First we only had the website to promote. Now we need to promote also the blog.

On the other hand the right keywords will draw attention to the blog, just as we get visitors on our website by organic search: we don’t use advertising still we get interested visitors.

So what content could we write to get the right type of people?

There for we need to look into what kind of people we want to attract to sell our web service to.
In general people who are looking to get:
- More leads than they get now, and wanting to pay for these leads
- More sales
- Sales requiring less costly lead generation, lead acquisition and sales cycle

People to address to:
- Business people
- Managing marketing or sales
- CEO, managing and executive directors

Type of business:
- Soho, SMB, SME both national and international – excluding large corporations and big financial institutions.
- Manufacturers, Distributors, Resellers, and Value Added Resellers
- Business Services: from independent consultants to larger partnerships.

Relevant and interesting content:

Then we need to define the content these people would find interesting and relevant to their business:
Again:
- How to get more leads than now
- How to get more sales
- How to Close Sales requiring less costly lead generation, lead acquisition and sales cycle
(This starts to resemble a squeeze web page, but it isn’t – however don’t hesitate to email us)

Crossing communication channels:

We believe the main problem is in getting the content to the above defined market groups, as most of these people are busy running their business or are in the process of getting leads and closing sales.
These people are not into reading blogs or being subscribed to an RSS feed and actually reading them. They have other problems on their mind.

Of course, they will occasionally use a search engine when they are looking for a change in their current methods of working or lead generation. But how many will search for “leads from website” or “website visitor company identification”. Probably not many as most people look for brand names or widely known solutions.

The best would be if our content would get duplicated, reformatted or rewritten and published into the communication channels addressing the defined market segments.
This is crossing the communication channels: from a blog to a printed or electronic industry magazine.

So the problem comes down to:

- What are these people interested in?
Probably: Increasing lead generation, more effective sales or shortening sales cycles.
- What do these people read or listen to?
Certainly not our blog, maybe a printed or electronic version of an industry publication / trade magazine.
And news papers.
Of course these people will be viewing television.
The chance of a startup getting television covering is zero to none.
- How to achieve crossing of the communication channels?
The blog content needs to cross over and be converted into another communication channel.
A communications channel, which addresses the target markets and people

How to cross channels?

How does this blog content get picked up by a journalist of the right media?

We can make sure the content of the blog gets into as many feed aggregators as possible using RSS.
We hope to make the content interesting, related, relevant and suited for the target market.
Then it is likely the content will be having a higher chance to be picked up by editors or journalists, than not relevant content.

The more different posts addressing different subjects, the more chance we have to get attention and copied.
Or we should come up with a brand new disruptive marketing or sales statement or concept.

Relevant content: Leads and Sales:

As all businesses need more sales or sales requiring less costly lead generation, lead acquisition and sales cycle, these subjects should define the content of this blog.
(Note: We already started with mentioned both keywords: lead and sales in the title).

If you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment this post.

This week we stumbled upon the post in TechCrunch PR secrets for start-ups by Brian Solis, and read the reactions of Loic Le Meur PR secrets? bullshit.

Many bloggers picked up these “PR Secrets for start-ups” and the ‘blog-conversation’ was commented by Robert Scoble in his blog Scobleizer.
We wonder who is going to benefit from the large number of posts in the end.

PR: is this Public relations?

If it is public relations, then for a start-up that will be hard to do as there is no public at start. No market segment: as it still has to be found by the real customers.
Most start-ups are not really sure who exactly will be their ‘public’. They haven’t sold much yet, and thus the market needs to be explored and defined.

There are many good examples of successful companies who missed completely their initial market: Dyson targeted his no-bag vacuum cleaner at high income, but it was being bought by 2 income families.

In our case will we sell to: SOHO, SMB (Small Midsize Businesses), SME (Small Midsize Enterprises), or International companies?
Will they mainly be Manufacturers, Distributors, Resellers or VAR (Value Added Resellers)?
The main thing we know: LEADSExplorer will sell to B2B companies, due to the nature of the web service, excluding larger corporations, who will ignore us due to our size.

PR: is this Professional relations?

We wonder personal relations with whom?
Journalists, bloggers, ‘influential people’ – who are they an how do they relate to your future buyers?

