Here at awalkinmyshoes.com I’ll make it my duty to reveal all the strategies and methods from marketing that I’ve acquired both online and offline.

When I initially had my start-up, Incentivest, I immediately tried to put in place different marketing strategies in order to later optimize on getting the business seen–even in its prematurity. One of my first goals was to get the company press as soon as possible as a way to bring attention to not only its methods of financial therapy, but also to bring forward such a “newsworthy story” of a young entrepreneur.

Doing this early would allow me to build credibility for the company, as well as open it up to financial opportunities (thus leading to making money).

The Setup

To thoroughly discuss the setup of how I received press, I have to go back to the days when I was a marketing associate for the company that later funded me. I wanted to bring press to the company by utilizing something I knew from high school…

My high school–in Long Island, NY, was a high school that got regularly featured in our county’s newspaper, The Suffolk Times. One specific time at which it gets featured is during Black History Month, when a motivational speaker usually comes in to discuss black history.

Since the company I worked for was made up of predominantly black individuals–I knew that getting them to speak at my former high school would be the easiest, quickest, and most beneficial press they could receive.

I will make a note, however, from this experience for you to all learn from: The two heads of the company (my main speakers), backed out of this opportunity ONE day before we left after I had planned this almost 2 1/2 months ahead of time. This could’ve been a great opportunity to be seen as giving back to a community (even though the company originates in philadelphia), while also showing that you care about educating young people. If you do not plan to take press opportunities seriously, not only will you be wasting the time and effort of your marketing personnel, but you will be bringing down the level of impact you have on the press by leading to “replacement individuals.” And, you will also be bringing down the level of impact of receiving financial opportunities. So if good press is planned–stick to it.

Even with my replacement speakers, a reporter from the local newspaper still showed up, and the company received great press for it’s inspiring story. After wards, I held on to the reporter’s business card for future stories.

This first experience allowed me to understand what is involved and required in a press experience as well as what is needed to make sure it goes as planned for the next time.

Getting My Company Press

When I felt it was ready to introduce Incentivest, here are the following steps I took to receive my own press:

1. I created a “newsworthy” press release- When I first started the company, I made sure to create several press releases based on the story behind Incentivest. In fact, I created one general press release to send to local philadelphia papers, and later created another press release specifically for Long Island NY(my hometown) related papers. Press releases are almost like article marketing online, except that you shouldn’t have a press release for every good marketing post like you commonly find with online article marketing. The key concept(s) here are to either provide the press with new factual information about an industry, or supply them with an inspiring story. When creating my press releases I followed a general format from an image I actually found online.

View the Ideal Press Release Format

2. Catchy Titles- I made sure to title all press releases with words that would stand out from the crowd and initiate interest. The title for my NY targeted press release was “19 Year Old with a Niche”, subtitle–”06′ Greenport High School Alumni Turned Entrepreneur.”

View to read my press release (pdf document)

3. Using Established Contacts- Now that I already had a story done about my funder’s company, I was able to directly e-mail and correspond with the reporter who wrote that article. I e-mailed the official press release to the reporter with the subtitle (since it’s more directly related to my hometown) as the subject of the e-mail. Knowing the reporter helped me to bypass a waiting/screening process for new stories.

4. Interview by e-mail- No later than 24 hours did I receive a follow up e-mail from that reporter wanting to interview me for a story. She gave me an option to interview by e-mail, which I took to form ideal answers for the article in an effort to avoid fumbling my company’s first press attempt. I only suggest you do this when you’re new, otherwise phone conversations are a great way to display your confidence, intelligence about your industry, sincerity towards the topic, and authenticates a better relationship with the reporter.

5. The Final Article - With the answers I gave, the reporter had continued questions about the company and my story. It took about 3 weeks before the article entered the paper, and another two weeks for me to receive it. By the way, ALWAYS keep an original copy of all articles related to company press.

I posted the entire article here on my blog as well as another post about my opinions of it.

