David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

This is a totally new, humorous and deadly serious Internet marketing concept: BegForPost :: Why pay per post when you can beg? It’s a marketplace for those who want blog exposure and those interested in giving blog exposure.  It is being reported in places like TechCrunch as an alternative to “the ethically questionable PayPerPost service that allows advertisers to pay bloggers to write about their products”.  (That’s a debate for another day.)

One of the toughest problems when promoting one’s website to bloggers is finding the right ones…not just those who might be interested because they are in your niche, but those who actually are interested because they want to receive your PR material.  Those adventuresome website marketers who take on that challenge waste a lot of time sending emails and filling in comments forms to bloggers who have no interest, who in turn waste a lot of time reading and deleting unwanted messages.

BegForPost is a start, but it needs something more.  It needs a way for bloggers to search for webmasters who are interested in getting exposure on a topic (for guest blogs, joint ventures, free samples, etc.)  It needs a way for webmasters to search for bloggers in their niche who are interested in listening.

I just took BegForPost for a spin.  I had no way to know which blog to target, so I looked at whom others were targeting, picked one, and begged for a post on behalf of a client.  My begging is at this point in the hands of a moderator.  But how do I know if the target blogger wants to hear from my client.   

This is a cool idea, but it needs a little more sophistication before it is likely to be genuinely useful.  However, I will report back if my test drive ends up bearing fruit.  If not, I might try again with another client. 

Yikes! It’s been two weeks since I posted SEO for Reputation Management: Part II.  So your patience has earned you a good post.

In SEO for Reputation Management: Part I, we made the strategic decisions of what Amanda wanted people toi see when they Search Google or Yahoo for her name.  In Part II, we took inventory of what is already on the Information Highway that she can use to that end.

Now it’s time to put together the plan. Time has slipped through my fingers, and Amanda (not her real name, remember?) has already begun implementing some of the plan.  At the end of this post, I’ll share with you her interim results.

I won’t go through all the details, but some of the major recommendations were…

1. Her blog was being used very, very sporadically.  More frequent posts, occasionally speaking in the third person, would help (I probably should mention that this is David Leonhardt’s blog in every post and put my name in the Blog Title above as Amanda does, but I never put together a reputation management plan for myself!).  In fact, I recommended a post about herself, something I should do one of these days, too. This should secure a second listing in Google’s top 10 for her blog.

2. She owns the domain of her name, but it points to her blog.  I recommended developing her domain to include certain content that would help her get double listings Google’s top 10 for her name.

3. I suggested ways to make her two blogger profiles work to her advantage.

4. I suggested ways to boost the rankings also of a few of the various places where she has articles right now (or then) on the Internet.

5. I suggested a few places where she could build a good reputation directly, that could also rank highly in the search engines or support the rankings of her other pages.  For instance, I pointed out my pages at MySpace, Zaadz, Squidoo, MyBlogLog and TagWorld.  I haven’t done near enough with any of these, mind you, but I will.  Honest.

6. I also recommended a multi-faceted linking campaign, geared to the various types of pages Amanda was trying to boost in the rankings.

SEO Reputation Management Plan Progress report.

On Google’s top 10 right now…

1.  Amanda’s Blogger profile.  She has another Blogger profile, but it has not been worked on yet and it is not ranking.

2. Her blog.  She has been doing more posts, but not yet what is needed for a second page to rank.  I have offered some additional details.

3. One of the pages I mentioned in item #4 above.

4. and 5. A new appearance by another offensive blogger, posted two years ago. How these two postings got up in the rankings is anybody’s guess, but it is likely the result of something that happened sitewide (as opposed to something related to these two specific posts).  As the linking campaign kicks in, the two offensive posts should sink.

6. Amanda’s MySpace profile.  More can be done to make this a double listing.  Possibly.

7. Amanda’s under construction and 99% unoptimized site on her own-name domain.  When the site is finished, there should be two pages from this domain in the top 10.

8. and 9. Two more of the pages I mentioned in item #4 above.

10. Amanda’s MySpace page. More can be done to make this a double listing.  Definitely.  I’ve made some additional suggestions.

So there you have it.  Some promising interim results.  One can do much to manage one’s reputation using sound, responsible SEO techniques.

I love Loren Baker’s post on 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck.  It goes right in line with my thinking when I posted the comments about Wikipedia and the NoFollow attribute, and the experiment to test the NoFollow attribute, with no stop-the-presses-results. 

I have said this many times before…the World Wide Web (www) works when linking is encouraged.  The Only One Orphan (ooo) works when linking is discouraged. Thanks to Loren for showing me the DoFollow WordPress Plugin.  If you post a comment here, you can be sure there will be no NoFollow attribute on your link.  

UPDATE February 2009: We have switched to the No Follow Free plugin, which seems to work better with the Intense Debate Plugin.  We have set the threshold at 5 comments.  So if you have commented more than five times, the DoFollow kckjs in…and no, firing off five quick comments all at one does not count.  This is a fully moderated blog.

This blog has been featured at MyBlogLog Face Ads as of a few hours ago (just checked my emails).  I know fame is fleeting and that my mug will soon fade, pushed aside by fresh faces, but I thought I would let you know that the post that was good enough to convince the MyBlogLog folks to put up with my face on their Face Ads page is the SEO for Reputation Management: Part II post of yesterday.

Now that I think of it, it’s ironic that I get a face link for a post about reputation management!

Just for fun, it occurred to me that I have a profile over at Blogger.com, even though my own blog is hosted here.

 Blogger: User Profile: David Leonhardt

Where can you find the most blogs all on one page (actually on five theme-based pages)?  Fuelmyblog – The Great Wall of Blogs lists 625 blogs per page.  Each one is displayed with an Avatar.  All you have to do is scroll over the Avatar to find view the details.

Suppose you have a web page that could be of interest to any food-related blogger.  All you have to do is keep scrolling across until you find such a blog.  You don’t have to click from page to page.  This makes it easy.

The link above is the page where you will find this blog (top row, 7th from the corner, The Happy Guy Marketing logo)

My weekly happiness blog is also listed. Look for the happy face near the upper left corner.

At this point I see that the home page is full, and the other four pages are filling fast, so if you own a blog, get in there now.  From an SEO perspective, the links are redirects, so they might not bring any “link juice”, but I am one of those who think that Google reads more than it lets on.  In any event, it takes very little time to post a blog, and I am sure that most bloggers will increase their readership over time as word gets out.

Andy beard just wrote a great blog post on tags and how multiple tags can help get a blog better search engine rankings for a wider variety of search terms, and therefore of course a wider variety of potential readers.  The strategy: tag everything in site.

I commented with reservations, but I am intrigued and at the risk of making my tag list unwieldy, I am going to start applying Andy’s strategy, beginning with this post.  (Don’t worry, I won’t overdo it; you’ll never see a tag list longer than a post, even if I try keeping my posts short.)

Always on the lookout for cool and useful new social networks, I signed up for a MyBlogLog acount, recommended by several people at WebProWorld.  If you join up, please make me a contact of yours and we can follow each other around, share information and be successful together.

I was listening to Andrée-Anne talking on Radio Canada about her blog, la Celibataire Urbaine yesterday.  She really was just writing a journal for some friends, and suddenly people were writing her and she set up an official blog and has 1000 daily readers and now writes a newspaper column, too.   

Blogging is a powerful medium, and it can catch anyone by surprise.  The moral of the story is to write interesting posts, and you just might end up with a very viral marketing tool.