The truth is, there is no quick mix. Here’s a clip from a speech Alaina Sheer recently gave on the subject.

To hear Alaina again along with Cement Marketing SEO Director, Brad Spencer, snap up tickets to Finding Your Virtual Mix: A Sway Workshop Day Camp at Ohio University on September 30th. The $38.00 tickets include a full day of search engine marketing and social marketing basics.

The low ticket cost is thanks to our generous hosts for the event: Ohio University’s Innovation Center, Business Remixed and the Small Business Development Center.

[Special thanks to Ruth and Jan of Articulation, Inc. for the above speech - a result of their meticulous and inspiring speech coaching].

If you missed it here’s what went down.

• A nice man in California searches the Internet using these keywords, “Lifesize E.T. Doll”. He needed said doll for a charity bike ride.
• His search term leads him to this post on my personal blog.
• My son and I pack up E.T. and ship him off for the long trip to California. See pictures here.

E.T.’s temporary owner just posted these pictures to Facebook. E.T. has landed and is about to take off on a bike ride to raise funds for the San Francisco Aids Foundation. Donate here.

To find out how your business can rank #1 in Google for terms like “Life size E.T. doll” contact Cement Marketing or attend our Sway Search Marketing Workshop on May 20 – 21st.

Whether I am speaking one-on-one with a potential client, typically a marketing manager or business owner, or to a larger audience, typically a room filled with the latter, I use the experience to improve my translation skills. [Hint: kicking up your shoes and letting the sun shine in always make this process a less painful.]

Boots aside, making sense of all of this “search and social stuff” isn’t for the faint of heart.

But, invariably, after a little bit of on-the-spot investigation into keywords or competitor strategies, I figure it out. I have solved a riddle and found an avenue where social or search marketing could transform their bottom line.

When I relay the idea or my discovery their faces light up. There’s a visible click and it hits them; any remaining skepticism washing away. That’s the moment I love the most, the moment when the translation succeeds and my audience (small or large) begins to see things clearly.

But first, I have to convince them that this isn’t just a waste of time or space. Instead it’s the most effective, most powerful and most targeted form or marketing we have ever seen. That’s when I turn to talking about measurement. Showing them analytics reports, actual results for actual websites.

“Sometimes I feel like a social or search marketing detective,” I said to an audience of two during a meeting last week. Twenty minutes into our meeting, I had determined that they should be targeting an entirely different audience with their search marketing – an audience they hadn’t previously considered.

“You are!” they both chimed in, “This is incredible.”

If you want a one-on-one visit with your personal social and search marketing detective – give me a call at 614-754-8228 or e-mail cementmarketing@gmail.com. Better yet, come and find me at one of the following public speaking engagements coming up this Spring. (And yes, I’ll probably be wearing my cowboy boots).

Ohio Wesleyan Center Lecture

“We can measure that! The metrics behind social media strategy”
March 25, 2010 – 3:10 pm
Bayley Room
Beeghly Library, 43 Rowland Ave, Ohio Wesleyan University
Free and open to the public or LIVE Webcast

Association of Fundraising Professionals Monthly Luncheon

“Measuring social media.”
April 13, 2010, noon – 1:30 pm
Grange Insurance Audubon Center
$20 for members; $30 for guests

Sway Social Workshop

April 22 – 23, 2010 – 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Wild Goose Creative
See website for rates. Early bird expires March 12th and there are only a few seats left!

The two-day workshops will be held at Wild Goose Creative in Columbus, directly below the Cement Marketing offices. Visit the Sway Workshop website to find out what makes Sway different than any other conference you’ve been to before.

Register now to take advantage of the early bird ticket rates before they jump up on March 15th.

Fate? Destiny? Or just some really cool chartreuse and burryberry mustard chairs.

Either way, we’re beyond pleased with our new space.

And our first client. More on Lifeline of Ohio soon.

