Four Prerequisites to Content and Search Optimization: D.I.C.E.
January 31, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
In my previous post I described the major content optimization work that I’d recently done on my web and landing pages, using a concept map as a guide.
Before moving on, I wanted to answer the question: what content is worth optimizing? I came up with D.I.C.E.:
Distinctive – Content that supports a marketing strategy that positions for uniqueness in the industry and differentiation from the competition.
Integral – Content that evolves and increases in value through links, core elements, overlapping themes and descriptions, and a shared purpose.
Credible – Content that backs up, supports and is aligned with the desired, and implicitly promised, user experience.
Educational – Content that reflects a generosity of spirit and authentic desire to share learning.
It helped to make a mindmap first. 
(click the graphic to enlarge)
Interestingly, a friend commented today that she saw me moving away from my coaching and soft skills work, and more into strategy and technical, with all this “optimization stuff”. I responded that clients will need a great of deal of facilitation, coaching, project alignment, talent recruitment and leadership support when they undertake large scale content and search optimization initiatives; its a natural fit with my differentiation strategy. Its also a good example of how professional services firms can evolve and be poised and ready to catch the next wave of unmet client needs resulting from rapid change.
Technorati Tags:
content, marketing , optimization, SEO/SEM, solo professional service firm
Optimize your content in the dead of winter
January 31, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
So this is a good example of how things evolve for a solopreneur. A few weeks ago, in response to some inquiries I had about the complexity of a generalist’s web site architecture, I wrote a blog and included a concept diagram using my web sites as an example. Note: I’m a firm believer in never waiting for a client to test a new idea; I always use myself and RedShift as a case study.
Around that time I was trying to get a handle on SEO/SEM, not so much because I planned to delve into it in a big way, I just have that kind of “need to know” personality, and I like to learn fast, in an experiential way. So, by extending the web architecture map, I was able to quickly get a good “view” of how my collection of online content could be optimized for SEO/SEM, both natural search and paid advertising. Coincidentally, I was contacted to do a paid (confidential) interview on SEO/SEM strategy. I pay attention to these kinds of synchronicities. As solo’s, we often have little else to help us sense we’re on the right track.
Well here I am three weeks later, having invested a great deal of time and effort, and happy with the results so far. I’d describe what I’ve accomplished, as critical “prerequisites” to the actual mechanics of SEO/SEM. And there’s an inherent paradox to these prerequisites and optimization: the more content you have the worse it is and the more content you have the better it is. I’m a generalist offering a range of programs and services, so I have a quite a bit of content. So it was a big job. But without depth of content, the opportunities for SEO/SEM are limited or non-existent. My #1 recommendation: content is king, create often, think iteration, not perfection.
The following broadly summarize my experience completing the prerequisites, although there was a lot of additional detail work.
1. Plenty of my content had to be written, re-written, cleaned up, tightened up and re-organized. There’s no shortcut; its just a lot of hard writing work.
2. My landing pages were not good, heinous actually, and what I expected them to do (i.e. conversion goals) was pretty ridiculous. They needed major re-work and re-thinking, but the writing was not so difficult and the concept diagrams provided a good guide.
3. Links matter, and I tripled mine by better linking all my web content assets together.
4. As the optimization work progressed, things that did not integrate tended to jump out. Some needed to be trashed, some needed to be re-grouped, some need to be re-placed. This was fairly major, affecting the programs and services that I offer. They were weaknesses that I knew existed but had pretty much ignored. I think making the changes was easier as part of the optimization prerequisites process.
So a colleague was shocked when I told him that I’d still not determined that small professional service providers with optimized content could get to the top of search rankings, or if paid search ads even made sense for solo psf’s. But you want to have the option because the potential for a more even playing field is still an unknown. An even more important, although unexpected result, is a body of content that’s now aligned with my business purpose and business model. And even better than that, I have new content, frameworks and programs to offer, based on what I’ve learned and the experience I’ve gained.
Technorati Tags:
marketing , solo professional service firm, optimization, SEO/SEM, content
Are you a star or an actor?
January 31, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
As solo psf’s, when we get caught up in the race to market ourselves and get ahead, we can sometimes lose sight of: “what business am I in?”.
I thought of this when reading the obituary of actress Suzanne Pleshette, who was a favorite, and even a role model of mine. She always stood out to me as down to earth, authentic, intelligent, sophisticated, witty, beautiful, ageless and a bit of a rebel. She knew who she was and the business she was in.
Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss wrote Sunday that she never achieved quite the stardom she deserved because she came along after Hollywood stopped making movies for the types of sophisticated female characters that she was born to play.
“I prefer to think of her as one of those stars who got away _ away from stardom, when the old dream factory forgot how to manufacture domestic glamour,” he wrote. “She had the goods, but at the wrong time.”
But to Pleshette, being a working actress with a long career was more important than being a star.
“I’m an actress, and that’s why I’m still here,” she said in a 1999 interview. “Anybody who has the illusion that you can have a career as long as I have and be a star is kidding themselves.”
A lot of the advice we seek out and accept as gospel, comes from high-visibility experts: popular bloggers, authors, academics etc. They’re the stars, and sometimes when we think of what success looks like, well, it looks like what the stars have: huge traffic to their sites, keynote speaking opportunities, darlings of the publishers and the press, sought out by the Fortune 50 clients. Its not a bad thing; who wouldn’t want that for themselves and their business?
The point is to not lose sight of what you do have right in front of you: unlimited opportunities to develop your practice by helping people and by affecting positive change; and doing so through your outstanding professional services that you provide to one client at a time. If you don’t have a client, do it anyway; use yourself as a case study. Its about being the great actor with the long career; if stardom follows, it will be icing on the cake.
