Dave Davis writes an insightful post about Email marketing and SEO, in view of a patent Google has  around ‘Email spam and junk mail as a vendor reliability signal’.

In principle what this means, is that using Gmail, Google can detect which emails from vendors gets marked as spam, which content gets clicks and unsubscribes.  This data could then be fed into the SEO rankings algorithms.

This snippet is the crux of the article – as it shows that the reliability of the vendor depends on signals that Google receives about the quality of their email campaign.

What are the implications?

It means that Google is looking at how it can use wider signals from vendors which can influence their online search engine rankings. It’s joining the real world with the online world and looking at touch points with customers as using these signals to impact rankings.

What is means for email marketing is

• People need to think about the quality of the content. Writing content that doesn’t appeal to customers isn’t going to get the click throughs. Here’s an informative blog post from MOZ on what an optimised, quality blog post looks like
• Think about your audience and what their requirements are. What information do they need to make a decision to purchase your service or product? Here’a blog post from Professional Academy talking about how to write for your audience
• It also means that you need to be clear about handling customers data. Looking at how you get customer data and how you handle it is going to be crucial in terms of ensuring that you get low spam alerts and unsubscribes. If you buy data for instance you need to think about the quality of the data, as that could lead to a high level of spam emails
• Think about the design of the email and the layout. Flyer style emails or content that looks spammy or low quality, will lead more unsubscribes and spam alerts
• Overall what it means, is that there are no shortcuts to achieving rankings in search engines. Delivering high quality content to a engaged audience whatever the channel is key, no black hat technique is going help boost those signals overall

With the advent of SEO, forum marketing fell out of favour, as more web masters looked at short cuts for getting inbound links. Buying links or doing guest blog posts seems to have been the key areas where people have focused their attention to get inbound links.

Short Cuts to Inbound Links

With the recent updates from Google where people have been blatantly guest blogging purely for SEO purposes or buying links, people need to look at more sustainable ways to get inbound links. Business owners seem to want to get the rankings in Google but not put the effort or resources in place to achieve this, which is why they end up doing short cuts. These short cuts get websites into trouble and end up being penalised in Google, which in turn jeopardises the business.

Forum Marketing Making a Come Back?

Forum marketing over the years has fallen out of favour, but perhaps it’s time to dust down the keyboard and revisit this? For a lot of SEO agencies, the key challenge is how they resource this or collaborate with a client on identifying potential forums and questions. However, I truly think that it’s worth the investment of time, because if it’s done sincerely and genuinely, it’ a great opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities and knowledge in the business, which will only drive the credibility further.

Cheap Drum Scanning Forum Marketing

For http://cheapdrumscanning.com/ we have only focused on forum marketing as a key way to build visitors to the website, grow credibility and off the back of that get inbound links.

Below are two examples of mentions of the website on forums, by other forums users.

These were genuine mentions by these people rather than choreographed posts, which makes it all the more real. [You’ll have to excuse the techy talk in here!]. Tim Parkin my business partner spends time each week supporting people in relevant forums on their film photography, answering questions covering a wide range of topics from which film, lens, processing to scanning. It does take an investment of time to achieve the results.

Thinking about Forum Marketing

If you are active in SEO and also thinking about how you can diversify your traffic sources so you’re not totally reliant on Google, forum marketing is certainly worth thinking about. However, it’s about the sustainability and authenticity of the postings. If you want to get back links and mentions, it takes a while to build up your presence, and it’s no short cut, compared to buying links.

What do you think? have you tried forum marketing and how have you found it?

It’s been a busy year, after losing my sister in law after a courageous battle with cancer, we’ve headed over to near York to be closer to my older brother & his kids. On top of that, I’ve been focusing my efforts on the other two businesses that I’m involved in. So I’m back in ernest.

Walking the Talk

There are so many people, agencies, and companies offering social media from web design companies, to PR agencies, to niche consultancies all offering to help companies with their social media. This is a reflection of the diverse ways social media can be implemented. Running a campaign for an event or book launch is very different to brand awareness for a B2B company or running a customer services channel for a blue chip company or running a SEO campaign for a niche international company.

With new technologies and techniques being launched every day, it’s an effort to keep up with the evolving market place.

