There aren’t many places on the web today, where you can place your highly valued, original content and wait for the traffic to come. Most of these content sharing sites are spammy and don’t contain any non-commercial content. Since I’m an SMO freak and really obsessed with finding new ways to promote our content via various web 2.0 and social media channels, when I ran into the flagships idea I couldn’t avoid trying it.

What is Hubpages.com and what is a Flagship?

Hubpages defines itself as an online content publishing eco-system. The “hubbers” (hubpages users) use this platform to create “hubs” (their own unique pages), in which they upload content. This is a useful and friendly platform to share the world with your knowledge and expertise.
Flagships are actually the top-quality-hubs, which follow a long list of requirements and demands. The main idea of the flagships concept is to create unique and valuable content database. Furthermore, flagship hubs are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly, and when built properly, can gain very good rankings, as well as revenue (Hubpages offers incentive based on revenue share with the writers).

How can you leverage Hubpages for Web Marketing purposes?

Hubpages is a great online platform that enables you to create content pages containing videos, images, links, RSS feeds, related tags lists and more.
The main advantage of this platform, which is more significant in flagships, is that an excellent and popular content can be promoted independently on search engines, thanks to the friendliness of this platform to search engines.
Suppose you’re a nutrition expert, and you write this great article about the importance of eating in various colors. Creating a flagship in this theme is much better than any article syndication act or even a blog posting. After submitting the nutrition flagship, the hubpages staff will review your flagship content, and once accepted, they will actively promote the page and you may do the same. So basically, your high valued content does the work for you! You can reach the top of the search results pages very quickly (suppose they aren’t that competitive) and your target audience will stumble upon your flagship. Since this types of pages are very informative and professional, they have a high tendency to to convert later on.

In order to create a flagship, you have to register to the flagships program, choose a unique subject from the subjects’ pool and sign the flagships contract. You can view some finished flagship examples here.

Some Flagships Tips

1 – Write creatively, use unique images, videos and news updates.
Don’t spam or use the flagship as a link farm (in this case, you will also be banned by the flagships program).
2 – Link to other unique and interesting sources that have a real added value to your readers. If your flagship will be a real information source for a high-searched term, you can make great profits.
3 – Let’s not forget the SMO and the full circle SEO strategy! Always create social media links to your new flagship – Facebook it, twitter it and so on… If it’s a niche flagship, don’t hesitate to create links in niche blogs, forums and more. Just be creative about it. Another important thing is that every link to your flagship increases the chance to earn more money.

To conclude, hubpages.com is above all a content sharing platform, which can be used as a web marketing tool, especially when using the flagships with unique and high quality content. Don’t forget to follow Hubpages requirement and you’ll probably get great results. Of course, there are many other similar content platforms that you can use (such as Scribd.com, Squidoo.com etc) but I’ll write about them specifically next time.

]]> http://www.compucall-usa.com/2008/11/24/flagships-and-using-hubpages-for-web-marketing/feed/ 1 http://www.compucall-usa.com/2008/09/15/wordpress-marketing-seo-for-wordpress-blogs/ http://www.compucall-usa.com/2008/09/15/wordpress-marketing-seo-for-wordpress-blogs/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:44:34 +0000 http://www.compucall-usa.com/?p=405 Wordpress has already proven itself as the most agile and customizable CMS and blog platform presently available. It’s easy to use, it’s open source, and as a blogger, I couldn’t ask for more than that (well I could but some things just don’t come packaged in CMS’s right?). However, it’s very important to consider the SEO and marketing aspects of using this platform for your website or blog.

SEO Targeted Wordpress Themes

The first and most crucial thing to consider for a Wordpress blog is the theme. Not only because of the importance of the visitors first impression, but also because of how a website’s code can influence the way Google can read you. There are many themes out there, created by people of all kinds. Part of them are designers, others are programmers. Not all of the people that put these themes together took into account the significance of being “friendly” to search engines. The code has to be clean, logical and focused around the content. It is very important that your Wordpress theme be CSS/XHTML validated. Although a great many “SEO Wordpress themes” out there meet this basic requirement, a lot of them don’t (You can always run yours through the W3C Validator if you want to make sure your blog validates). Some themes also have content optimizing tool possibilities, such as the ability to give SEO friendly page titles and much more. There are websites that also give “SEO grades” to their themes, so make sure you don’t pick a theme with a grade lower than 85

SEO Plugins for WordPress

There are many SEO plugins for Wordpress that can enhance your blog’s compatibility to search engines. The most common is the “All in SEO pack” Wordpress plugin. This plugin creates an extension within your Wordpress platform that lets you insert Meta tags into each post. This plugin also avoids duplicate content issues typical to Wordpress and creates titles templates, so you won’t have to optimize your posts titles manually. Simple Tags is another Wordpress plugin that enables you to manage the tags all over your blog.

