Had a busy day today, started at 7 am with a networking breakfast, and that was followed by another quick meeting and then a consulting session with some clients (a team of three).

I’m a bit tuckered out, but today really drove home the point for me that although you can never reach as many people in person as you can with online tools, person-to-person contact (especially in business, obv.) is still number one. After a long day of shaking hands, meeting new people and making presentations, I feel like it was all time well spent. (I hope my colleagues feel the same way about the time they spent with me!)

I’ve met some exciting new clients these past few weeks, and I’ll be rolling out the result of some of our recent work soon, so watch for that.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a thought: The reason why I felt today was so productive and fun was that I made so many connections with the people I want to do business with. The same principles apply to online networking and marketing tactics, except that the technology makes it possible to make more of those connections.

And speaking of online networking tools: I’ve just done a re-jig to my MySpace page, (thanks to some code from Rob) and it’s looking more and more like my main site all the time.  Had to change my headline on there too, because as Mack points out, MySpace now has over 100 million users.

Namely, because their name is mentioned in it. But I use that simply as an example, to point out the importance of keywords and headlines when it comes to ranking at the top of the search engines.

Please, don’t get me wrong: Value to your site visitors and potential customers in your content is number one. But they will never be exposed to that value if you do not make some attempt at positioning yourself in the search engines. What this means is that you have to take a bit of extra time to be sure that your headlines, topic, and content all jive with your keywords, and the overall message of your writing. This is true of your site content, and it is true of your blog posts as well.

It’s a bit more work, and some would argue that this advice infringes on the natural creative process. Alas, you are not alone in this quest to publish both for your readers and for the various search engine “spiders” that crawl through your data and give you a ranking based on the now most homogeneous word in the English language, “relevance.” The evolving meaning of that term is a topic for another day, but the short version is that Google ranks sites based on several criteria with an algorithm that is top secret, ever changing, and very difficult to outsmart without cheating, which will subsequently get you unlisted.
Imagine for a second: The grey, old, daily newspaper reporter, who is charged with the task of composing the perfect headline in each piece he writes. He used to have just one criteria: “What will make people want to keep reading?” Now, he too has to consider whether the headline matches the story, and whether he words in said headline are likely to find their way to the top of the search engines. It’s not impossible, it just takes a bit more effort, and adding a dash of science to your already delicious recipe of creativity.

Now imagine the progressive blogger who crafts each post with such precision as to have it attached to the popular tags of the day, and hopes that each of her posts will be “dugg,” on digg, resulting in a landslide of traffic and popularity for her site.

If you’re just starting out, you don’t need to have that kind of diligence, or even have to understand everything I just said in that sentence. (If you did understand all of that, then you should know that to my knowledge , I have never been “dugg,” and this is the first post EVER where I included Technorati tags) I too am learning as I go, and having a lot of fun in the process.

Blog on, friends. Blog on.

Taggy, taggy bo-baggy: SEO, digg, content, blogging

I’m busy, but that is no excuse. I find myself reminding my clients that they should post as often as they can find the time, and yet lately I haven’t been the best example of that myself (a goal that I set from the beginning).

So I’m publicly vowing to post more often, even when I just have a random thought or observation that I think is worth sharing with the world. Some of my favorite blogs don’t stay “on topic” at all, so if you’re a regular reader, you might get more of “me” interspersed with my morsels of marketing and PR advice.

But the marketing wisdom will keep coming, too. I recently had an offline conversation with a certain author and web content expert, and it reminded me of how exciting all of this change and conversation and community-mindedness can get. And I want to keep my finger on the pulse of all of that action. Not because I feel obligated, but because I love it.

By the way, if you want to experience the process of authoring a book from the “blog up,” check out David’s post about his new book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” This is obviously a topic that is very relevant to me, and I for one will be watching, commenting and taking notes throughout the process. It seems that this is the future of publishing; establishing an audience early, and develop the book through a series of blog posts and of course the comments and suggestions of others. It will only be a matter of time before it catches on outside of the “tech” sector.
Hope you’re having a great summer!