I’m passionate about walking the talk rather than talking the talk, which a lot of other companies and people seem to do. Running a consultancy or agency delivering campaigns is all very well. Actually being in the client’s shoes and seeing the campaign from their view is imperative.

Seeing the Campaigns from the Client’s View

It’s not just about the big ideas or going through the motions or the glossy images or the glitzy campaign. From my own experiences of running the online marketing for Cheap Drum Scanning and OnLandscape I’ve certainly learnt a lot over the past 18 months, even though I’d say I’m a seasoned online marketeer.

I’ve tested new techniques and old techniques for link building, content creation, building a community and so much more.

Delivering results is what it’s all about, and aligning the campaigns both SEO and social media to the business outcomes, and that’s the key learning. I doubt I could have all these amazing insights if I haven’t taken the leap of faith and decided to walk the talk.

Now I’ve built up this knowledge, I already share those insights with our clients, giving them the depth of my expertise and knowing that I’m talking from a place of experience as a business owner, not just yet another agency, trainer, consultancy going through the motions.  That’s also given me more focus and passion back into what I do.

Testing new software, old techniques, new ideas and having a place where I can test these out is a great opportunity. Admittedly it can be hard work juggling the old time management [which I’ve got uber good at now!]. But being at the cutting edge of some ideas which are emerging, and actually to be in the space in the new emerging digital economy.  OnLandscape is a  paid for content business model, which works on a freemium basis, where 1/3 of the content is free, but the exclusive webinars, videos and articles are paid for. Not many people have got that to work.

Enough of my ramblings. Thumbs up to being back, and look out for my blog posts sharing my insights on SEO and social media from someone who’s walking the the talk…..

Would be great to get your comments – do you walk the talk and if so how?

Just sharing links and photos isn’t enough to stimulate activity, which is why content design and creation for Facebook is key.

With the launch of reply to comments on Facebook pages a few weeks ago, this made having conversations on Facebook pages easy as people can respond to specific comments.

 So what is a Facebook Chat?

It’s a virtual conversation where people come together on a Facebook page to discuss a comment topic using the comment functionality.

 How do I set up and promote a Live Chat Session?

We ran a Live Chat on OnLandscape Facebook Page back May and here are the insights from running the session:

Goal / Reason

You need to give people a reason to join the session, so getting in a key speaker or someone with enough of an online profile that’s going to have draw an interest. For instance for the live chat we ran we had 2 of the UK’s best landscape photographers running a Q&A.

Topic

You can’t just have a live chat – you need to focus people’s attention so they can think about what questions to ask. In the OnLandscape example, Joe and David kicked things off talking about their latest trips and photographs. People then started asking questions around composition, what cameras they used.

Speaker

Pick an expert with a good understanding of the topic you’ll be talking about. If they have a good online profile this helps too as you can capitalise on that for promoting the event.

Promoting Live Chat.

We created a graphic which mentioned the time, date, speakers + topic. This then got posted on the wall and people started posting their questions.

We also tweeted out the link to the Facebook posting using the relevant hash tags and also emailed our membership of OnLandscape.

The speakers also promoted the Facebook chat through their website, email campaigns, Twitter and Facebook.

We created a dedicated web page for this, whether that is a news article or page on the site, this needs to have a sign up form on it, so you can send a reminder to people shorting before the start of the session.

Running the Session on the Day

• We logged onto the Facebook page ahead of time to welcome people to the session.
• We created 2 graphics, so people could post their question to the relevant speaker
• We did 2 half hour slots, so people could follow both threads of conversations.
• Whilst the speakers answered the questions, there was a moderator picking up questions off email and Twitter and feeding these into the Facebook session.
• After the session all the questions and answers were then copied in to a blog post and including in the email newsletter to all members.

We talk to Sharon about how blending social media with PR can increase reach and opportunities. Creating a newsworthy content is key to success…so hear how this can work for you.

Since I started Optimum Exposure four years ago, it’s become a crowded market place with low barriers to entry. There’s so many different aspects of social, whether it’s PR, lead generation, market research, community engagement, or brand awareness. There’s then the different platforms to manage, report and measure your reach and interactions.

