Many are still not convinced Twitter is the right avenue for their business or personal needs. Thinking of Twitter as your worldwide radio broadcast is a great way to address both your business and personal needs. All you need to do is decide whether you want to be the listener, the broadcaster, or a combination of the two! 

Radio broadcasts are often just a one way communication tool to send out your ‘voice’ to your listening audience. While some interaction is utilized occasionally, many radio programs are a way to communicate an overall message to listeners in a one way manner. There are radio programs that are informative, comical, controversial, and entertaining. Each program has its own format, its own audience, and its own method of communicating with its listeners. The key components to the overall business model for radio are voices, listeners, and communication between the two: whether one way or through two way conversations.

Market Research

Advertising

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

We’ve all seen those funny church signs while out and about, or maybe you’ve only seen them online. Anyways, we thought the below was a pretty funny one and inspired us to come up with our own using Says-It.com. Check out: SignGenerator.org and SignGeneratorMaker.com as well!

These types of things can be link worthy content *hint, hint*. You can use the sign generators listed above to come up with catchy and clever images for your particular niche or industry and post on your site, or even on your social profiles. Promoting via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, e-mailing your friends, and so on is how to get it started. You never know, something funny and off the wall may just go viral on you!

 Some Vertical Measure’s Originals: 

Have any other good ideas? Let us know!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

Imagine Googling your business name, and just beneath your company’s #1 ranking is another result, but this one isn’t something you want people to see.  Maybe it’s a lawsuit that was brought against your company, maybe it’s the insane rantings of a blogger who happens to hate your company.  Maybe the story being told is true, or maybe it’s not.  But it doesn’t really matter…you need

that result off the first page, and quickly.   That could be difficult, but what if you could have prevented it in the first place?  I’m gonna show you how…

Reactive Versus Proactive Reputation Management

The truth is, many businesses have heard about reputation management, but few of them are doing it proactively.  In most cases, they’re probably reacting to situations like the one I described above. This is a bad situation to be in.  If the negative result is already out there and being propagated, responding to it in a reactive way is like damage control.  The damage has already been done, and all you can hope for is to limit the amount of damage done.  And depending on who you’re battling against, it could cost you.

But what if you were to handle your reputation management proactively?  What I mean by that is actually agressively pursuing specific keywords, like your company name or the name of the owner, and dominate the search results for that particular term.  Now, please understand, you CANNOT do this for a generic search term, but you can do this for a very unique search term (again, like your company’s name).

The Reputation Management Method

The method consists of utilizing social media to create multiple opportunities for top 10 rankings from a multiplicity of websites, all for one specific keyword.  Let’s take "Vertical Measures" as an example.  If you Google our company’s name, these are the results you’ll get on the first page:

Now, just take that in for a minute.  You’ll see that we dominate 8 out of 10 positions for our business name, and that’s as it should be; I mean, it is OUR business name, and not someone else’s, right? But look, 6 of the results are from social media websites.  They include big players like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  But they also include a social profile on a website specific to our niche: SEOmoz.  Now, this should tell you something.  If you’re trying to be proactive about your company’s reputation management, you need to make sure you have profiles on these types of websites.

16 Opportunities to Dominate the Search Results for Your Business Name

Here’s a list of the top social media and local listing sites to join based on the research we’ve done.  Factors include obvious things like PageRank, traffic, and cost, but also how well each site ranks in search results for business name searches.  I.e. LinkedIn and Merchant Circle profiles have a tendency to rank well in the search engine results pages. This list is not exhaustive, so if you’ve got more you think should be included, post them in a comment below.

What to Include in Your Business Profile

If you are trying to dominate the company’s name in the search engines, then each profile should include as much information about your business as possible, including the following:

1. Company name as the username whenever possible
2. Company name used as the vanity URL whenever possible
3. Company name within the profile page description
4. Keywords used within the profile page description
5. Company contact information, including address and phone number
6. A link to your company website

If you are trying to rank for some term other than the company’s name, then just subsitute it into the information above.  For example, you could substitute a company executive’s name for the company name. 