We can’t really discuss blogs marketing without also mentioning SMO (Social Media Optimization). The Sociable plugin (and there are many other plugins) is a tool that gives your readers the possibility to submit your post to many social communities, social websites and bookmarking sites. Creating a social presence for your blog in the social community is a vital component to any blog. After all we don’t want to get into that debate of if you build them a field they will come right?

Analyze Your Wordpress Traffic!

Finding out how your visitors reached you is a great way of knowing what you’ve done right and what you’re doing that maybe isn’t doing so well. If you can’t do that then you’re going to be more or less flying in the dark. Wassup lets you analyze traffic and users’ behavior on the site. If you’re hosting Wordpress yourself then install Google Analytics or something paid like Clicky.

To sum things up, Design, Content and the Analysis of your blog or site is very important. However, there are marketing aspects that you have to pay attention to. Make sure your blog has social media links and presence, download several SEO plugins and check your theme SEO grade. And the most important advice is – always optimize your blog in order to stay fresh and on top.

Remember when VW launched the New Beetle in 1998? The hype was huge, everyone went out and got one, people were putting flowers in that little spot on the dash and people were even counting how many Beetles they would see a day on the street. They even managed to get Motor Trend’s Import of the Year in 1999. Then mysteriously, in 1999 and 2000, they started breaking down. People kept sending them in for repairs.

Well here we are in 2008 and bam, we’ve got a shinny (every pun intended) product in Chrome with probably the best viral campaign since the iphone and people are very quick to run and love it and install it on all their multiple computers (I was guilty of having it installed on 2 computers inside of 15 minutes of its release and even twittering about it).

I don’t know if Google was bitter with Microsoft getting to Facebook first, or peeved that the inked that search deal, but I have to admit that Google leaving out proper Ajax support for Chrome puzzles me. Facebook (Alexa rank 5, Compete.com rank 15), as well all know and have some to love, is heavily dependent on Ajax. It makes everything wonderful, fun and easy. Google believes Facebook is important giving it a Pagerank of 9 out of 10. I ran a search of people within my network of Israel to see how many people have Google listed as an employer and I got over 500… So you would think that one of the developers, at least, tried checking out his profile on Facebook before the release right?

You would also think that Google being partnered with Mozilla would have led to them taking a page out of their incredible development by releasing a developers edition to get the apps and the add-ons on board.. But no. Google knows best!

The big question is will people now come back to Chrome, or will the next Mini come out to put them away as our oh so beloved Mini did to the VW bug?

The first aim is to choose 1-2 main keywords for that page that we will try to promote that will reach the search results you’re aiming for. If we will choose more than 1-2 main keywords per page, the focus becomes diluted, and we probably won’t make it to where we’re really trying to get. You can choose more than one keyword if you insist, but the rest of the keyword should be variations, synonyms or phrases including the main keyword (this will definitely help since Google knows which keywords are related to others).

1. Keyword Research

The first thing you have to do is review the page and prepare a list of related keywords. From this list we will start to work. From here you will have to choose your favorite keyword analysis tool or several tools (my recommendation is the Adwords Keyword Tool or the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool by Aaron Wall).
After choosing the tool, examine the keywords, compare competition, length etc. The best keywords will be chosen according to the criteria defined by you or by your client. It is important that in this part your client will be involved, so his needs and experience will be taken into consideration and to be frank, his experience in what’s relevant to his business trumps yours.

SEO Keyword Optimization

2. Look at your competitors

What are your competitors doing? What keywords are they targeting? You might want to target to the same keywords as they are. Competition may be fierce and you may want to build some authority for your page before you. That’s the reason you should use a tool like the Adwords keyword tool or Aaron Walls tool, because it gives you new keyword suggestions and the estimates search traffic for them in the country/area you defined. With this tool, you can also analyze a specific site’s content and conclude what the main keywords are that the site is targeting.

3. Maybe you’re already a success…

Check what your current positions are for past targeted keywords. If you’re located second for a well-searched term/keyword, don’t try too hard – you’re already there. In this case, you’d better create a new page for similar keywords and not change the current one. The website SEODigger can help you find the keywords that your site has rankings for.