OnLandscape was set up just over 2 years ago (in those days it was called LandscapeGB) as a business. After 18 months we realised that a third of our subscribers were international so we rebranded and changed to OnLandscape. Having tested advertising in magazines and other forms of marketing, we solely depend on exhibitions, SEO, Social Media, email and partnership marketing.

With the landscape (pardon the pun) of SEO and social media changing so quickly, having a test bed where I can pilot the new software, apps or techniques has been handy. OnLandscape benefits as we can lead the way in the market and our audience are social savvy users, so it plays to our audience.

You might think that I’ve gone quite on the blogging front, in fact, I’ve been walking the talk and running the marketing for another business. From that I’ve learnt many insights, pitfalls, ideas and I’l be sharing back on Optimum Exposure and with my network.

Reporting in SproutSocial

The level of reporting is stunning – and that’s one of the key reasons why I moved over. I run a number of campaigns for clients and reporting is important for measuring the ROI for the social campaigns.

Walking the talk is important for me as well – and for one of the other businesses I run, On Landscape, I wanted to measure the reach of our campaigns more efficiently.

Understanding the demographics of the followers and fans is imperative, so you can see that you are targeting your audience. More importantly you can then respond to the information about your followers e.g. On Landscape we realised quite a lot of our subscribers and followers / fans are international so are now targeting more international content.

Feeds

Pulling in RSS feeds is great, so you don’t have to dive off into Google Reader. More importantly the lists can be managed and viewed here.

Smart Inbox

Being able to move tweets that you’ve responded to into the archive is an efficient way of managing Twitter & Facebook. The ability to see a track of the conversations with users and add notes is useful. Certainly for our business On Landscape we can marry this up with users on the site which makes it more of a social CRM in that aspect.

Hootsuite doesn’t alert you to when you have a RT nor a new follower, which is a key thing when building an audience and community. SproutSocial does both, which is a great feature.

Any downsides to SproutSocial?

Sprout Social doesn’t support Google+ which is a bit of an annoyance having to manage that separately. It does cost more than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite has a lot of hidden costs, as you add users and extra credits for reporting, it soon adds up.

Conclusion

Sproutsocial has made me more focused on the campaign managment as I get more reporting on the types of content, so I can evaluate what content generates more engagement, which in turn drives more fans and followers.

2 years ago OnLandscape which is an online community for landscape photographers.  Or should I say an online magazine?

It’s been a great 2 years and a good journey, with lots of learnings on the way.  We didn’t invest in the design or technology initially as we wanted to see if the business model worked.

Paid vs Freeium content

Using a freemium model means that you need good free content to hook people in.  the free content also needs to be optimised for the search engines to draw people in. There’s a subtle difference between content to hook people in vs maintain engagement.  People want more tehnical, niche or rich media content.

Stand Alone or Extension of Business

Is the community going to be an extension of the business such as an ecommerce site engaging with their customers and looking at growing the community as a means of growing their customer base. Or is it a stand alone business / magazine? This will drive the technical requirements.

From a customer journey, if it’s an ecommerce site the users don’t want to have to have 2 logins for the shop and community – so think about about the overall business model.

Purpose of the Community

What’s the reason why you want to launch a community? Is it to grow your customer base or launch a new business or a book? This will drive how you structure your content strategy & technical requirements.

Content Strategy

Content is King. People won’t pay for general content. Niche, technical content is important. Rich media (videos and MP3) are a great way of engaging people. Crowdsource questions for interviews or ideas for content.

Social Proof & Online Shopping

Major kids brands are now working with the online community to test drive their new products to get feedback and inout from the parents and children.

Alison touches on the topic of social proof.  When parents research buying toys for their kids, researching what other parents and kids are saying about the product is becoming a key stage in the buying process.

Using the community has generated content around specific toys and brands which is helping brands engage more with their audience & customers, drive more sales & feedback.

Creating niche communities which can then work with associated brands is a new area where brands can expand their interactions online. It’s proving a successful formula for companies an brand to work together to create content which creates a buzz around the bran and yet engages in a true collaboration with their customers.

Blacks Solicitors have a great profile on the various social media sites which have proven successful in boosting brand awareness, customer engagement and PR opportunities.

In the second half of the interview, Chris talks through what next for Blacks Solicitors online and the legal side of social media.