To be a successful leader, it is important to understand what that entails.  You might assume that reading a book with that title by an eminent author such as Stephen Covey would provide the answer.  However a review of that book by one customer runs as follows:

What an incredible adventure for the mind and the eye.  The pictures enhance the concept of leadership and the concept of leadership enhances the meaning within the pictures.

That enigmatic book perhaps illustrates the difficulty of defining what makes a successful leader.  We all know a successful leader when we see one.  A short definition is someone who others wish to follow and get involved in helping achieve the leader’s goals.

How Reputation Helps

One important aspect of this is spelled out in a keynote speech that Jim Murren, chief executive of MGM Resorts gave at the Southern Gaming Summit.   He emphasized that reputation and integrity are critical to being a successful leader.  In his successful company of 62,000 employees the core values include things like diversity, community and philanthropy.  With such leadership, his company was able to overcome some big obstacles in recent years, including Hurricane Katrina, the national recession and the near bankruptcy of the gigantic City Center Resort in Las Vegas.

Vigilance About That Reputation

It’s not a question of achieving a reputation of successful leadership and then resting on your laurels.  It’s an ongoing process that requires enduring effort.  Even then, there will be occasions where things do not turn out as one would wish.  The unexpected can happen and we are all human. 

Sometimes we may not even be aware of damaging incidents. Unfortunately the Internet has brought incredible visibility to anyone who wishes to use Twitter or Facebook to spread their concerns.  That is where a service such as reputationdefender can be invaluable as a company’s radar screen on any allusions, good or bad, about the company. 

It is often said that bad news travels 10 times as fast as good news and it certainly seems to be true.  The earlier one is able to counter false accusations, the more likely it is that the truth will reign.

Post from: BPWrap

A Good Reputation Is Critical For A Successful Leader

Technorati Tags: covey, leadership, reputation

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This is a guest post by Amelia Wood.

The Atlantic recently made an interesting announcement. Announcing a swerve away from the tried and true models on web writing, the online news association has recently stopped caring about SEO. Instead, the company is focusing on, dare we say it… actual readers, to catapult their articles to viral status, drive links to their site, and increase Google rankings.

This may seem the result of luck. Maybe the paper has such a high status that they no longer need to do SEO behind the scenes to get the articles viewed? Possible. But what’s more probable it that The Atlantic is one of the first to catch on to a trend that has long been brewing. With update after update, Google continues to bat down content mills and SEO-driven companies that focus only on page rank, as opposed to quality. Maybe the time has come where all online publications need to take heed and follow the Atlantic example. Read on for three reasons we should all stop writing for SEO:

1. Social is king

Anyone who follows SEO and Google updates knows that social media interaction is one of the important new factors in Google search rankings. The more “likes” your product gets, the more shares on Facebook, the more re-tweets, what have you, the more your Google ranking will increase. This means something.

Google wants users to have the final say in the content that is relevant to them. So, Google, will protect and promote any indications real people give them about what it is they want to see. If you’re writing content packed with nothing more than keywords and link bait, then you don’t have much of a chance people will read it, let alone share.

2. Google will always win

Never underestimate the most powerful internet company in the world. Google currently runs the web, and what they want goes. If your company isn’t putting out real, quality content, then you will eventually be drowned out by those who do. You may be able to hold your own against Google for a few years, but you will eventually fail unless you begin to give users what they want.

3. It feels better to write and read

This is the least tangible reason to write for your readers, rather than for page ranks, but it is by far the most important. When you create content that has a true purpose, that is an extension of your own opinions or expertise, it just plain feels good. You know you are doing work that has meaning. And, it also feels good to those who read it. Users can spot meaningless content. They are much more likely to pass content on if it holds true value.

Author Bio: Amelia Wood pursues freelance writing projects in the medical billing and coding schools niche. She especially loves hearing back from her readers. Questions or comments can be sent to wood. amelia1612 @ gmail.com.

