Dan Morris – Page 59 – Audience Industries

How to get a double listing (indented) in Google

Have you ever wondered how to get a double listing in Google? Some people refer to them as indented listings, either is fine. An indented listing is not often thought about during the web design process, but from a search perspective it can push your traffic through the roof.

A double listing is the culmination of two pages on your website ranking well for the same keyword. They don’t have to rank 1 and 2 for the keyword, but they do need to rank on the same page. When they do appear on the same page of the search results, Google uses the indented listing to show they’re from the same site. It’s really just an efficiency thing for Google.

double-listing-google — Double, indented listing in Google

So, how do you go about getting a double listing? As far as difficulty goes, it should be as difficult as it was to get your first page ranked for that keyword. And then just a smidge harder.

If you want a formula, start with the title tag and description tag. For the page of your site that currently ranks on the first page of Google, how often does your keyword occur in both of these, and what percent of the total tag is your keyword? Figure that out, then write a title tag and description tag for a second page that matches the number and density.

The key here is to use the same keyword, but write a different title and description.

The next phase is to analyze the components of the webpage itself. On the page currently ranked, what is the density of your keyword and where in the page does it occur? You’ll want to mimic both the density and placement on the second page. But again, keep in mind the rest of the content needs to be different. Just keep the numbers the same.

That was the easy part.

And the hard part. . . maybe. . . where are the links coming from that are going to the original page? Backlinks? Blog links? Other interior page links? One way links? anchor text links? etc. . . (You may want to use Market Samurai or the SEO Quake tool bar to help figure this out).

Once you do figure this out in a quantitative way, the goal is to mimic what you did on the first – without using the same sites. You can use some of the same sites to link to the second page – but ultimately you’ll want different links with simliar pagerank.

The folks at Google aren’t idiots. They may just notice if everything is duplicated. The key here is to create a natural web of links to both pages. And the second key is to have the patience to not expect results tomorrow. Do these things then wait a bit and see what happens.

If you’ve had luck with double or even triple listings – and have a “secret”, we’d love to hear it.

Google Local: How to ‘optimize’ your local business

So what is Google Local? To start with Google Local is now called Google Places (I think. I see both in different places). Anyway, Google is a search engine who’s trying to provide relevant results for your search question. If you live in New York and you type “residential plumber”, Google believes that providing the relevant, local results would likely be what you’re truly looking for.

Go directly to Google. Do not collect $200

So, on searches where Google Local is activated, a map shows up on the first half the page with stars showing you the locations of the local businesses that you might be looking for. Look up “auto body repair Hudson MA” and you’ll get a list of auto body shops nearby.

google-local-optimization — Google Local

So, how do you make sure your business shows up on this map and in these listings? First and foremost you have to go to http://google.com/local and register your company. That’s the very first thing. (Wait, don’t leave yet – it’s the very first thing after finishing this article).

The second part is optimizing what you tell Google. There are 23 different things you can tell them. Ideally, if you give them all the information and the form is 100% complete – you’re optimized. So here’s a quick breakdown of the 23 things and their importance:

40% – Address and Company Name

5% – Email address

10% – Website Address

5% – Description in less than 200 words

1% – Categories

4% – Hours of Operation

5% – Payment Options

5% – Photo 1

2% – Photo 2

1% – Photo 3

1% – Photo 4

1% – Photo 5

2% – Photo 6

2% – Photo 7

2% – Photo 8

2% – Photo 9

2% – Photo 10

4% – Video 1

0% – Video 2 – 5

2% – Additional Details (in one line)

4% – Reviews

That’s the important one to do on its own because of the search traffic it brings in. But you should also go to the other local directories and fill out their “information cards”. Specifically, you want to hit Wcities, Infousa, Yelp,Localeze, Placelocal and Merchant Circle. (Then make sure to “bookmark” each of these listings once you are done with a service like Ping.fm or Onlywire)

Get out of jail, and go to your website

Don’t stop there. A place on the map with a little link to your website is great – but that’s not going to push up your retirement. So head back to your website and make sure your full address, phone number and company name are clearly visible on your site – and not just the front page. Your best off to put it in the footer.

Now if you’re truly adept at code and your website, make sure to place the Google Webmaster Tools verification code and Analytics code on your website as well. This is one of the few, free ways you’re going to see exactly which keywords are bringing people to your site. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that St. Paul Plumber is actually paying your bills; whereas, people looking for Minneapolis plumber are just exiting your page without contacting you.

Finally, we get to the railroads

Connections. That’s what railroads do. They connect cities – but only the important ones. Imagine if the train from Memphis to Milwaukee stopped in Tuscola, IL but not Chicago. What would that make you think about Tuscola? To some degree that’s how Google feels about websites. If nothing is linking to your site, if there are no connections – how important and valuable could your page really be?

