Marketing Blagger

I came across a worrying fact the other day. If you are adding comments all over the blogosphere in the hope it will help with your Google Page Rank (which counts incoming links as part of its assessment of your blogs importance) you could have been wasting your time!

It seems plenty of blogs have what’s referred to as ‘No Follow’ attributes in the code, which basically stop Google from counting these towards your Pagerank. How frustrating, especially if you’ve been busy posting all over the blogosphere, getting involved and contributing like crazy.

So what can you do about this? Join the Do Follow Movement that’s what! How do you do that? Well here goes:

1) First check out Andy Beard’s ultimate list of Do Follow plug-ins to remove the No Follow attributes from your blog.

2) Then head to Randa Clay’s blog to pick up one of her beautiful graphics to prove your commitment and display proudly on your blog. For example:

3) Next head to Court Tuttle’s blog and add yourself to his D-List - all those who’ve joined the club already.

Once you done this, start commenting on any site from the list and with a bit of luck your Pagerank will start to rise.

I’ll let you know if it works for me, I’m currently stuck at rock bottom (see the chart below), but it certainly seems to be doing the trick for the amazing Paula Mooney!!

If you want to know what your current Pagerank is head to Live Page Ranks where you can get a chart like mine, although hopefully with a higher page rank.

My thanks and respect to Andy, Randa, Court and of course Paula.

For any aspiring internet marketers you should check out a decent blog I’ve recently start to read written by internet mogul John Chow. His blog John Chow dot Com is designed to help you make money online. He is offering to link to your blog if you write a review which should help to send you a ton of traffic your and boost your page rankings.

So what’s good about John Chow’s blog?

He has a great post on the seven habits of successful bloggers which will help any newbies. I particularly agree with his ideas that giving out link love is important, particularly if you want to get some traction with other bloggers in the blogosphere. Also posting regularly is vital. If your readers are picking up new content regularly through their RSS feeds then they’ll keep coming back - assuming your content is good.

It’s also interesting to read about the salaries some of these “internet moguls” are taking home. Seems some of the most well known bloggers are earning well in excess of $100k US a year. Now if that doesn’t inspire you, then I don’t know what will.

Happy blogging!!

By the way - this is also a great example of viral marketing.

Just a quick one today. I found this reasonable summary of Seth Godin’s permission based marketing system. It’s quite a straight forward and simple summary for those of you in a rush.

For those with even less time, here are the five steps to permission marketing:

1. Define the irresistible offer

2. Create a targeted business list

3. Create the opt-out message

4. Craft the perfect pitch

5. Reinforce the relationship

To define permission based marketing it’s all about building ongoing relationships with your customers and prospective customers, rather than focussing on transactional relationships. In other words, aiming to extract the maximum life time value of a customer, rather than a just one off purchases.

I had the great privilege yesterday of meeting the Chief Executive Officer of Xerox, Anne Mulcahy. Speaking to a packed auditorium at the London Business School, Anne talked about how Xerox has been transformed from a company with serious debt and health issues, into a streamlined, debt free, profitable company, with exciting long term prospects.

Obviously Xerox is not a small business, with a revenues of around $19bn in the last reporting period it is far from that in fact. But, some of the lessons Anne has learned could easily be applied to any business, large or small. So with that in mind, I want to summarise some of the key points Ann highlighted as being vital to Xerox’s success:

1) It is important for leaders to listen to advice and to understand the issues facing the business

Get to know your business, your market, micro and macro factors and more. You can get to grips with all of this with a good marketing audit, including SWOT, PEST and a host of other analytical excurses.

2) Leaders need leadership intuition, experience and accountability.

To get the most from your business and team, develop your leadership skills through a mixture of training and experience. The chances are if you’re already running a successful small business you will have some inherent intuition to use anyway.

3) Develop a clear vision and direction for employees, a story.

Anne’s team at Xerox wrote a dummy Wall Street Journal article about the company in four years time. This was distributed throughout the company to give everyone an idea of what they wanted to achieve. There’s no reason why you can’t develop a story like this for your business, no matter how large or small you are.

4) Invest in your business, even in the tough times.

Often when times are hard, companies cut back on some of the activities that are essential for long term success. This was a mistake Xerox wanted to avoid and whilst they did cut back on advertising, they continued to invest over $1 billion in research and development. When it comes to marketing Anne’s opinion is that “building the brand and investing in marketing excellence is very important”.

5) Work on communications.

This is both internal and external communications. Conduct a stakeholder analysis first to identify who you need to talk to and set about doing so in a planned and measured way. Anne considers face to face communications to be essential, especially with key customers.

6) Surround yourself with truthful critics.

Constructive criticism is a good thing, the last thing you want is to be surrounded by a bunch of yes men. Try to ensure the criticism you receive is complemented with advice for how to resolve any problems i.e. that it is actually helpful.

7) Ensure you have good calibre of people in your business.

This is a no brainer, although an enormous challenge especially for small business who often do not have the pulling power of larger enterprises. You can work around this by ensuring you have a programme for investing in and developing all of your staff, from the bottom up.

I like David Ogilvy’s thoughts here also as he only ever hired people smarter than he. That takes a great leader.

8 ) Success is based on the value you bring to customers - “they have to be the centre of your universe”.

This seems a fairly obvious point, but I can tell you from experience it’s very easy to lose sight of your customers wants and needs when you are hell bent on getting new business, or making the VAT return, or paying your staff. You need to keep in mind that satisfying the customer is the only way you will ultimately get paid.

I was extremely impressed by Anne’s presentation. A great business woman (and interestingly also voted the 5th most powerful woman in the world) and an inspiration. Thanks Anne, I’ll be trying to take some of this on board.