Credit: Image courtesy of rightsreaders via flickr

Post from: BPWrap

3 Reasons to Stop Writing for SEO

Technorati Tags: Facebook, ranking, SEO

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If you’ve been in the blogging or SEO business for a while, PageRank is likely your preferred metric that you use to test the quality of your sites. Of course, PageRank has been the standard for several years now, and it’s definitely important to do all you can to keep your PageRank number high. At the same time, however, a site that’s ranked high using PageRank can be a very poorly executed site, while a stellar site can still have a low PageRank. Here are a few other metrics you should look at to see how you can improve your site to its full potential:

1. Click through rate

If you don’t already have Google Analytics, or some other analytics tool that can give you more numbers than just PageRank, stop reading this article and sign up for it now. One metric that I think is very important is Click Through Rate (CTR). A low CTR shows you that you need to work on making your entire site more compelling. A high CTR shows that users who come to your site are doing what you want them to do – clicking through several pages on your site or blog and not just viewing your home page before leaving.

2. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is another metric available on Google Analytics and similar tools that gives you an insight into how your users navigate your site. A high bounce rate means that your readers arrive at your site and leave only a few seconds later. A low bounce rate means that users are actually sticking around and checking out all that your site has to offer.

3. Social media influence

Social media is king right now, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Even if you have a high PageRank, this doesn’t mean that people are actively engaging with and sharing your content. There’s no one tool to measure your social media influence on various important networks like Facebook and Twitter, but this list by Pam Dyer should get you started.

• Klout
• TwentyFeet
• PeerIndex
• Empire Avenue
• Sprout Social
• Crowdbooster
• Twylah
• My Web Career
• Appinions

4. Number of comments.

Even if you do have a number of visitors to your site, to achieve an optimum experience, you don’t want them to be passive visitors. You want them to truly engage with your content. And you can tell if they are truly engaged only when they leave substantial and informative comments. If no one is commenting on your blog, see how you can modify your material to make it more interactive. End blog posts with questions like this:

What do you think about PageRank? What are some other metrics we should look at to optimize our sites?

Author Bio: This is a guest post by Eliza Morgan who is a full time blogger. She specializes in writing about business credit cards. You can reach her at: elizamorgan856 at gmail dot com.

Post from: BPWrap

Beyond PageRank: Analytic Metrics that Do More

Technorati Tags: analytics, bounce, click through rate, comments

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And that’s really not so difficult to understand. After all, consumers in this day and age are better informed, and given a wider array of options, than ever before. That even comes to the food they buy, and the farms or food distributors they choose to do business with.

So when it comes time to buy food products, there are more factors to consider than just taste or price. There are countless options available, and plenty of them taste great and cost about the same. Recent studies have found that consumers are starting to distinguish between companies based on which brands are known for going green, or giving back to charity, or whatever else.

So what does a company do if it’s not particularly well – known for its charitable giving? Well, the short answer is to contact a company like Reputation Changer. Reputation management agencies can cultivate the desirable impression about the brand in question. They can make Brand X into the brand of choice among consumers, and leave the competition in the dust.

If a farm wants to be known for its environmental awareness, then, it needs only to reach out to a company like Reputation Changer. Reputation management pros will inundate search engines with content that establishes that farm as green, as socially aware, as responsible, and as a great company to do business with. That level of control over public perception is what any company needs to give it the competitive edge in this digital era.

Post from: BPWrap

Why All Businesses Need Reputation Changer’s Services – Even Farms

Technorati Tags: brand, change, farm, reputation

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At the end of last month, Google released yet another Panda update which, according to Google’s blog, focused on the continuing improvement of systems such as "related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch, and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine."

But while Google is celebrating their advance in search engine capability, business owners and online marketers groan – because Google’s update means more modifications to their sites to keep up with the new Panda algorithm.

It is unlikely Google will cease tinkering with the Panda algorithm. Their business is to make Internet searching easier and more intuitive for users, so as a online business owner or marketer, you should expect more changes in the future.

And though it might seem frustrating to always be scrambling in the wake of each new Panda update, there are measures you can take to anticipate the next set of updates. If you’re tired of always reacting, make the following changes to your site now to minimize the work you have to do later:

1. Take inventory of your backlinks. As you surely know, backlinks are one of the few important kinds of Internet traffic currency. With high-quality backlinks, you can buy your way to the top of Google’s search results; but low-quality backlinks will leave you broke. The name of the game is quality, not necessarily quantity, so always be sure to stay clear of the common but potentially harmful "5,000 backlinks for $5" offers on the web.