View the final Suffolk Times article about Incentivest
View my review about the article

The Suffolk Times: Facts

Just to understand the reach of The Suffolk Times newspaper, here are some facts about it.
Total Distribution:11,520

“To appreciate just how much The Suffolk Times is relied upon as the source for news and information on the North Fork, this is all you really need to know: The newspaper has a paid circulation of more than 10,000 in a community that has fewer than 8,000 homes. ” The Suffolk Times

The paper also reaches a rather unknown community of significant wealth on the North Fork of Long Island. Long Island is home to “The Hamptons”, as well as many movie/tv stars who can sometimes be seen in my hometown, so you can understand my desire to get good press here.

Feedback and Opportunity

I received significant feedback from people who knew me directly–they hadn’t heard from me in awhile, and were happy to congratulate me on the start-up. I received message after message about how the word spread throughout the town.

Soon, my older sister approached me with news that a non-profit organization called “C.A.S.T.” which she is an employee of, asked her about getting in contact with me to incorporate my financial therapy services/knowledge into their program. C.A.S.T. is actually a non-profit in which my grandmother was responsible for assisting the establishment and maintenance of programs for the poor and unemployed.

It really bums me out that soon after this opportunity arose, problems with my funder began to lead to the early dissolution of Incentivest. I would’ve loved to have contributed to the company my grandmother helped to establish while also providing assistance to my hometown.

Future Benefits of this Press

1. Press Release Writing Experience-All in all, I now know what to ideally include in a press release and how to write it so that grabs the attention of a reporter.

2. Interview Experience- I also know what to expect from a reporter, and how to effectively prepare for an interview prior to the interviewing process. I now believe that the next time I’m interviewed, it will be a much easier experience for me.

3. Established Buzz in My Community- Even though Incentivest is now dissolved, I know that I have created a buzz in my community that will lead to new and better opportunities with my future business(es).

4. Bookmarking My Experience-This article has essentially acted as a bookmark for my experience with my former company, and still supports my story as a young entrepreneur. It will help me in the future to refer this article to reporters for added credibility and substance to my story.

Just from knowing a couple of facts from my high school, I was able to land two press opportunities that have overall strengthened my marketing and PR experience, while adding to my journey as a young entrepreneur. I hope that my experiences can become valid reflections of my experience, and plan to continue to share them with you with each new one that comes along.

Be sure to understand the significance of this experience when you see the press I will receive in the near future….

Subscribe to my RSS for updates on future offline and online marketing advice!

Toodles!
-Melody

Today I will finally show you actual screen shots and scans that cataloged my progress to the 1st page of Google in 3 weeks (specifically for keyword “Financial Therapy”). The following images are from actual screen shots taken on the date noted, and from SEO progress entries into my business journal (click on the thumbnails to view the larger image). By the way, the online screen shots also give you a better sense as to the explanation I was giving for the title and meta tag coding.

Purchased Site (www.incentivest.com): 6/10/08

I originally purchased the website in early June specifically for the purpose of setting up the corporate emails, and hadn’t quite begun designing the site.

July 08′:Designing
It wasn’t until late July that I began to finally have time to gather all the content that was necessary for launching my site, as well as creating coding, graphics, and additional elements for the website. My goal was to have the website done prior to our company launch, August 20th, 2008.

Launch of Website: 8/20/2008
Incentivest.com was launched the same day as the corporate launch party we had at our former Manayunk space. Since the day was so busy, I hadn’t cataloged anything about potential ranking on Google, so at this point I just say that it’s online presence/ranking was nonexistent (I usually say that an online presence is “nonexistent” when don’t rank within the top 100 positions via your keyword(s) on Google). I originally gave myself two months to have make sure my efforts would rank the site on the first page of Google by the end of the two months–boy was I surprised when it happened three weeks later!