Technorati Tags:
marketing , solo professional service firm
SEO/SEM for the independent professional service provider
January 14, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Search engine optimization is an area I’m finally getting to. I think like any other “latest big thing”, its difficult to wade through the hype and the thousands of people who profess expertise with little to back it up, except what sounds to me like, hype regurgitation or a strategy to “beat the system”.
But I do have a gut sense that the time has come, and for a professional service provider, “what you don’t know you don’t know”, could bite you in terms of cost of doing it wrong, or cost of not doing it at all. I’m still in early experimental stage (Google AdWords only) and very much a neophyte, but I’ve learned quite a bit.
Since I’ll do just about anything to avoid wordy reports or spreadsheets, I’ve attempted to diagram a high-level evaluation and decision-making framework for SEO. I used my business, RedShift as the case study and found it useful to extend the web architecture diagram that I included in a previous post.
(click to enlarge)
So now that I can “see” the steps and choices, the big question is: how to increase the probability of success of an SEO or AdWords campaign? Maybe even before that, the right question is: Does this make sense?
I’m not sure it makes sense for every professional services provider, but there is opportunity to reach more prospects and learn a great deal with a small investment.
Technorati Tags:
generalist, marketing , solo professional service firm, slash career, SEO
Niche philosophy and slash career
January 12, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I had lunch with an old friend last week who for decades has been both a successful therapist and abstract painter. He’s one of my few lifelong entrepreneurial friends with “little to none” technical or new media experience or interest, although he does have a web site for each business. In fact, I’ve often joked with my brilliant and talented friend that he’s the only Neo-Luddite I know who always gives me great insight and ideas about building a professional practice; advice that has nothing to do with the Web or technology.
So I was surprised when he told me that he knew he had a problem because in the last month he’s received no new calls from people who found him on the Web. He told me that until recently, he not only has consistently gotten inquiries but has had a number of people travel from the west for his services. When the calls recently stopped, he checked Google for his name and certain keywords, and saw that he did not come up at all until the second page. He previously came up on the top of page one. It was a big “aha” for him. It was a bucket of cold water for me, seeing how ahead of me he was, however unwittingly, in terms of getting business from SEO. More on that in my next post.
Later, my conversation with my friend made me think again about niche marketing principles, generalists and the recent buzz about “slash careers”, which I think is a cool idea, but interpreted so widely that it adds to the confusion about “to niche or not to niche”. But I do feel strongly that the convergences and intersections in our increasingly multi-dimensional lives, are big factors in how we design our service models and how we design and develop our personal/professional brands. Unlike some of the bloggers and authors on the this subject, I don’t think any model is more right, wrong, better or worse than any other. They’re just different, and a good starting point to think about what an integral, unique solo practice looks like.
I see myself as a generalist with a number of programs that share some core elements, for a number of different markets. My work draws upon my personal activities (like rowing, and being around kids as much as possible) but I don’t make money from my outside interests.
I see my therapist/artist friend as an example of a true slash career (and potential global microbrand). Both careers are businesses with separate markets. They draw upon and benefit each other, through him.
One of the authors, using herself as an example, describes her slash career as author/journalist/speaker/blogger/columinist. I see that differently from my friend – its words, largely the same topic and for the same large audience. I don’t have a name for it but it looks more like this to me – concentric.
Other career-coach bloggers, when posting about the dangers of slash careers, lump in, for example, plumber/fisherman. But that feels more like career/hobby. But its a fine line, and like most career advice in the conceptual economy, there’s no one clear-cut answer. So I suggest play with it and bring in the right brain by drawing it. You may be planting the seeds for your global microbrand.
Technorati Tags:
generalist, marketing , slash career
Web diagram example for the multi-dimensional independent professional service firm
January 9, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I posted in November about the upside of not having a niche strategy. Since then I’ve come across related blog posts, including this post about the dangers of a “slash” career (ex. screenwriter/lawyer). I continue to find the “pro-niche” arguments passe’. But I do get questions about “is it harder, more time consuming and more expensive” to manage a more complex business?
Not for me. I own 7 domains, offer 10 professional service programs, write a blog and belong to 2 social networks. I track it all through Google Analytics. All hosting, domain and blog services total less than $300/year (estimate). I’ve just started to experiment with Adwords and I’m not sure of the annual budget..approx $500 is a guess. The only other additional cost I can think of is multiple business cards. Big deal.
Yeah, its more work to write descriptions of multiple offerings vs just one. But I think the diversification upside and the ability to grow and even split off programs, is worth the extra initial work. It will be easy to upgrade and re-design if, or when, I’m ready for that. The content creation experience is invaluable.
There’s many, possibly much better, ways to set up a global micro-branded professional service firm online system. I want to share mine so that other solo’s will have a real-world example of one designed, developed and maintained by a non-tech, self-taught independent on a small budget.
click to enlarge
So my advice: don’t think small, do as much as you can yourself, don’t think it has to be perfect, don’t wait!
Technorati Tags:
generalist, solo professional service firm, global microbrand
RedShift eBook – The Seven Virtues of Change Leadership
January 2, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
How Executives Will Fill the Leadership Chasm and Transform Their Organizations
This is my first eBook and a labor of love created during the dead of winter 2008. My goal is simply to create a spark in people who are leading change initiatives, perhaps for the first time.
You can either download the pdf version or view the single page web version.
Download pdf file (1.1 mb)
Web version (no download)
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