This seems to have worked for Infinity Box Inc., who had their Wufoo (Form builder) mentioned in hundreds of blogs around the world. However they will not have known all of these bloggers. And many bloggers just have copied the message from one another. Thus the 3 people of Infinity Box can’t have had a relationship with all these bloggers.

By addressing the journalists, bloggers and ‘influential people’ you can waste a lot of time on the wrong media and wrong people.
The same time could have been used to address real potential customers.

If you don’t know your public or market segment, then who will be the influencers to address?
Moreover even if you know your market segment, then you still need to know if these people will get their information from those ‘influencers’. What’s the impact of the ‘influencers’ on the real buyers?

Trial and error

We believe what a start-up need is trail and error.
You try out a press release, a partnership, a post in a blog, a comment on a blog, a directory insert or a page on your website.
Try and measure what bring s traffic what not.
Measure the conversion from the traffic by kind to leads.
Then you know what works.

- People look for the strangest things on our website. We sometimes wonder if they are looking for a solution or to know ‘how to’ for other reasons.
- Some comments on a blog did generate loads of traffic, others nothing.

PR is one person?

They always say: ask the Xerox repair man what model to buy next, when he comes around for repairing the old one. He knows best.

We believe PR is not possible by an outsider person as he hasn’t got the drive (and he/she costs money), but has to be done by everybody in the company at any place at any time.

PR costs time and money
Time and money that could be used for on hiring a telesales or call centre services, working directly on leads. Or your time calling potential customers.

We know Cold Calling isn’t appealing as it is the ‘lowest’ one can get with the fear of getting rejected, whereas PR is high level and feels great.
Cold calling is two steps away from a customer and calling upon leads is only one step away from obtaining a customer in B2B.
PR is still a long way from getting customers in B2B.
Start-ups need customers.

We noticed changes in search positions on Google for different search terms.
Changes without a pattern: just jumping up and down in ranking.
Example: From #5 to #39 and back again to #7 for the same keywords used.

If Google would be using a calculated method, one would expect slow changes over time, having only small or incremental steps in ranking up or down. However such erratic behavior resembles more a human interaction by different people each with a bias.

As we get a large part of our traffic from Internet searches the number of visitors does change, as also the keywords they seem to be using. Due to these swings, sometimes popular keywords don’t bring up high enough our website.
Thus changes in visitors and type of visitors, brings changes to our lead generation.

Searching for answers

So we went looking for help on the Internet as we didn’t understand and found these two blog posts:
- Google Drinks a Fighting Problem Tuesday, May 27, 2008 on The WebMarketCentral Blog – by Tom Pick.
- Google Previous Query Reason For Crazy Google Rankings? 25 April 2008 on SiteProNews by Jaan Kanellis.

The WebMarketCentral Blog has examples and comparisons using the same search terms on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These show how the same searches are relatively consistent in Yahoo and MSN, whereas the Google searches swing heavily.

Jaan Kanellis mentions: “Seems like this algorithm tweak was to improve the PPC ad relevancy initially and now is being introduced into the organic results.”

Is Google getting out of control?

Let’s hope not.
Or are the results now somehow controlled by humans: who are biased or not operating always in the same way?

Celebrity

If Google were a human being and thus a worldwide celebrity, then paparazzi would have reasons to take pictures and the gossip magazines would have stories to write – as on Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse.

Business

In business if your products or results are not stable or unpredictable you will be less or no longer trusted.
This might just happen with Google.

(Further to the: Power of marketing: Selling free goods at a premium price)

The problem with both water on earth and information on the Internet is their abundance and being free: water is (almost) everywhere, and so is the information on the Internet.

Bottled water:

In the nineteenth century, natural springs needed to be carefully selected for their health effects and location (tourism).
In a next stage the water was bottled, marketed and sold at a premium price over municipal water.
Marketing: The perception of the added value of bottled water is mainly created by the marketing: “Health” “Cool”, not so much in the process and probably no tangible added value.

Internet information:

Nowadays, one could use all the data available on the Internet by selecting and shifting manually through the overwhelming amounts of information. This carries a cost and would be very impractical/impossible.
The automated process requires the information from the Internet to be selected, cleansed, aggregated, classified, categorized, sorted, and reformatted in order to be presented for being of any use.

This means there is value in the process in both cases:
- the added value of the bottled water
- the processed and well presented information.

