Exposure**
**by Aaron Wall**
Many reporters would like you to believe there is a firm wall between
content and advertising, but often they merge&particularly for niche
or trade related publications. When my wife was getting started in
business and wanted to promote her first website, a trade magazine
kept trying to push her for an ad and she kept saying no, preferring
to invest in SEO. The following month, the trade magazine published
what amounted to a public relations driven smear piece against some
companies with similar business models to my wife's company, while
promoting a few of the largest brands in the space - who just happened
to be big advertisers.
This same sort of advertising blend amongst media and advertisers is
popular in virtually every media format. Television stations run fake
news <//www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary>
. Some magazine ads are designed to look like editorial content
because that converts better. Popular online media sites ranging from
WebMD (example
<http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-athero-artery-connection/understanding-atherosclerosis>
) to the Wall Street Journal (example
<http://online.wsj.com/ad/ups?mod=djm_UPShousead>
) publish ads on their site that lead to special advertising
sections. If you miss the small sponsored resource disclaimer, you
might think you are reading editorial content. Some ads even start off
with a free editorial quiz that leads to an ad at the end (example
<http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/cholesterol-health-check/default.htm>
). [Editor's note: this column may have a sponsor disclosure as
determined by the publisher, and is not necessarily endorsed by the
author.]
When I started writing online, some niche publications would not give
me the time of day until I gave them some ad dollars, at which point
in time I suddenly became an expert. And another set of people ignored
me until Danny Sullivan linked to an article I wrote in late 2003.
After he linked to my site, a lot of other people trusted me
(somewhat) because they saw him cite me.
If your first entrance into the world of marketing is SEO, then it is
easy to get taken back by how sausage-like media business models are.
Google's search guidelines for webmasters present an oversimplified
view of the web because it suits their business model to do so. In
such a world, a large percent of sites that rank violate their
guidelines because to some degree that is where the competitive line
is. Either you rank or you do not.
What separates the type of companies that can violate guidelines and
rank vs those that get immediately punished is often how much other
marketing they do and the relative size of their footprint. If a site
is promoted through nothing but spammy techniques, then Google is not
going to have much sympathy. But if a site is strong on the brand
front, strong on the public relations front, and strong on the
editorial front, and strong on the organic links front then it gets
more room to fudge with the guidelines.
About a year ago, Todd Malicoat wrote an article about how brand size
plays a role in SEO <http://www.stuntdubl.com/2008/02/08/brand-size/>
. If you are brand new to the web you might not have the money to
invest in brand building, but you still can build a strong foundation
by investing in a strong web design and a strong domain name. It is
hard to build a brand or get many organic links until you have a way
to drive traffic to your website. Below I have listed 7 compelling
(and relatively inexpensive) ways you can invest in pulling links (and
other credibility signals) into your website.
Create featured content. Every page of your site should not have the
same cost. Some pages of featured content should be much deeper than
your typical content such that people think they are so much better
than everything else that they feel the articles are citation-worthy.
Outbound links. When creating featured content, one of the best ways
to help it spread to the right audience is to reference some of the
thought leaders in that space directly in the content. That enables
you to pitch them without seeming like you are pitching them.
Advertise on non-commercial keywords. Many non-commercial keywords
are cheap because they have little to no direct business value. But
some of them are often associated with ideas that are often talked
about in the media. If you can create featured content and then
advertise it on Google for about a dime a click, that can pull in a
lot of links. One of our sites got links from the New York Times and
the Washington Post using this technique.
Buy ads on sites that rank. Some sites that rank are not owned by
people who know much about business. Some of them will want
unbelievable prices for ads, whereas some others will sell ads for
about 5% of the market rate. Buy the deals and skip the overpriced
stuff.
PRLeads. If you have a smaller website and can not afford traditional
forms of advertising or a big PR firm, then you can try to get quotes
in the media by subscribing to PR Leads <http://www.prleads.com/>
. It costs about $100 a month and you get to list topics where you
would be a good fit for a quote. Media members ask for quotes via
email and you respond to the ones that you might be able to get quoted
in. After you are quoted, you can their logos on your site in an as
seen in section.
Clean user experience. Some ad driven sites are able to get momentum
quicker if they do not run ads on their site until after they start
building an audience. Run ads too aggressively, too early and it might
turn people off, plus if a site has little to no audience then it
won't make much money from ads. But if you build a lot of links and
momentum first, it is much easier to make money from ad based business
models.
Free samples. A decent link can cost $50 to $500. Many products and
services sell for less than that. And some products (like software)
have virtually 0 cost to distribute. So if you can find out a way to
get your product or service in the hands of thought leaders, then that
will typically have a much better return on investment than
traditional advertising does. If you mostly run an ad driven media
site, then writing guest articles for other sites that have your
target audience is a great way to get exposure in front of the right
people.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Aaron Wall <http://searchengineland.com/author/aaron-wall/>
is the author of SEO Book <http://www.seobook.com/>
. He also works with Clientside SEM <http://www.clientsidesem.com/>
to help large corporate clients improve their search engine
rankings.
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