Aaron Hoos

No matter how good your business is, you’re bound to get some bad press at some point. It’s a part of business but wouldn’t be so bad… if it didn’t appear on the first page of a Google search result! Somehow, bad news or reviews seem magnetized to the very top of search results, and they remain stuck there as an obstacle to a fast-flowing sales funnel!

I’ve worked with several businesses and individuals who have bad press from their past lurking in Google search results, and we’ve rolled up our sleeves and dug in, trying to take back ownership of their reputation by taking back ownership of their top Google results. Here is the advice that I give them:

You essentially have 2 options:

• You can talk louder and more often than the bad news or reviews
• You can change the story completely

Both will take time and investment (sorry). I have seen both work and can’t say which one is better, although I suspect that the “better” one has to do with how quickly you need the content removed from search results about you and how flexible your prospects and customers are.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT OPTION ONE: TALK LOUDER AND MORE OFTEN
If you have some annoying news or reviews that aren’t budging from your Google search results, you will need to get more aggressive by talking louder and more often.

Identify the keyword that is the problem. Is it your name or your business’ name? Be certain that it’s the keywords that people are actually Googling to get to you. (If your name is Bob Smith but you have earned bunch of bad reviews about “Robert Smith” that don’t even show up when someone searches for you, then forget about trying to manage it… it’s not disrupting your sales funnel unless your contacts find it in some other way). But if it’s your name (or business name) that is causing the problem, and bad news is showing up on that word when people Google you, here’s how to talk louder and more often:

Own the word: Make sure you own the domain name of that keyword. If you can think of a few different websites, consider buying related domain names. For example, I might own AaronHoos.com, AaronHoos-publishing.com, AaronHoos-writing.com, AaronHoos-speaking.com, AaronHoos-consulting.com, etc., or AaronHoos.net, AaronHoos.org, AaronHoos.info, etc. You can’t just copy and paste the content from one site to another and you should endeavor to keep each site fresh. At the very least, start with one site that is exclusively your name or your business’ name, if at all possible.

Start a blog: Start a blog with that name in the URL. Blogger and Posterous are my favorites but there are several others. If you can manage content across all of them, then start a blog at several of them. (Make it easy on yourself by assigning a function to each blog. Maybe one blog is just a quick blog about books you’re reading and every blog post features another book. Maybe another blog is for casual posts about what’s going on in your life, and it’s tied to Flickr and Last.fm and Foursquare. Maybe another blog is your professional blog. Maybe another blog is where you post your favorite videos. Again, make sure your name is in the URLs: aaronhoos.blogspot.com and aaronhoos.posterous.com, for example.

Get social: Open a Twitter account. Use your name as the Twitter ID. Create a personal Facebook page and a business Facebook page. Change the URLs to your name. Create a LinkedIn profile and business profile (if applicable) and change the URLs to your name. Create a Foursquare page. Find other social media relevant to your niche and do the same. Get active on those sites… and own your name at each site AND make sure your privacy settings allow for being crawled by search engines and published to the web.

Post content at offsite content channels: Find 5 or more article publishing or distribution sites and get actively writing and publishing articles there. Use a combination of article distribution sites (ArticlesBase.com, Isnare.com, EzineArticles.com, etc.) and article publishing sites (Squidoo.com, HubPages.com, Suite101.com, Technorati.com, etc.)

Post news: Find an online news site that caters to your niche market and report the news in your industry or niche category.

Make your own news: Write a report – just something smallish like a 5-page PDF – and then write a series of press releases. Publish them at press release sites (and consider spending the $300+/- for a press release at PRWeb.com). Host the PDF on your site (where search engines can crawl it) but submit it to PDF search engines and ebook sites. (Scribd.com is my favorite).

Create profiles: There are several sites that allow you to create and/or manage a professional profile about yourself. They have various functions but include some of the following: GoogleProfiles, Twellow, PeoplePond, DandyID, just to name a few.

Post your resume: Create an online resume at resume sites. Depending on your industry, there might be industry-relevant sites that allow you to create a portfolio page. For a broad range of services, Guru and Elance are good examples.

And remember, the key here is to always use your name or business name (whatever the critical keyword is whose reputation you’re trying to “clean up” in Google) prominently – in the URL, the page title, subtitles, and content.