The trend has been that Panda punishes shameless backlink manipulation, so focus instead on writing or publishing material that viewers will want to link to on their sites.

2. Gain popularity in social media. It’s no news that Google uses social media trends as benchmarks for search rankings. In fact, Matt Cutts, a Google spokesperson, said last year that Twitter links and Facebook sharing would act as "a ranking factor influencing where sites fall on its results pages."

So establish your presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr — wherever people are congregating and sharing online. Make sure you are most active on the channel that your followers use most often. If they’re on Tumblr more than Facebook, for example, then direct your efforts accordingly. Half an hour a day spent on social media sites, sharing and interacting, is half an hour very well spent.

3. Streamline your website structure. Good design has a twofold purpose: first, it draws viewers in and makes navigating the site easy; second, it actually improves your sites ranking in search results. And while design is largely a question of aesthetics, it is also a question of functionality. Your site design should be "shallow," meaning that every page should be accessible in three clicks or less. Designing your site with this design functionality in mind will optimize your site for a search engine crawl.

4. Don’t rely on Google alone. It is important to optimize your site for Google’s algorithms, but if you don’t take into account other important factors, your site’s ranking will be drastically affected every time Google releases a Panda update.

The best approach is to divide your SEO efforts across several different channels. Use Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, backlinks, add sharing buttons on your site — in other words, diversify.

5. Keep producing great content. It is impossible to know every single factor that Google takes into consideration when updating Panda for search engine ranking rules, but, as the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors survey reported, the "analysis of a site’s perceived value to users" consistently is the most important factor.

Your content is what most directly influences your site’s perceived value, so make your content valuable, informative, funny, important to your readers.

All this said, it never hurts to stay current on Google’s update plans, which you can read on their blog. Taking a preparatory stance keeps you from having to always react to Google’s updates and will keep driving traffic to your site no matter how the algorithms change.

Author Bio: This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of online courses.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7@gmail.com.

Post from: BPWrap

Beating Panda Updates – An Internet Marketing Guide

Technorati Tags: algorithm, backlink, Panda

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You can of course do regular searches using Google, Twitter Search and any other search engines that take your fancy.  However none are perfect and you may be looking for the wrong keywords.  That’s why it can be useful to use a service like reputation.com that will work to ensure that customers only see the truth about your business.  This is done by eliminating negative material from your top search results.

As reputation.com points out you should know what’s being said about your business.

Anyone can post rumors and fake reviews online, any time — including competitors. And the longer negative material is on the Internet, the more damage it does — a recent study found that one bad online review can cut about 9% in revenues.

Clearly the best way is to work hard to make sure that customers are satisfied and if irritations occur that these are dealt with promptly.  The Vancouver Sun blog had a useful checklist on this:

1. Digital arguments with customers are exponentially disastrous — bite your tongue.
2. Respond to online complaints directly and privately if possible.
3. Respond fast.
4. Keep complaints off social media — give customers every opportunity to complain to you directly.

You would think that is all good common business sense but it’s surprising how few companies seem to be oblivious and uncaring about the reputation they have out in the market-place.

Post from: BPWrap

Your Business Online Reputation Is Worth Protecting

Technorati Tags: Facebook, reputation, Twitter

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The two blogs are for sale by auction at flippa.com. Assistance on these auctions is being given by a current Cre8asite Forums Moderator, Donna Fontenot, who is an ebusiness coach.

Click on either of the two panels to the right to go directly to the relevant auction page for an example of what an auction listing looks like.

We Are Not Talking About Flipping Websites

Putting both buying and selling in the title might immediately bring to mind the process of flipping websites.  That is usually a rapid process involving the following three steps:

• purchase of a website at a price below its value or potential value
• make improvements to the website usually to increase revenues
• market the website to obtain a good price

The majority of websites sold via auctions such as flippa.com are involved in this flipping process.  A good resource if that is your intent is Website Flipping 101: The 15 Principles to Buying, Selling, and Flipping Websites.  This is a website maintained by Chris Yates and his business partner, David Gass.  Many run profitable online businesses by flipping websites but that is not the topic we are covering.  The acquisition that Rand Fishkin is talking about has much bigger potential than the typical ‘flipped’ website.