Raw data is not usable (worthless) for people in business, especially in marketing or sales. The information needs to be ready for ‘consumption’, ready for use and interpretation.
Then it can be used in case of sales and marketing in the process of lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing and customer retention.
Marketing: Thus the processed Internet information should be marketed having a real value.
Real benefits can be marketed: “ready-to-use”, “to the point” information.

Define the benefits of your products or services and use them in your marketing message(s).
State them clearly.

One of the best marketing concepts is bottled water.
1) One takes something which is basically free: water from a spring
2) Have a minimal process: verify the quality – maybe filter it
3) Package it: in a bottle
4) Brand it: Vittel, Evian , Volvic, Perrier
5) Marketing the benefit: using advertising campaigns like “Good for your health”, “Revitalizing”, “Brings youth to your body/life” and “Cleanness/Purity” or just “Cool”.
6) Then sell it for a premium price over tap water.

Compared to tap or municipal water, which can be consumed in most places in developed countries without any problem, the bottled water is many times more expensive.
This is great marketing “invented” by mainly French companies and the health benefit is not proven for all waters.

Moreover one needs to go the grocery store, supermarket or hypermarket in order to purchase the bottled water, whereas the tap water is available in house. Thus people make an effort to get this bottled water: being healthy or cool is important.

In many developed countries, the regulations governing tap water quality, monitoring, and regulation are more stringent than those for bottled water. Thus the consumer pays a premium price for a product with less frequent and strict monitoring.

Origin:
It all started in the nineteenth century in France and Belgium (Spa) with spring water, where people came to these cure and spa resorts for health reasons (and drinking problems).

Nowadays both spring water and non-spring waters are being used, still the health image in the marketing message remains, even for the non-spring waters which are filtered tap water.

Transform the concept to the Internet:

1) One takes something which is basically free: information on the Internet
2) Have a minimal process: clean, organize or sort the data
3) Package it: a web service
4) Brand it: “Your_Brand”
5) Marketing message of the benefit: “Increase your sales” “Generate more leads”
6) Then sell it for a premium price compared to information found using search engines.

In order to achieve this, the problem is in the marketing:
How to address and convince the public or decision makers in companies?

Again: the Internet might be the fastest and easiest way.
How to build the positive image and explain the benefits?
Website, blog, press releases, viral marketing?
Can it be applied in the Business to Business (B2B) market?

So what are your experiences with marketing repackaged free goods? or Internet web services using data from the Internet?
What was your marketing effort?
Was it sufficient?
Did you get any viral effects? Or did you use mass email campaigns?
Could you sell your service at a premium price?

After having written a few articles, we have followed the guideline to use certain expressions in the title in order to get more interest:
“Top 10 best ways to …”, “How to …”, “10 Steps …”, “Improve …”

Actually these humbug style of titles (P.T.Barnum: hype) seem to work and get more readers, who ended up on the LEADSExplorer website.

Still the title needs to address or refer to:
- a problem the potential readers really have encountered
- expressing benefits for the reader

The first 4 to 5 words of the title determine the level of interest it will generate. Thus these first words need to contain the “humbug” expression and the keyword(s) related to the content.
So don’t waste words and limit the number of keywords to one or two. If you have more keywords, write a second article. Two articles have the potential to generate more traffic and leads.

For SEO (Search Engine Optimization) the best is to have the keyword(s) in the title and throughout the article.

There are many articles written on ‘How to write an article” and even complete blogs are being written on the matter.
Try to write something useful and interesting for the reader, but adjust the title as it needs to attract people and make your article stand out in the crowd.

Visitors who come from an article website should have a higher chance of getting qualified as leads, as they already have been reading your article, have become interested and clicked on the link.
The total number of their visited pages should be incremented with one page, making them more eligible for qualifying as a lead.

Moreover their specific interest should become better defined by the subject of the article. It was the subject of the sole article which convinced them to visit your website.

Article writing would be one of the best efforts for getting leads in B2B, if there weren’t so many non-company visitors amongst them. It seems most of the article readers are reading them at home.

Still as they are really interested, they will remember your products or services when required for their job and revisit your website or contact the company.

Technorati Profile

As recommended for lead generation, we have written several articles and published them on different article websites.
Not all article websites bring the same interest (or clicks), as their audience is different. So investigate first if these websites cover your target market.

These articles do bring links by:
- the article on the publishing websites.
- by people referencing your article in their blog.
- by people copying these articles in their blog.
- special: in one occasion the article got translated in several languages.

