. A classic example of linkbait are the “Top 10? lists that tend to become popular on social bookmarking sites.
5. Link farm. A link farm is a group of websites where every website links to every other website, with the purpose of artificially increasing the PageRank of all the sites in the farm. This practice was effective in the early days of search engines, but today they are seeing as a spamming technique (and thus can get you penalized).
6. Anchor text: The anchor text of a backlink is the text that is clickable on the web page. Having keyword rich anchor texts help with SEO because Google will associate these keywords with the content of your website. If you have a weight loss blog, for instance, it would help your search rankings if some of your backlinks had “weight loss” as their anchor texts.
7. NoFollow: The nofollow is a link attribute used by website owners to signal to Google that they don’t endorse the website they are linking to. This can happen either when the link is created by the users themselves (e.g., blog comments), or when the link was paid for (e.g., sponsors and advertisers). When Google sees the nofollow attribute it will basically not count that link for the PageRank and search algorithms.
8. Link Sculpting: By using the nofollow attribute strategically webmasters were able to channel the flow of PageRank within their websites, thus increasing the search rankings of desired pages. This practice is no longer effective as Google recently change how it handles the nofollow attribute.
9. Title Tag: The title tag is literally the title of a web page, and it’s one of the most important factors inside Google’s search algorithm. Ideally your title tag should be unique and contain the main keywords of your page. You can see the title tag of any web page on top of the browser while navigating it.
10. Meta Tags: Like the title tag, meta tags are used to give search engines more information regarding the content of your pages. The meta tags are placed inside the HEAD section of your HTML code, and thus are not visible to human visitors.
11. Search Algorithm: Google’s search algorithm is used to find the most relevant web pages for any search query. The algorithm considers over 200 factors (according to Google itself), including the PageRank value, the title tag, the meta tags, the content of the website, the age of the domain and so on.
12. SERP: Stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s basically the page you’ll get when you search for a specific keyword on Google or on other search engines. The amount of search traffic your website will receive depends on the rankings it will have inside the SERPs.
13. Sandbox: Google basically has a separate index, the sandbox, where it places all newly discovered websites. When websites are on the sandbox, they won’t appear in the search results for normal search queries. Once Google verifies that the website is legitimate, it will move it out of the sandbox and into the main index.
14. Keyword Density: To find the keyword density of any particular page you just need to divide the number of times that keyword is used by the total number of words in the page. Keyword density used to be an important SEO factor, as the early algorithms placed a heavy emphasis on it. This is not the case anymore.
15. Keyword Stuffing: Since keyword density was an important factor on the early search algorithms, webmasters started to game the system by artificially inflating the keyword density inside their websites. This is called keyword stuffing. These days this practice won’t help you, and it can also get you penalized.
16. Cloaking. This technique involves making the same web page show different content to search engines and to human visitors. The purpose is to get the page ranked for specific keywords, and then use the incoming traffic to promote unrelated products or services. This practice is considering spamming and can get you penalized (if not banned) on most search engines.
17. Web Crawler: Also called search bot or spider, it’s a computer program that browses the web on behalf of search engines, trying to discover new links and new pages. This is the first step on the indexation process.
18. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. You should avoid having duplicate content on your website because it can get you penalized.
19. Canonical URL: Canonicalization is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation. A canonical URL, therefore, is the standard URL for accessing a specific page within your website. For instance, the canonical version of your domain might be http://www.domain.com instead of http://domain.com.
20. Robots.txt: This is nothing more than a file, placed in the root of the domain, that is used to inform search bots about the structure of the website. For instance, via the robots.txt file it’s possible to block specific search robots and to restrict the access to specific folders of section inside the website.