I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.
With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.
When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.
Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra
[...]
[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)
[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:
- More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
- More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
- Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
- Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
- Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
- Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect
[...]
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Also, contrary to advertising, social media enables the building of relationships and trust. Those don’t go away easily either. The key as Lee said is publish and promote…..i see so many corporate blogs that just don’t do the promote part. I think there’re solutions for content creation all other the place (blogging platform, youtube, myspace/facebook and so on) but not many for content engagement (i.e promotion) and it’s a real challenge to do it well especially when more than 1 person is involved like in a typical marketing team.
But Laurent, all of that takes a lot of time, right? It seems to me that people might be more willing to spend the money required rather than investing the time. Well, either way, there are companies like Abraham Harrison that can turn all of this work unto money — and we’ll do it. Anyway, we’re not the only one, but you’re right. People come into this place of “build it and they will come” is completely wrong. Also, it usually takes longer than immediately for all of the work to start bearing fruit.
When you search for “Survivor Corps” or just Survivor+Corps on Google Live.com, AOL, or Yahoo!, you’ll see that just about the entire reputation of Survivor Corps online is PWND by Survivor Corps and all of those mentions and most of those links are thanks to the hard work of my team on behalf of Survivor Corps. It might look organic, but it is surely well-earned media.
Yes it does take time. And time is the most precious element in business, probably before money (well may not be true nowadays). I saw from a previous post you’ve done a amazing job for survivor corps, and I do believe there was a lot of hours behind it. That was my point, companies compete for people’s attention, social media won’t escape that though it changes the rule of the game because it’s more a ‘people to people’ one than ’system to system’ like other marketing techniques.