4. Start optimizing!

Start inserting h tags, writing keyword targeted content (watch the density!!), insert alt-text tags to your images and so on. If you have many related keywords that you’re interested in promoting, consider changing the page that you’re working on into gate page. One that links to many different sub-pages, each targeted to one of the keyword variations.

5. Did you think that we wouldn’t mention social media??

Submit your newly SEO optimized page to a bunch of web 2.0 and social media sites – create virtual presence to this page. This process will not be whole without some bookmarking.

6. Internal linking

Whether it’s a new page or an old one, review your site’s internal linking. Add suitable links to your footer/sitemap. By doing so you’re not only making sure that it will be easy for Google to reach this page and index it, but also letting Google know that these are the most important pages on your site. Just don’t overdo it. Too many pages in your footer and Google thinks you’re trying to mess with it and then it might penalize you accordingly.

7. Follow, review and analyze

This is crucial to measure exactly how the changes that you have made affect the search results. Prepare a special sheet describing the changes that have been made in the site and include the original location in the search results. This way, in case you harm the page (which can happen if you over-optimize), you can always undo what you did.

You may also want to take a look at a great post for Keyword discovery by Rishil on SEOmoz which is called Building Bricks: Keyword Discovery Process for Small Businesses

And another great hubpage I wrote in the same topic: http://hubpages.com/hub/10-First-SEO-Steps

The Tel Aviv-Yafo Entrepreneur August Meetup, organized by Mr. Gadi Guy and Ms. Or-Tal Kiriati, will cover different topics around social networking where local entrepreneurs will be able to share in a unique occassion, together with Mr. Pulver, their ideas and techniques, get advice and discuss business models.

Mr. Ophir Cohen, Compucall’s CEO, will also give a lecture about the hottest web marketing trends, prior to Jeff’s speech.
We at Compucall believe that educating and sharing are key for the success of our community.

Now, let’s assume you won the seo gold medal and are sitting on the top position in Google for your most important keywords, the same question can be asked “What now?”…

Michael Phelps actually answered this question in one interview he gave after his last win and said that he might now compete in different swimming styles. So basically “Try New Things”

In the wonderful world of SEO, winning the Gold doesn’t mean you can rest. Unlike swimming, in web marketing there are no limits to the number of gold medals you can have. There are an endless number of keywords (long and short tail) that are out there and every single one represents its own podium finish. Moreover, web marketing is a constantly growing and changing field which means that the gold you hold right now might not even carry you through the end of the day.

Whether the gold is getting top positions in Google, raising your traffic by 70% or increasing your online sales, there are many ways you can choose to achieve it.
Today one of the most popular ways to achieve your target is using Social media websites and online communities. Social media generally referred to as Web 2.0, can be a very rewarding way of achieving your online goals. It is however, also a demanding one.

Writing good and interesting titles, descriptions and choosing the most relevant keywords are only one aspect of the equation. The cliché “Content is King” remains true today and without content that will capture your readers attention and imagination, you’re going to be treading water To effectively use social media you need to be web 2.0 active.

As I’m sure we’ve all found out more then once, just posting content and forgetting about it doesn’t work. That’s the main reason many web marketers found Social Media to be disappointing when it didn’t deliver the traffic they thought it should.

A good Web 2.0 strategy must have at its core a well developed social persona. Someone that others can believe is real, relate to and most importantly want to keep in touch with.

For ongoing Web Marketing you need to not only bring in the masses, you also need to keep them coming back and bringing their friends along as well.

According to numerous surveys done over the past 2 years, and out of personal experience (unfortunately) I can say that most web 2.0 users have an instinctive dislike towards spammers and fake users, and to be perfectly honest that’s a good thing. That’s the quality check, spamguard, call it whatever you like.

Spammers are very easy to spot as are most of the fake user profiles. Most social sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Stumbleupon have a few unwritten rules, the first and most important one being “be real”: don’t spam and don’t promote yourself without having anything of value to add.

For example, if you’re watching a video about SEO, and you add a comment, then a link to your site will appear in your signature; which is the correct way of doing it.  Comments along the lines of “I have a great SEO site check it out at:  www.mysite.com” will not be received well and will be marked as spam.

Think before you add content to the social sites. Make sure it is not just self promotion but has real value to your would be site visitors and potential clients. People will respect you more, follow you and probably end up following you, twittering you or digging you.