#35 Ranking on Google 9/3/08
About a week and a half after incentivest.com’s launch, I spotted the site’s first ranking on Google at the 35th position for its keyword “Financial Therapy.” In this online screenshot, I have two different pictures:

The 1st picture shows the incentivest website and an arrow pointing to the top of the page where the results say from “31-40 of about 23,700,000 for financial therapy.” In my handwriting next to the site, is the date and position (#35 as of 9/3/08).

The second picture is the same date, but shows that basically the 35th position means that it ranked on the 4th page of Google on 9/3/08.

#5th Position on Google: 9/8/08
Less than one week after it’s 35th position ranking, the site had already jumped to the 5th position on Google. This scan of my corporate journal entry shows how I documented the ranking of the site on 9/8/08.

#3rd Position on Google: 9/10/08
Two days later the site jumped to the third position of Google on September 10, 2008. You can imagine the glee I was experiencing when I realized that my hard work was quickly paying off.

Continued Screen shots and scans for: 9/17/08 & 10/6/08

The following scans are just to show that even several weeks after its extreme jump to the 1st page of Google, the site was still maintaining its 1st page ranking.

9/17/08
The site experienced consistence ranking on the first page but for several weeks it kept going from the 3rd to the 4th position, to the 5th, back to the third. I think the second position that was highest that an incentivest-related page ranked on Google, however, it was the press-release for the company launch that I had submitted to online directories.

10/6/08
More than a month after its official launch, incentivest.com still ranked on the 3rd position of Google, and by that time I finally began taking into note how it ranked on Yahoo. On 10/6/08, the site ranked in the second position for Yahoo.com, and I was surprised to see that soon after it ranked in the number one slot on Yahoo.

Lessons Learned
Although the recent dissolution of Incentivest has left me bummed, I have learned so much from the experience and I really just wanted to be able to show people the successes I experienced along the way. I have researched online marketing for about two years now, and am finally at a point where my knowledge is worthy of results–fast ones! I hope you’ll be able to take this information and apply it to your business’s site, experiencing results in no time. If you have any questions about the process or what I’ve written so far, feel free to leave me a comment.

Final Confessions: I’m glad I was able to walk away from one experience, with significant skills to take control of my future.

With the bulk of the coding behind us, today we’ll focus on the importance of linking as well as promotional efforts to maintain top ranking on search engines.

Step 4. Linking and Promotion

Linking
On every top SEO site, experts will discuss the importance of proper link building to optimize your website. I’ve decided to list the top do’s and don’ts when setting up your website’s links for optimization. If you have someone who is professionally designing your site, just make sure to give them a list of what you require for SEO purposes

Do’s

Do include both a title and alt into the coding for your links.

<a href=”link.html” title=”Services and Products” alt=”Services and Products Page”>Link</a>

Do use keywords on the home page as links to sections of the site that talk about them.
Do create a proper sitemap that links to all the pages of your website (submit it to google).
Do create some sort of cycle or path of information where readers can click on the next page to find out more about a certain topic.

Read more about Financial Therapy >>>

Do (for user friendly purposes) make sure that all links change color when they are clicked (blue links change to purple links for pages that have already been visited).
Do setup linking that will jump to another part of the same page, such as the linking that is commonly found in glossary or FAQ pages. The codes that create this effect are:

<a name=”main menu”></a>
<a href=”#jump back up to menu”></a>
<a href=”#link”></a>
<a name=”section to jump to”></a>

Do create a footer with links to the Home, About, FAQs, SiteMap, and Terms of Policy Pages
Do setup links to blogs, videos, press releases (pdf documents), and other news about the company (that appear on media websites)
Do create a network of expert individuals and link to their sites where people can either find out more about you or client sites (i.e. if you’re a site designer/marketer)
Do use both text and images as links to other pages of your site