Since none of your local competitors are doing it, work on link building. Ask vendors to put a link on their site, customers to praise you in their blogs with links, and friends to tweet about your site. To keep this post under 600 words (whew!), I’ll leave it there. But if you want to know more about how to do this. . . ask me right here what it is you need to know to get your site going.

How to Add the Facebook Like Button – A Daunting Decision

So I added the Facebook Like Button to my site today. And now I’ve got a couple hundred posts that haven’t been “liked”. I wonder if I was better off a few moments ago. (pssst. . . I include “how to add the Facebook like button” at the end of this post.)

Contrary to the advice I give clients about starting Facebook Fan Pages, I didn’t tell anyone about it before adding it to the site. And let me tell you how embarrassingly awkward it looks when every single posts has the words “Be the first to like this”. . . Arghhh. . .

So my mom came to the rescue and “liked” a few posts. That’s what moms are for “Doncha know?” Now I’m wondering, will the “like” button cut down on the comments section? Will it actually increase the number of people who do something when they’re here – the ones who don’t even comment. Maybe it’s just me. . . I’m curious.

So think about this daunting move before you decide to create a Facebook fan page or even add the button to your company site. Fan pages are a bit “delicate” when it comes to the start up. Ever show up at a fancy restaurant only to find you’re the only one there? What kind of impression does that give you?

So if you’re going to learn how to add the Facebook button with the intention of doing it, contact some of your existing fans and see if they’ll “Like” you before you announce the change. Don’t press the button yourself or get all the employees in the office to do it – ask your clients, fans and vendors. They’ll like it that you “owe” them one, anyway.

If you can get 10 people to “like” your blog post or 50 people to join your Facebook Fan Page before you really announce it, you’ll be looking really good. That ball will start rolling downhill immediately – and no one will feel awkward being the first.

OK, so how to add the Facebook Like Button to your blog – you can do one of two things. You can go to “plugins” and search for “Facebook Like button” or you can e-mail me and I’ll send you the zip file. But please, before you go, please, please, please. . . . press the “like button”.

You’ll make my mom happy. 🙂

How to Use a Free Report in your Marketing Efforts

“7 Ways to Avoid Getting Ripped Off by _________, just enter your name and e-mail for instant access”. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s how you’re building a database of names interested in your niche. And when the prospect exchanges their information for your information it’s game over. You won! Congratulations!

But what is it you’re giving them? I’m sure it’s good information – perhaps even great information. And it’s quite possible you created this report by putting together 7 of your Ezine Articles or rewriting some PLR. (Actually, I’m not sure what you’re doing to write your reports – leave a comment at the end, I’m curious).

Moreover, I’m willing to bet your report is written in the second or third person with sentences like “A person looking to hire a ________ should first do this. . . ” or “You should do this: _____________, before engaging this kind of service.” And your reader probably had no problem understanding it – and was likely appreciative.

So my question to you is “Are you becoming the expert in your field merely by giving away the free information OR are you becoming the expert because you are the information?” That’s a huge distinction.

Well, I’d like you to scrap that report. That’s right – toss it out. Or at least open the editable version and start editing. Your “free report” shouldn’t be generic. It shouldn’t be a compilation of articles or PLR snippets. It should “BE YOU” (which is a great book, by the way – ask if you’re interested in reading it). Take your 7 tips articles and write them in the first person. That’s the first step.

The first person is so cheesy isn’t it? Well, instead of saying “The first thing you should do is . . . “, start with “I’ve noticed many of our clients were making this mistake. As in the case of Betty Clemens, we were able to help her avoid that mistake by first doing . . .”

See. You’re not only providing the 7 tips but you’re proving the worth of the tips by showing them in action and proving that you’re the expert when it comes to implementing these tips. Explain how you or your client screwed up the first time, learned from it, then tweaked and now “own it”. Put you and your expertise into it.

Don’t just give away a free report. Give away a little bit of you to engage that little bit of them that wants to hire you. Give them a taste of your expertise. Imagine how much more comfortable you would feel if the pamphlets your doctor gave you were all about experiences with his patients? That generic garbage doesn’t make you an expert – it just makes you the source.

If you’re interested in learning more about that “expertise part”, read my post on “Dog the Bounty Hunter”.

And don’t forget to leave a comment about how you’re creating your reports. I’m sincerely interested.

Celebrity Apprentice: Right Guard proves the buying process

Last week on the Celebrity Apprentice, the folks at Right Guard got asked a pointed question. They first instructed the celebrities that the Right Guard target market was young, sporty males and thus their advertisement needed to reflect that. One of the Celebrity Apprentice team members asked, “Should we market to the mom’s and wives who may actually be the ones who buy the deodorant?” And like they should, Right Guard knew the answer.

That’s one of the things we drill in our local marketing workshops – the buying process. If you don’t understand how your customer comes to buy your product, how do you market to that customer?