Finding Niche Opportunities

Checking up on your competitors is an age-old strategy.  So this situation is no different. If you’re looking for niche networks and websites to create profiles for your business, simply do a search for the name of your competitor’s business and see what comes up in the top 30 search results.  If they have profiles on websites that you don’t, add them to your list!

Ralphm

Website – More Posts

At this point in my life, there are two things I truly enjoy and spend a lot of time doing. One is hiking and the other is link building. That’s right I said link building. I know – it’s a sickness.

Normally I hike so that I can totally remove myself from the day-to-day concerns of running an SEO & link building agency. In fact, I have been building links for as long as LinkMoses (he just does a better job at the whole self-promotion thing than me), and I have been hiking for even longer. Last week those two worlds finally collided when I ran into the sign below. I wonder how may other hikers have seen this sign and immediately associated it with backlinks! I know – it’s a sickness.

Actually my first thought was "what in the world is this supposed to mean?", but my next thought was "take a picture and post to TwitPic, tweet about it and write a blog post". I know – it’s a sickness.

I asked my Twitter followers what they thought when they saw this picture. I received three pretty funny responses.

@dougfeeney Odd shaped sausage??  (not a link builder)
@frank_in_oz confusion… (a hiker)
@Matt_Siltala is that trail no followed?   (bingo!)

So what comes to your mind when you see this pic? Please let me know below!

Arnie Kuenn

Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures and author of Accelerate! Content Development & Marketing to Grow Your Business Online. Vertical Measures provides search, social and content marketing services, designed to help businesses improve their online presence and obtain more traffic and conversions.
+Arnie Kuenn

Website – Twitter – Facebook – More Posts

Do you own a local business? Do you want to get top rankings for your business when potential customers do a local search for your business?   If you answered yes to either question, you need links citations for your website.  And you’re in luck, because here are 10 great links citations you can get for your website right now.  And don’t worry; if you’re not sure why citations are so vital for local search marketing, I’m going to share that with you too.

What is a Link Citation?

A citation is any reference to your local business, including business name, address, telephone number or other relevant information that may or may not contain an actual link to your website.  That’s right–it doesn’t matter if there’s an actual link to your website or not–just the mention of your business within a local search frame of reference is enough to make it relevant for Google and other search engines to count it as a point toward helping you improve your local search marketing results.  In other words, citations help you get ranked for local search results.

Why You Want Links Citations for Your Website

In his article, Why Citation is the New Link,  David Mihm gives a complete picture of why citations are super relevant to your local business.  It boils down to this: If you want to rank in Google’s local search results, you need to do more than just claim your Google local business account.  And just building more links to your website isn’t necessarily going to help either.  What you need are citations.  From the big names in local directories to small niche directories, you want to add your business information to as many as you can find (or afford).

Where to Get Links Citations

There are many places to get relevant citations for your website to help it rank in the Google 10 pack for local search results.  Here are 10 citations you can get right now.

1. Best of the Web Local
2. Insider Pages
3. Super Pages
4. City Search
5. Hot Frog
6. Yellow Pages
7. Local.com
8. Yelp
9. Match Point
10. Zoom Info

Where to Get More Links Citations

First, look for niche directories where you can list your business.  For example, if you are a florist, you might look at places like this local flower shop directory.  Some get expensive with monthly recurring fees, so start with free ones and if you’re on a budget, choose paid local directories wisely.

Just like you might search your competitors’ backlinks to find linking opportunities, you can search your competitors’ citations to find citation opportunities for your local business.  How do you do this?  Go to http://maps.google.com and search for your competitors by name or category.  Then click on the individual business listing and click on the "Web Pages" tab.  There you’ll see all their citations (see picture below).  Then, go get ‘em!

And if you’re really intent on getting a few links to your website, here are 10 great links you can get in the next 50 minutes. But just remember, they’re not the same as citations…

Ralphm

Website – More Posts