Don’ts

Don’t over-saturate pages with links
Don’t use hard to read colors as link colors
Don’t hide dozens of links by making the color white (or the color of your background) which violate the guidelines of search engines (search engines don’t want you to do special “coding tricks” to help you rank well and can’t be seen by a regular reader)
Don’t have broken links, or launch a site when the links to all the pages aren’t functioning
Don’t setup a flash intro, which links to the rest of your site (flash has no ranking benefits, and usually just annoys visitors who skip the intro anyway)
Don’t have links that say “click here” or link to pages with improperly described title tags (i.e. “Home”)

Additional Promotional Efforts

You’ve launched your website, and because of your hard efforts of preparation, creating a user friendly content layout, and setting up the proper coding and links for your pages, you’re able to rank well on the search engines in no time. However, in order to maintain your high ranks and reputation with the search engines you must continue to accomplish these things:

1. Continue expansion of the website, adding new features for customer/reader feedback and education
2. Obtain local and national press in newspapers and other media outlets so that coverage of your business appears throughout the online world.
3. Submit press releases for new developments in your company to online press release directories, so that the right reporter can find your story.
4. Join social networking sites and other online communities such as facebook, myspace, and twitter.
5. Setup educational webinars, and promote other online (or offline) events

With the unlimited resources of information and knowledge you can provide to your customers or readers, taking care of your marketing and promotional efforts will prove profitable for your efforts in the long run.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll show you the actual time line outlined in my journal and screenshots which show how I climbed to the 1st page of google and yahoo in only 3 weeks!

Final Confessions: Last night I just finished my first youtube video in 2 months. This weekend I’ll be finished up two more videos and then by Monday all three should be up on the AWalkInMyShoes YouTube Channel

So far I’ve covered the general preparation, and content layout that resulted in my climb to google’s first page in 3 weeks. Today we’ll tackle the coding I used.

Step 3. Coding

I haven’t personally seen any sites that have shown the actual coding used, and the type of linking/coding characteristics to follow to maintain a well ranked site. But here’s the first.

Meta/Title Tags
Everyone who has done significant research on Search Engine Optimization, has at one point, stumbled across the lovely theories of meta and title tags. Years ago, people who wanted to rank well, just had to apply the right meta/title tags to their site and they would get significant viewers. However, in the time of content saturation, and new developments in the ever-growing search engine industry, it has become harder to succeed by doing just one aspect of SEO.

There’s still a lot of question if whether or not meta tags still work, but it has been widely accepted that the proper Title Tags will put your site at an advantage.

Keywords
I spoke previously on keywords for your site in the first step to ranking well on google. Generally speaking, their has to be a balance between your keywords being too broad and too specific.
If you’re just starting a business in a saturated industry (like finance/business) it will be close to pretty impossible to rank well within the first few weeks with a saturated term. The previous websites that rank well with those terms are:

1. Thousands of pages in size.
2. The top industry experts.
3. The first on the scene for those terms (and learned how to maintain them)
4. Or just pay their way on top through the sponsored links list (in the words of full house, how w-ude!).

My Keywords were, “Financial Therapy” and “Holistic Financial Planning.” Although the industry existed, few were using the term “financial therapy” as a means to deal with financial problems related to subconscious behavior. Starting off in an industry that hasn’t been completely saturated yet, is another way of building your online presence. However, besides ranking well, you have to work hard to promote those revolutionizing terms (and if you coin the term–its even better), and build their popularity both online and offline.

For instance, using the keyword “blog” would’ve seemed useless years ago in a time when there were few blogs. With over 100,000 new blogs starting every day, let’s just see if you can rank well within a couple of weeks time frame.

So now, that we’ve discuss keywords a bit, we can continue with our meta tag discussion. Each of the 30 + pages I created had the following meta tags (arranged differently on some pages).

<meta name=”keywords”
content=”financial therapy,holistic financial planning, Financial Therapy,”>
<meta name=”Description”
content=”Financial therapy and holistic financial planning from Incentivest”>
<meta name=”Content”
content=”financial therapy – financial therapy and holistic financial planning from Incentivest”>
<meta NAME=”author” content=”financial therapy from Incentivest”>
<meta NAME=”copyright” content=”Incentivest, Inc @ 2008″>
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”15 days”>

The top three important meta tags in this particular coding are the name, description, and content meta tags. Meta tags enable the search engines to decipher the content that is available throughout your site by the keywords you specify in the tags.