Buying A Community

Rand Fishkin in his article explained what he had in mind as follows:

When you buy a blog or any form of online community, you’re not simply acquiring links, you’re getting:

• An engine for brand building and indirect customer acquisition
• An ongoing methodology to pull in links, tweets, shares, +1s, likes, etc.
• Brand evangelists who will help expand your reach and credibility
• A PR opportunity like few others, even in fields where PR is hard to come by (acquisitions are talked-about, blogged-about, and make the news, even those of relatively small blogs)
• Content that’s already been proven to attract an audience
• All the organic signals that search engines love to see – from links to social to usage to content to branding

In many ways it resembles what Andrew Knibbe, Marketing Manager at Flippa, had set out in a guest post at Problogger on Buying and Selling Blogs with Strong Personal Brands.

The things that make ProBlogger what it is remain here, even if Darren’s time and presence on the blog has decreased from what it was when he started all those years ago. There’s a large and loyal community, a strong brand, an enormous, high-quality content inventory, and  a raft of happy advertisers, affiliates, and so on. So if ProBlogger was for sale, you can see that it would have a lot to offer a potential buyer.

In summary, the kind of blog that Rand Fishkin had in mind is much more than a collection of articles.  Through its history such a blog has built up a community of stakeholders who interact with the blog in a variety of ways.  It can even include guest bloggers who are associated with the blog and most certainly includes its loyal readers.  We believe that the two SMM blogs now being sold, StayGoLinks and Senior Money Memos, have earned that position in their respective fields.

Post from: BPWrap

Buying and Selling Blogs

Technorati Tags: auction, buying, flippa, selling

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Most bloggers have come to the realization that high quality content is the best blog marketing strategy. You might come across some newbie blogs that resort to gimmicks to boost their SEO ranking, but ironically those blogs have low visibility because their tactics are so transparent.

What tactics am I talking about? There are a handful of them, but the most regular (and the most annoying) offender is the overuse of keywords in an article to get more links.

Consider the following paragraph, which tries to maximize the keyword "basket weaving":

The art of basket weaving goes back many centuries, to the time when basket weaving was the primary source of commerce. Travelers would come to basket weaving towns to purchase baskets from the indigenous basket weaving people.

Wow — four times in two sentences. If you were aiming for sheer frequency, you’d be churning out keywords at an impressive rate of two keywords per sentence.

But it shouldn’t be news to any blogger that you aren’t shooting for keyword frequency. Keyword usage is an important part of any SEO strategy, but it should complement rather than define that strategy. So the question is: where do you draw the line? How should we be using keywords?

Here are some answers.

1. With punctuation.

When using keywords, the goal is always to use them as naturally as possible. Remember the above example — it was pretty obvious that I was trying to saturate the paragraph with the "basket weaving" keyword phrase, and the content suffered for it.

The basket weaving example, however, was a bit reductive and doesn’t really represent the kind of keywords bloggers are trying to use. What is more typical is keyword phrases, like "SEO blogging for money," which has the potential to render content totally meaningless if used as one phrase in a paragraph.

Instead of sabotaging the content, use punctuation to separate the phrase if possible. Punctuation doesn’t alter the way search engines recognize phrases, so if you can work a complete phrase into your writing with a period, comma, or colon, give it a shot.

"Nothing works to improve your ranking quite like SEO. Blogging for money isn’t easy, and doesn’t happen overnight, but optimizing your site will help bring in cash a little more steadily."

2. With longer phrases.

A short phrase is usually easy to incorporate into your article, but it is very difficult to use a short phrase several times without sounding dull and repetitive. One possible solution to this is to make your keyword phrase longer. Adding words to the keyword phrase makes the repetition of phrases less obvious and makes more content more readable.

If your phrase is "SEO blog," you could expand the phrase to:

· SEO blog tricks

· SEO blog mistakes

· SEO blog advice

Even when using this technique, however, you still don’t want to spam keywords. Repetition is repetition.

The techniques here aren’t necessarily ground-breaking, but even seasoned bloggers should revisit their use of keywords to see if their approach could be improved. Just remember: act natural.