Once you manage to find the right combination of quality content and marketing, the next important thing is to be consistent and persistent. Unless you want a one time only rise in traffic, you should be active online and let people know you’re out there not just to market yourself but also to interact and listen to others.

As your online community will grow and expand so will your ability to better market yourself and your site. It might take some time and hard work but it’s definitely worth it.
After all, if getting a Gold medal was easy it wouldn’t have any value.

Alright so after a little bit of coercion and reminding people that contracts were up for renegotiation soon (aren’t they always?), I’ve got people writing and landing posts on my desk for review. After reading them, I keep asking myself the same questions:

- Is it any good?

- Will anyone benefit from this post?

- Are they just trying to get me off their backs by giving me this?

- Why did I get myself into this…

So after reading a few good posts and a few just okay posts and keeping in mind that I don’t want to discourage people from writing by asking them “Do you really think I’m going to posts this?” I’ve come up with a set of three standards that my writers (and myself of course) have to apply when writing and editing these wonderful pieces of informative literature that will one day appear on the Compucall Blog:

1. Would you post this on your own personal blog?

2. If this post were written by someone else in the industry, would you digg, sphinn or bookmark it?

3. Since your name will be under the title of the post, would you want this to show up first in the search results if someone Googled your name?

So that’s that, let’s see where it takes us shall we.

Web 2.0 is defined as a term which describes the trend to enhance information sharing and users’ collaboration all over the web.
You probably already know that everyone today uses web 2.0 sites in order to increase traffic or to try and strengthen their authority. A link on Digg’s first page is every advertiser’s wet dream (and then some). The thing is, that web 2.0 links, as well as web 2.0 sites, are very dynamic and are constantly changing. Therefore, your results will peak like a really high cliff with a 90 degree drop on the other side- very high but for a short period of time.

When starting to build your SEO strategy plan try to follow the following steps:

1 – List the sites that you want to have presence in. These sites have to target your potential consumers/readers. Keep them on hand because it’s important to be able to measure what you do (remember the first rule of marketing, if you can’t measure it, then don’t do it).

2 – Create an entity that leaves its presence on relevant web 2.0 sites. Another option is create a company profile or a real profile. This entity has to be listed with consistent details and even an image, so it will appear real. If the content on each site is creative, interesting and original (no duplicates!!) then the comments, authority and buzz will follow. You’ve heard the cliché “Build them a field and they will come” right? Wrong. In today’s Web 2.0 world, the cliché should read “Build them a field with a winning team and free beer and dogs, and they will come, but then make sure they keep winning and the food and drink is still free”. These “web 2.0 listings” have to be constantly updated and you always have to look for new sites – Remember the peak principle!
Note: there are many web 2.0 specialists around the web that can create a link bait article which can, for example, take you to the first results in Digg.com. These services are pretty expensive (about $3000 a piece), but sometimes the exposure, traffic and links that you can gain by doing so is invaluable.

3 – Link from your website to your web 2.0 profiles so that everyone will see you have a significant presence on the web. Also, this makes all these listings look more reliable. As a marketing person/company, this activity can give you an added value in the eyes of potential costumers. As a B2C company, this presence looks fresh and different to your potential costumers to be.

4 – Follow your “Web 2.0 listings”, analyze them and improve them accordingly. (remember measure, measure, measure)
Web 2.0 presences are crucial to web marketing professionals, but like everything is marketing – you have to measure it and then optimize accordingly. You also have to be unique and original in everything you do, or as Seth Godin likes to say “Be Remarkable” as always.

A great site that lists most of the top web 2.0 sites is Go2Web2.0.com. You can use it as a resource of sites that might be relevant to what you’re trying to do. They’re a great Israeli initiative (and did you see that Page Rank)?

If you are interested in Web 2.0 packages, further details are provided here.

So low and behold, we finally have the website almost ready and I casually mention the opportunity to blog and interact at a general employee meeting and guess what (insert generic cricket sounds here).

Alright, maybe people are busy and it’s slipped their mind. So bring it back up at the next meeting, explain the benefits of blogging and then going to other blogs and starting to talk to others with your link pointing to our blog or to your blog profile and starting lasting industry relationships that will grow your knowledge and create great connections for the next SMX or SES. People nod. One person sends me a blog post, another contributes title for a blog post and that’s it. Remember there are 20 people here who are more than qualified to chip in.

This should be fun.