If you notice I have variations of the same keywords, whether they are both lower case/capitalized versions, or slighly modified. The rest of the meta tags, add further description to the site.

Take note that included with my keywords are phrases like, “Financial Therapy from Incentivest.” This allows the possibility of two things.

1. Incentivest would’ve been taken seriously as an expert of financial therapy.
2. The search engines may have automatically displayed Financial therapy whenever someone would type in Incentivest (like how geico is automatically known for car insurance).

Title Tag
Prior to incentivest.com’s launch, I had discovered from studying the source code of one of the cases from an online SEO expert I personally knew. Studying the code opened the way for me to properly code the title tags for each page.

Main page:incentivest.com

<title>Financial Therapy, Holistic Financial Planning – Incentivest</title>

Two things I noticed from that expert’s coding.
1. Place your keywords FIRST, in the title tag.
2. The title tags for your remaining pages should be a small variation of your main tags.

For my remaining pages, the title tags consisted of “Incentivest Financial Therapy,” followed by the name of that particular page (i.e. FAQ’s, About The Company)

<title>Incentivest Financial Therapy – About The Company</title>

Now that I’ve given you an inside look into the coding I used, I will continue this post on coding tomorrow, where I’ll be discussing the importance of link building, as well as the promotional efforts aside that will increase ranking and online presence.

Final Confessions: I would definitely recommend that you HIRE someone to do your business’s site coding. It’s probably one of the biggest pains in the….well you know.

Step 2. Content Layout

It’s incredibly important to understand that well ranking business websites not only have quality content, but the layout of the content is done in a user friendly manner–leaving passersby with the clarity that they’ve learned about your website without creating a humon-goid headache.

To better illustrate how I accomplished 1st page ranking in 3 weeks, I’ll continue including small diagrams along the way. And at the end of the week, I’ll even show you an actual timeline that I documented with incentivest’s 3-week progression to 1st page success.

You can learn more about the type of navigation I used in my previous post, but I’m going to jump right into what the content on each page looked like.

Main Page:incentivest.com

The first page began with a small introduction question about your future and how the company would’ve provided services to satisfy your goals. The next paragraph after that leads into the definition of Financial Therapy in Incentivest terms.

What is Financial Therapy?
(fə-nān’shəl ) (thěr’ə-pē) Financial Therapy in Incentivest Terms: Financial therapy is a process of evaluating and reprogramming one’s habits dictated by the subconscious when in reference to their financial spending.

Creating a specific definition for your service especially if its revolutionary allows the search engines to pick it up as a source for defining that term. It also allows you to answer questions potential customers will have right from the beginning.

Sidebar Content
I created a sidebar on my site that showed on ever single page of the site. It included thumbnails with small blurbs about specific pages about the site that one may want to just jump to. Repeating this sidebar (arranging it differently on some pages) allowed me to emphasize my keywords by having the sidebar present on each page.

Main Services Page
I setup the main services page as a bullet system (much like a site map), breaking down the categories involved with the services and products. Again, it allows for continued emphasis of my keyword(s) (financial therapy).

I wanted to point people to specific directions of the site by the way the services/products information was laid out. Each main page (i.e. financial consulting, financial therapy) first had an intro page as an overview. Then each page had a linking system (we’ll cover coding tomorrow) to continue the reader to the next page.

Learn More about the Consultation Process ->>

This created a predetermined cycle of how the reader would discover the next batch of information.

All of the pages thereafter pretty much followed the same format. The next area to cover was how all these pages were going to link to one another, and their coding specifics. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post where I’ll post the actual meta tags, and HTML coding from my previous incentivest.com website.

Final Confessions: I stayed up all night trying to finish my videos for my youtube channel…almost done