Thus there is an increase in link popularity and a higher chance to be found.
Great for SEO and will bring visitors to the website.

However identical articles should not be posted everywhere, as duplicate content is penalized by the search engines. If you do publish on the same subject, do change wording and phrases.

Number visitors from these articles?

Each article generates visitors. Still over time, there seems to be a decrease in interest for each article.
Some articles are clearly more popular than others.

It is hard to predict in advance what articles are going to be:
- read and clicked
- referenced or copied in a blog
- forgotten – hardly read

Promoting the articles?

The problem is these articles need to be found too.
Thus one would need an Internet promotion of each of the articles too, if you want to generate a lot of traffic.
So you would get back where you started: promoting articles instead of your website.
In the best case someone mentions it in his blog or gets it bookmarked.

Got bookmarked?

We don’t know if one of the articles ever got bookmarked in Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, Stumble, Reddit, Fark or …
We believe you need some kind of popularity or “fame” in order to get bookmarked.
It’s like being “hot” or “not hot”.
Of course content counts too.

Popularity

There are many factors influencing the popularity of an article.
Amongst others:
- the subject
- the title
- the quality of the text
- the awareness of the brand of your company
- the “fame” of the writer.

Receiving comments on the article?

Hardly any comments. In one case some of the comments were negative. Still a reaction is better than nothing.

Conclusion:

Our experience shows that these articles:
- increase the number of links
- increases SEO and the chance of being found
- add on to the credibility of the company
- position the company as “the Authoritative” source of that specific topic or business segment.

Thus writing articles should generate leads.

Although the blog gets indexed as a normal page in the website, we submitted the blog to several websites who run applications sending the link or ping to many websites.
(Wikipedia on “ping”: In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.)

One website refused our link as the blog didn’t have enough posts (4) and was considered as possible spam.

The first website that picked up the link was: Peace Africa
Not exactly the target of our business. Still a link is a link from a page rank 4 site and thus some SEO.

We are just wondering when other websites will pick up our blog on SEO, leads and sales.

What is your experience?
How did you promote your blog and how long did it take?

One day you receive an email with the message you have made it to the finalists of the web contest you signed up for months ago. This doesn’t mean you are the winner, but already a finalist or nominated.
You are invited to the awards event where the winners will be declared.
This is probably their main goal: getting you to this event. Although it is a great opportunity for making connections with Venture Capitalists and possible partners, it costs money (travel and lodging) and is unlikely to generate leads or customers.

The organizing party publishes the list of the finalists on their website and in most cases a press release is send out. This is already positive for SEO.
The list and the press release will bring some interest of visitors, in most cases Venture Capitalists looking for an investment.
In case the event has a certain fame or reputation, the list can get picked up by bloggers, who copy the list of the finalists in their blog.
- If the list contains the links to the website, it will generate additional traffic on your website.
- If no links provided, some people will still take the effort to lookup your company name on the Internet and visit your website. These are people to watch as they have made the effort.

In case you have an interesting solution or proposition (and some name or fame), a blog can mention your solution or application in a paragraph in their posting, and depending on the popularity of the blog, this can result in a significant amount of visitors.

Results:

Becoming a finalist will bring you during the first 3 to 4 weeks after publication or press release:
- 2 to 3 visits a day from Venture Capitalists and Investment Bankers.
- Many non-business visitors for different reasons.
- Visiting competitors.
- A few business visitors, some to be qualified as a lead.
This interest surge is not immediate, as the web page with the list needs to get indexed by search engines and the press release needs to get published and distributed.

In our case about 1 out of 10 visiting Venture Capitalists have made an inquiry by email.

After those initial 3 to 4 weeks, you still will receive one or two Venture Capitalists or Investment Bankers every week until it dies out after 8 weeks. This group of visitors is driven to find a potential new client.
The interest from non-business, competitors and business visitors will die out faster than the Venture Capitalists.

Conclusion about on-line contest:

- SEO by additional links
- Blog reference
- Attracting Venture Capitalists and Investment Bankers to your website and get inquiries.
- On-line contests will generate a limited number of leads.

As we haven’t had the opportunity to become a winner, no experience what that would generate this in links, SEO, visits and leads.

Note:
We know who is visiting our website by company and what they are looking for: that’s how we obtained these numbers.

Did you ever win an award?
What was your experience and the benefit?