So their answer was, “Mom’s and wives may buy our product but we’ve found the males in the house influence the decision”.

That goes directly to the effectiveness of your e-mails, your headlines, your blog posts and your in-store advertising. If you don’t know who your real customer is, what are building upon?

Imagine an entire campaign laid out in Woman’s Day Magazine, in Oprah Magazine and in People attempting to educate mom’s on the benefits of Right Guard for their sons. Do you then marry the message with the look? Do you take away the sporty, edgy feel and give it a more wholesome “good for you” quality? And are your contests then loaded up with “mom” prizes?

. . . Only then to find out that your repeat buys are next to nothing because the boys want the edgier, more heavily celebrity-weighted “Arm & Hammer” – the next time? Because in the end, the mom’s and wives want their men to actually wear the deodorant. “Good for you” or not, if they don’t wear it – they won’t rebuy it.

Don’t begin the process until you look deeply at your own customer. Ask yourself these questions:

How does my customer first hear of my existence?
What is my customer doing moments before they buy my product?
What is my customer buying? (In the case of Right Guard, the name of the scent? the look? the brand?”
What stops a similar person from becoming a customer?
Finally, what does my customer overcome to become my customer?

Have you figured out the buying process of your customer? How did you come to that conclusion?

And; if you’re interested in learning more about the buying process, check out our other buying process posts.

How Twitter and Obama Got Hacked

hacker

Both Obama’s Twitter account and Twitter itself got hacked into. Can you believe that? Well I read a great article on how the hacker did it.

This will amaze, but hopefully will inspire you to take action, too.

The hacker’s name is “Hacker Croll”. He’s a 20-something Frenchmen who breaks into corporate and personal accounts in his spare time. Hackers likeCroll are incredibly diligent and patient, as you’ll see here.

Hacker Croll shamelessly publishes the methods by which he gains access to accounts, and to start with he utilizes an entire network of sites to gain enough information to break into the target. He starts by building a database of information about the company and its employees. He keeps track of any information he can get his hands on, even the employees’ pets names.

As you continue to read this, keep Nicole Dean’s e-Book”How To Avoid Disaster” in the back of your mind. Can you really afford to be without it? http://danmorrismarketing.com/password

Hacker Croll knew that he probably only needed a single point-of-entry into any one of the business or personal accounts in his list. Since most sites are set-up so that users log-in with an e-mail address and password, once he got one – he likely could break into many. Why?

Because people generally use the same information for each site. Imagine if someone hacked into your e-mail account? Could they not go to any site on the web and press the “I forgot my username” button? Or the “I forgot my password button”. It is precisely this system that allows hackers like Hacker Croll to break your simple Hotmail password in order to break into your bank account.

Going back to Twitter, Croll knew that he only needed to find the weakest employee password to get into the network. Companies that allow their employees to come up with their own passwords are in jeopardy for precisely this reason. Unfortunately for Twitter, Croll found such an employee and was able to crack his Gmail account.

If you’re a business owner, you should know that because of human habits, someone could break into your server just by learning the password of an employee’s personal blog, or e-mail service or twitter account.

From there, Croll mines the Gmail account information for more information about other sites the user is registered at. He quickly found that the employee used the same password at many sites. And in the case of “secret question” websites, he found it even easier to break in. Imagine trying to break into an account where there are a billion possible passwords, and then get help from the secret question as it narrows the options down to “pet names”.

From this point Croll had access to all the employees email attachments, business notes, and important information. That led him to quickly taking over the accounts of the founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Croll then got control of their AT&T, Amazon, iTunes and MobileMe accounts.

He got access to over 300 business documents which he sent directly to the media to proved he’d broken in. In this case he didn’t steal the secrets or hurt anybody. He did what he wanted to do – expose weakness. He even sent them a note that said “better fix your holes, or someone malicious will break in next time.”

Regina Smola, of WordPress Security Lock, and I are putting on an internet security seminar March 31st. We’re going to be teaching you everything you need to know about keeping your WordPress blog and Twitter account safe and secure. And how to recover from problems should they occur. If someone hacking into your accounts will put you at risk, you and your employees need to join us!

Take Action today. Go to http://danmorrismarketing.com/security – This is one problem where waiting could be too late.

Integrating Twitter into Your Business Model

Today I spoke to Terri Brooks with the Social Media T Room about integrating Twitter into Your Business Model. We covered the three basic business models used on Twitter and some contingency planning tools to keep your business account secure.

The primary model on Twitter is the One User One Account model. This is the most “respected” model where you spend most of your time (your Twitter time that is) tweeting live, responding to others, Retweeting others comments and general relationship building. It is this model to which you’ll read about most.

To make this happen, go to twitter.com and set-up a Twitter account. Done.

The second model I call the Broadcast Model and would consider this a tool most closely related to advertising on radio. Basically, a Broadcast Model Twitter account is an autopilot account that both auto-follows and auto-tweets messages.