Once you’ve done all (or a majority) of these, you need to manage them: Cross link them, push RSS feeds from one to another, refresh your content, and add new content. Obviously it’s too much for anyone to do in a day or even a week, but it is manageable if you plan to write a blog every day, an article every week, a series of website refreshes every two weeks, and an update your profiles every month. Not everything has to change all the time but a good cross section of it should be refreshed regularly so that there is always something new being posted somewhere. In my opinion, there is no such thing as too much. If you can produce content – a lot of content – and that content is high quality and consistent, you will eventually claw back your reputation.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT OPTION TWO: CHANGE THE STORY
If the above list of opportunities is too much time or effort, or if you have to move quickly and aren’t afraid of shedding a few of your prospects or clients along the way, simply change the story. Find a new, related keyword that you can use and start marketing with that one aggressively.

If you are Bob Smith and there is some bad press out there, start marketing yourself as Rob Smith, for example. If you don’t have a name you can shorten (like Aaron), switch to your initials or even a pen name or professional name. Lots of people use pen names or professional names, and not just for reputation management. If you are “Fast Web Designs,” change your name to something else and aim for another related keyword… “Quick Website Builders”.

SUMMARY AND ADDITIONAL RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT TIPS
The internet gives entrepreneurs an advantage and a disadvantage: The advantage is rapid deployment of marketing to quickly build and fill sales funnels with contacts. The disadvantage is rapid spread of news and reviews (which tends to more likely to be bad than good). Like any other asset, your online reputation needs to be monitored and managed carefully. And if you ever find bad news and reviews creeping onto the search results for your business, you can talk louder and more often or you can change the story.

I’m frequently asked by clients where they should concentrate their efforts while marketing their business. They know that the right content in the right channels can make a significant and positive impact on their business but there are so many choices!

Of course, every business is different but here are a few that I recommend frequently (in no particular order):

• Blogs
• Articles
• Twitter
• Press Releases
• Reports

I’ve found that a significant effort in each of these options can help to grow a business with better search engine optimization, better positioning, more traffic, and higher sales. I’ll briefly touch on each of these content channels and how to use them in your business.

CONTENT CHANNEL #1: BLOGS
I think there is no better value for your business than to have a blog that you post on regularly. A blog provides you with a direct voice to your consumers that seems more intimate than an article while also offering a way for them to communicate with you (through comments) around the stories you tell.

Furthermore, a blog is like a laboratory where you can share your thoughts and develop ideas, even if they are not fully thought-through.

Here’s how to grow your business with a blog:

• Make sure you have a branded blog (a blog with a .wordpress or .blogspot in the domain name is okay but not as good as one that is entirely yours).
• Try to post three times a week minimum.
• Keep posts between 250 and 1000 words, but an average of 400 to 500 is good to aim for.
• Develop a list of topics you want to write about so that you are never at a loss for what to say.
• Identify 3 keywords that are important to your business and make sure they are in nearly every blog.
• Don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through. People visit blogs to read blogs with the full understanding that they are one person’s take on a situation.
• Each week or month, stockpile a handful of blogs in your “drafts” folder that you can publish at a moment’s notice if you find that you do not have time that day.
• Avoid overtly selling in your blogs but a self-promotional link or advertisement in the footer or sidebar of your post is appropriate.

CONTENT CHANNEL #2: ARTICLES
Even though there are millions and millions of articles out there right now, there is still space for you. Articles continue to be a powerhouse traffic-driver for many businesses.

You can use articles to position yourself as a leading thinker in your industry. That will drive highly qualified traffic to your site.

Here’s how to grow your business with articles:

• Create a publishing calendar so that you have enough articles to publish 1 a week for 6 months to a year. If you can hire someone to write your articles, you may want to consider doing more (say, 1 a day). However, most people don’t have time to write 1 article a day without the help of a professional. (You’ve got other things to think about!)
• Aim to keep your articles between 450 and 600 words. Some articles are suitable to use words like “I” and “me” but many articles are best when they use a more neutral voice. This helps them to appear more credible. Save the “I” and “me” voice for your blog.
• If possible, prewrite and stockpile as many articles as you can so that you have some on hand for when you’re too busy. (This is frequently a marketing channel that is neglected when things get busy).
• Look around for highly trusted sites to publish your work on. Consider who the target audience is first, but don’t forget to take PageRank into consideration.
• Write content that is highly valuable to readers. One easy way to think of topics is to consider a question your audience has. Make that question your title and then respond to the question in the body of the article.
• Use the resource box to promote yourself.

CONTENT CHANNEL #3: TWITTER
Twitter really burst into the mainstream in 2009. Soon, business was being conducted in tweets of 140 characters or less. Twitter will continue its strong position in the market in the near future but now that the “honeymoon” period is over, users are forced to make sure that are doing the right things to be effective.