Author Bio:

Jane Smith writes for background check. She is a Houston based freelance writer and blogger. Questions and comments can be sent to: janesmth161@gmail.com

Post from: BPWrap

Keyword Abuse is a Crime — Just Say No

Technorati Tags: abuse, keyword, long tail

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Topics can sometimes grow organically as you write about them and do a little research.  The topic here was to throw out a challenge to develop the best 125px x 125px ad since I had developed one today that I thought was pretty good.  I still would be interested to hear whether you can do better than the ad on the right here.  However there’s more to all this than meets the eye.

The History Of 125 X 125 Pixels Ads

I always like to do a little research to flesh out any blog post.  It appears that the 125 X 125 Pixels Ad was invented by Nik Cubrilovic of TechCrunch probably in 2006.  That comes from a very recent blog post of Michael Arrington,  founder of TechCrunch, who should be an authoritative source.  Hat tip to Todd Garland for that.

That ad format was a real winner as you can see in a 2007 blog post that Darren Rowse wrote:

Over the past 6 to 12 months the 125 x 125 pixel advertisement has emerged onto the blogging scene as a fairly common means of advertising.  I don’t know who did it first – but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs using it. Some of the more prominent ones include TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, CopyBlogger and John Chow – but there are many hundreds others. In fact over at b5media we have them on all of our 250+ blogs.

The ad format is so versatile that it is not surprising to see the explosive growth that has occurred since then.  It provides a reasonable amount of visibility for a more economic price than larger display ads.

What A 125Px X 125Px Should Do For You

The ad may be economic but the challenge is how best to use such a small space. It is interesting to consider that question in terms of that simple marketing view of how sales occur.  You may have heard the acronym, AIDA.  That stands for:

  Awareness >> Interest >>  Desire  >> Action.

Prospective customers must be moved through these different phases as they change from ignorance of the product through to making the purchase.

The 125 x 125 pixels ad has a link attached so the action is clear.  How far up the AIDA scale can that small parcel of screen real estate move the visitor?  If done well, as the visitor clicks through to another web page, ideally there is a desire to buy.  Does your 125 x 125 pixels ad achieve that?

Post from: BPWrap

125 x 125 Pixels Ad Challenge

Technorati Tags: 125 pixels, 125px, ad, TechCrunch

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The Google Quality Guidelines Violation

The penalty for violating Quality Guidelines occurred when Google hired two top marketing agencies to promote the Chrome web browser using video content. 

Google reportedly bought online video ads from a digital media agency called Essence Digital. Essence then reportedly hired another company called Unruly to carry out Google’s video ad campaign. The end result was that a number of blogs wrote positive posts (with the video embedded) about Google Chrome for compensation – the reward was apparently Amazon gift cards.

These blog posts were of inferior quality, said little about Google Chrome but did include links back to Chrome web pages.. Google then issued a statement that addressed the issue:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

The Google Wrist-Slapping

Google has now slapped its own wrist over this Chrome pay-for-blogging flap. It is downgrading the search result ranking of the company’s own Web browser, Google Chrome, for 60 days.  The punishment imposed on Chrome will significantly lower the results ranking of the main download page for the browser.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side will need to  submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

The Irony of this Google Wrist-Slapping

Ignoring any Google internal politics that may be involved here, there is a certain irony in the events here.  This involves the following steps:

1. Google builds a search engine based on an algorithm that puts weight on the number of back links to web pages
2. The Online world reacts to this as everyone tries to create massive numbers of back links to their web pages sometimes by paying
3. Google attempts to stop this tsunami of back links by adopting quality guide lines to ‘outlaw’ paid links
4. Google inadvertently violates its own quality guidelines as many others innocently do
5. Google penalizes itself to set an example

Google is behaving like King Canute here and its action will have no long term effect.  Better by far than taking step 5 when step 4 occurred, would be to rethink step 1 when step 2 occurred.  Google continues to promote the PageRank concept as if it has marketing effectiveness.  Most knowledgeable observers of this scene suggest it should be buried.  That would be the way to avoid embarrassing wrist-slapping incidents like this.

Post from: BPWrap

The Irony Of Google Slapping Its Own Wrist Over Chrome Paid Links

Technorati Tags: browser, Chrome, download, PageRank, penalty, quality guidelines

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