]]> http://cementmarketing.com/the-new-first-office/feed/ 0 http://cementmarketing.com/fortune-500-seo/ http://cementmarketing.com/fortune-500-seo/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:50:19 +0000 Alaina http://www.cementmarketing.com/?p=88 By Bradley Spencer
Cement Marketing SEO Lead

Fortune 500 companies are about to eat your lunch. Unless, of course, you grab a sling shot.

If your website is less than a decade old, has less than 100,000 inbound links, or less than 10,000 indexed pages, then enjoy the year or so. Relish the traffic you are getting from search engines. Stew in the delight of ranking high for some pretty common search terms. Because that’s all about to end.

Why is your site about to go ten pages deep?

Because huge companies with massive budgets are watching what us smaller websites and SEO firms are doing and oogling at our ROI.

Fortune 500 companies that are slow and unwieldy have stayed out of the search engine optimization game so far. But now that they are seeing the importance of organic traffic, they are going to systematize and dominate. They have the money, brand and influence to absolutely destroy any websites that stand in their path.

Do you really think you can rank for “Big Red Wagon” when Target, Walmart, Walgreens, and other huge companies with established domains, inbound links, and a team of SEO’s are working for the same thing? Not likely.

Do you really think that your keyword research tools can stand up to something that a genius programmer could design for GE and sell for millions or dollars? I doubt it.

So what does this mean for us smaller, freelance, or one-man webmasters? Is this the end of the line? Are we going to look back on 1995-2009 as the glory days of SEO before the “Big Guys” got involved?

Maybe.

But there IS a way to stay in the game when the big guys enter. And it won’t have anything to do with getting a few links here and there or having a flawless site structure. In the future, as Cement Marketing practices, every site will be built to be fully optimized for search engines. Our SEO practices, while cutting edge now, stand to become industry standard.

So how will smaller websites stay competitive?

Easy. The same way brands and small businesses have always put themselves on the map – with a clear and compelling message that everyone wants to share.  Be unique. Be edgy. Be smart. Be linkworthy. And above all create something memorable.

Fortune 500 companies have Legal Departments and they have Branding, Office Politics and 1985-MBA-Weilding Bosses, and they have writers whose creativity has been sapped by talk about American Idol around the watercooler and endless meetings. My God, The Meetings.

You, on the other hand, have coffee shops, and late-night brainstorming mixed with loud music and screaming kids and thunderstorms and the absolute ability to publish and create whatever you want without worrying about what your boss will think, how the shareholders will react, or what the legal department thinks.

People don’t want to link to corporate legalese. They don’t want to read boring content. And they aren’t going to remember a watered-down sales pitch. Us smaller guys, the Davids, will trump the Goliaths because we are far more interesting and we always will be. If your business has employees, if you have people with smiling faces ready to service or help your customers – than you are more interesting than a dry, corporate website.

Use your employees and customers are your muse. What do they need? What do they inspire in you? In your brand? Maybe it’s a viral application, a widget, a quiz or a compelling Twitter account. Whatever it may be, chances are yours will be more interesting than the same thing created by a giant corporation.

So what do you do now to prepare for the SEO future?

First and foremost, be sure all of your SEO ducks are in a row and that your site is fully optimized and then stop and think about what you are doing today and what you can be doing tomorrow to spread your brand message virtally.

At Cement Marketing we believe that the future of SEO will depend on the quality of your content which will be judged, not just by search rankings, but by the amount of chatter your brand or website is receiving across all social network platforms. That’s why we offer both SEO and SEM capabilities. It’s what sets us apart and what will ultimately set your brand apart in what is about to become a very competitive marketplace.

Break the mold of what your competitors are doing and create something unique, something people will want or something they will use. Don’t worry about tips and tricks, soon those will be commonplace. Start thinking big before the big guys do.

Read Brad’s SEO & WordPress Consulting blog
Follow Brad on Twitter

Just like this chair.

This old chair, thrown out to the curb and forgotten, is a hidden treasure.

Just like your website. 

It just needs a little cleaning, some polish and a splash of search engine marketing. 

This chair has serious potential. Do you see it?

We do.