Here’s how to grow your business with Twitter:

• Remember that Twitter is a social network. People don’t want to be sold. They want to build relationships with others. Leave your hardselling techniques for your website and instead focus on sharing yourself with your followers.
• Twitter is a microblog so if you’re not sure what to write, just think of it as a blog… only smaller. It’s okay to talk about what you’re doing or where you’re going or a movie you just saw. Contemporary business does not separate business life and personal life but finds a balance between the two.
• Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to compress long domain names into manageable ones.
• You can keep your social engagement manageable by engaging with a small handful of people on a regular basis and with your broader network slightly less.
• Although most tweets should be written in the “here and now”, there is room for some pre-written tweets which can be scheduled to post later at HootSuite.
• While you shouldn’t sell on Twitter, you should make sure that your bio points people in the right direction so that when they are ready to buy from you, they can find you easily.

CONTENT CHANNEL #4: PRESS RELEASES
Press releases continue to be a solid producer of results and, thanks to the way the web has changed how we do business, press releases are now a channel that can be accessed by the media (just like they’ve always been) but also by consumers. Press releases provide a way to get into Google News rapidly and get relevant backlinks.

Here’s how to grow your business with press releases:

• Make sure that whatever you are writing about is newsworthy. Too many businesses write about non-newsworthy content and try to pass it off as a press release.
• Keep your press release to 400 – 600 words. Much longer than that and people simply won’t read it.
• Make sure you have some contact information inside your press release.
• A press release should be written from the point of view of a journalist (so you should refer to your business in the third person). However, be sure to include quotes in your press release and those can be in first person and are ideal to promote yourself.
• Don’t be afraid to spend money on distribution. Businesses frequently hire me to write press releases but then release them through a free service which is often less credible and very limited. PRWeb is the best service with paid distribution services between $80 and $360.
• Typical newscycles are a month or less. So consider publishing a press release each month about your subject.

CONTENT CHANNEL #5: WHITEPAPERS AND REPORTS
Reports or whitepapers are highly credible positioning documents that businesses can use to demonstrate thought-leadership on a subject. While some reports may not generate huge amounts of traffic or be solely responsible for a sale, they play a key role in driving more traffic and more sales by compelling people with their credibility. A business that wants to rapidly achieve the status of an authority on a topic should produce reports or whitepapers.

Here’s how to grow your business with whitepapers or reports:

• Create a publishing calendar and plan to produce at least one report every quarter or, better yet, one report every two weeks.
• Aim to publish reports that are at least 3 pages (not including a cover). However, reports of 5-20 pages are better. Reports of a hundred pages or more are not unheard of but will need to be extremely valuable for customers to read them. (After about 40 pages, you may want to consider breaking it up into 2 or 3 reports).
• Reports need to strike the balance between being thought-leadership pieces and being relevant for consumers. It’s okay to produce a report that anticipates trends a hundred years from now… as long as your business is also producing reports that address immediate needs.
• Good report topics should combine high quality information with high value applicability so that readers can apply what they’ve learned.
• While not always necessary, reports may be considered more authoritative if they have links and footnotes.

There are, of course, many other content channels out there. These are my favorite and I’ve seen them produce good results for clients. The important thing is not to adopt as many content channels as you can, but rather to find the right mix of content channels to reach your target audience.

Lots of businesses use the flavor-of-the-week approach to marketing. They read about great success that a business has had with articles so they have a bunch of articles written one week. Then they read about press releases another week and they have some press releases written. Then they learn about successful marketers using Twitter so they tweet like mad for a week.

At the end of the three weeks, what do they have? Very little.

A strategic approach is needed to market a business. Before your business blasts out marketing, make sure these market strategy tips are informing your marketing efforts:

MARKETING STRATEGY TIPS

1. Know what you sell and why people buy it. You’ve probably heard the classic reference about businesses selling drills but people buying the ability to make holes. What you are selling might be your product or service but people never buy your product or service. They buy the benefit your product or service provides. If you’re not making sales, it’s often because your product or service doesn’t provide any benefits.
2. Identify your position in the marketplace. What makes you unique? Create a USP that can only be applied to you. (If you can apply your USP to anyone else, it’s not a “U”SP). Get unique. Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy is a great tool for this.
3. Focus on a niche market. If you’re too broad, your message won’t get through. Narrow by industry or by demographic. Sell to fewer people to make more sales. Yeah, it blows your mind.
4. Market your business with a specific number of content types (i.e., 2 articles/week; 5 proposals/week; 1 press releases/week; etc.). Try it for a quarter. Measure the results and adjust. If you want more business, ratchet it up.
5. Develop your message and stick with it. It’s okay to test and modify your message but once you’ve found it, stick to it like a fat kid on fudge.
6. Create short-term and long-term tactics. Stop looking for immediate payback because it doesn’t happen.
7. Just add friggin’ value already. Everything else falls into place after that.
8. Make it really easy for people to understand what you do and to connect with you. Offer a pile of contact methods, intuitive buying processes, and fast response times.
9. Do all of the above at the business level but do it all at the offering level, too, for each product or service you sell.
10. Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. Find your own groove.
11. Create a simple marketing system – just 3-5 steps – and hammer it out every single day. Every. Single. Day.
12. Measure your success by the actions you take compared with the sales you make. Stop worrying about the number of followers or subscribers.
13. Once you have a foundation of successful marketing methods underway, test those flavors of the month as you hear about them. Test them consistently for a month and see what the impact is.