What makes this better than radio is the ability to follow people who use specific keywords. In radio you try and align your target audience with the kind of radio station they’re listening to. Very unscientific. Suppose you could build a Twitter list of 10,000 people who’ve mentioned wine, and 6,000 of them follow you back. That’d be a great start for a company in the wine industry.

I started using this for my Twitter Problems account and it gets retweeted more than anything else I do. Useful?

To make this happen you have two basic steps. Get a Twitterfeed account and follow the instructions there. This is the service that will auto-tweet news and information related to your industry.

Finally, the third basic model for business Twitter accounts is multi-user account. I’m going to break this into two separate purposes.

twitter.com/predfans uses the first purpose brilliantly. Suppose you want to tweet about the Predators Hockey team a lot but know that many of your followers are going to be turned off by this. Using a service like retweetbot.com, you can tweet directly to predfans and ONLY people who follow Predfans will see that tweet. This would be great for a conference. People interested in the Predators or in your conference could then follow one account and see all the relevant tweets.

Cotweet.com specializes in this as well. They want you to have one Twitter account for your business. But that one account shows Tweets from multiple people in the company. For instance if you’re the local Zoo, the dolphin handler could be a tweeter, the guy who scoops the elephant dung could tweet and the marketing guy could tweet. But the public would only have to follow the one zoo account to see all those tweets.

To make this happen, check out retweetbot.com and cotweet.com. All the necessary instructions are there.

So what do you think? Which kind do you prefer? Do you see the benefits and drawbacks from each?

The Money is Not in The List

The money is not in the list. How many times have you heard that? I suppose there’s someone out there using that headline just to attract traffic. But the truth is the list itself is not that important.

If the list were all that mattered, then the richest people would be those with the biggest lists – the spammers. But when was the last time you saw a “spammer” interviewed on Oprah? No, the list may not mean anything at all. The money is in the manner you grew your list, if that is supported by the value you provide afterwards.

Dave Ramsey, the financial guy, thinks everyone should have to experience “killing your food and dragging it home”. Basically, the entrepreneurial life. Until you’ve worked on commission = which every entrepreneur does, it’s hard to equate work with money.

Internet marketers are in the business of dragging home their dinner. In fact, the income of the internet marketer is directly proportional to the amount of value he creates. (or she. . .sorry. There should be a word that means he/she) That’s the key right there.

The money is not in the list. It’s in the value you provide to the list. If you keep your customers’ goals in mind – and help them achieve their goals. . . you’re providing value, creating trust and opening the door to sales.

The hard part is knowing what your customers’ goals are. Suppose you have a hobby site – like bird watching or knitting. What are your customers’ goals then? That’s what you have to explore. . .and foster and ultimately find the solutions to. If all they want to do is look at photos of pretty barn quilts – then that’s what you should be giving them.

When you become the solution to their goals, you can give them the do-it-yourself information and offer the expedited version. The money. . . is in their pockets.

How do you use your list? Is it successful? Leave a comment.

Ignite Nashville 2010- My World Domination Presentation

So you may have caught my blog post earlier this week about the formula for world domination. If you didn’t, then scroll down a bit – it’s down there. I had so much fun thinking about it, I decided to turn it into my Ignite Nashville presentation. So here’s my “test” run-through to make sure I understood what to say in each slide.

If you didn’t make Ignite Nashville this spring, check out BarCamp Nashville in the fall! Lots of fun. And to see the live performance, check out the Ignite Nashville website.

DanMorrisMarketing.com is Live

“So my friends the time has come. Time to raise the roof and have some fun.” I’m not sure about the roof part, but I did accomplish a goal this week. I completed and made live my newest creation: http://danmorrismarketing.com

I love this LettersFromDan site, but like I said in one of my previous posts – your blog must have a theme to be ultimately successful financially. There’s so much clutter in this world that “randomness” often just doesn’t cut it. For example, how many men go straight to the Sports Section when they unravel the morning paper? There’s a reason it has its own section. I bet there are a TON of people that read the sports section and that’s it.

What are the chances they’d subscribe to the paper if sports stories were just randomly placed throughout the paper?

But LettersfromDan makes me smile – so I decided I’m not changing it – though I contemplated it for a long time. Ultimately, the only reason I wanted to change it was so clients and prospective clients had a place to “check me out” online. My adventures with Mark, thoughts on the different places I enjoy traveling and random opinions just didn’t fill that need.

Thus DanMorrisMarketing was born. And this week it is live. You’ll see some new stuff over there – but it will not serve as a constantly updated blog as I’ve intended this to be. So join me there. Join me here. In either case, I love that you’re reading and look forward to chatting with you soon.

(oh that first sentence, that was the opening line of “All night Long” by Lionel Richie – in case that’s haunting you right now).
🙂