Once upon a time I was a stockbroker and investment rep. I loved the analytical side of the biz and I loved connecting with people. But being an investment rep is a lot of stealing clients away from other reps, which is not cool. (Sadly the crappy parts of the job outweighed the good parts so I decided to do something that I enjoyed far more: Write for brokers, advisors, and investors).

During our training to become investment reps, one of the best techniques that my peers and I learned for connecting and selling was storytelling.

People love stories because stories educate while they entertain. Some stories are as simple as an analogy, other stories can be involved and should place the prospect or customer squarely at the center.

Of course, the investment world isn’t the only place we see stories, although it’s very effective there because the stockmarket can be a big field of question marks and clients need stories to help them understand. We also see stories in many other industries. Good, engaging commercials tell stories and classic copywriting (like the infamous “They laughed when I sat down at the piano…” magazine advertisement) tells stories, too.

Stories are appropriate throughout the sales process, from lead generation through presentation, closing the sale, and building client relationships. They should appear in your content but they should appear elsewhere, too, like in sales presentations.

17 SELLING WITH STORY IDEAS
In an article by ManageSmarter.com called “Winning Customers Through Story: A New Take”, Lori L. Silverman and Karen Dietz talk about the various stages of your sales funnel where stories are appropriate and how to implement them effectively. They give 17 bullet points at the bottom of the article to show business owners how to include stories throughout their business. Some of the tips include: “Translating and relaying market research data and findings through composite stories”, “Having the organization’s founding core values and folklore already crafted as hip-pocket stories, ready for sharing”, and “Co-creating a future story”. Brilliant! Check out this article and implement even a few of these 17 story recommendations.

EXAMPLE
When I was a stockbroker, I would sometimes need to educate clients on the buy-and-hold investing strategy. So I would use a story like this:

“Imagine that you bought a house in a neighborhood and every house in the neighborhood had a big sign in front of it. The sign was a live ticker of the value of the home. Sometimes the prices rise when there are more buyers than houses or when someone paints their kitchen. And sometimes prices fall because there are more homes for sale than buyers or because the street is dirty or because one of the neighbors is noisy.

It’s the same with stocks. When you buy a stock and hold it, the fluctuations that the stock faces from one day to the next are meaningless. Even economic downturns can be worrisome to investors but they don’t need to be.The problem is, while our homes don’t have a live ticker in front of them, the stock market does and people can be very sensitive to individual fluctuations even though it doesn’t affect their long-term view.”

STORIES EDUCATE, ENGAGE, AND SELL
Stories are compelling and a great way to connect with your clients and customers. Take the time to write your own stories and your audience will become riveted to what you have to say.

START HERE
If you’re not sure where to start, just list the top 3 objections you face during a sale. Then write a story (either an analogy, a true story, or a composite of client experiences) that addresses the objection and challenges the listener to rethink their position.

The Question:

Njore J.  KARANJA asked:

I am in the process of creating a subscription-only website. How do I go about marketing it for subscribers, and what is the best payment method?

[Visit Njore J. KARANJA's LinkedIn profile]

Aaron’s Answer:

I can’t answer the payment methods but I can help you on the marketing side. Without knowing very much about your site, I’d suggest these general ideas:

1. GENERATING TRAFFIC
* Depending on what your topic is, you might find Google AdWords or Facebook ads to be helpful. Just make sure they are highly targeted.

* I’m still seeing article marketing as a positive way to create traffic… provided that your articles are compelling and high value.

* Start an account on Twitter and use Twellow to help you target people to follow.

2. GETTING SUBSCRIPTIONS
* Build some value on the outside of the subscription gateway so that people can see that you do add value. Offer more (most) of the value on the inside of the subscription gateway.

* Create a free, downloadable report discussing the benefits people can have through the use of your subscription site.

Good luck!

-Aaron Hoos
http://aaronhoos.com

[Visit my LinkedIn profile]