Visual storytelling is an effective way to cut through the clutter of information overload online. Here are some tips on how to effectively incorporate these visual elements into your next marketing campaign:

1.  Tell Stories Through Infographics

An infographic is an effective way to communicate information in a memorable and easily shared format. As Social Media Chimps notes, “most people will decide to leave a website or continue exploring it in the first 2-4 seconds of seeing the page. With very little time to convince people to stick around, infographics and visualizations are a more effective way to literally catch peoples’ eye.”

Infographics jump off the page on Pinterest and Facebook, and they’re irresistible to share if the information is timely and easy to understand.

2.  Share Story-Based Images on Your Facebook Timeline

Your company’s Facebook timeline is ideal for creating a visual-driven story about your brand or employees that users can easily scroll through. By focusing on telling stories through images or videos, you can create content that is both effective at sharing your message and easy for users to share on their own timelines.

Lauren Sorenson of the marketing firm HubSpot offers an example of how to effectively tell image-based stories on Facebook: “There are brands like Starbucks who aren’t just telling you what their employees are doing on a daily basis — they show what is going on behind the scenes with real employees and customers. This creates a human connection that helps translate the brand experience, and promote brand loyalty between companies and consumers that can’t be achieved through words alone.”

3.  Encourage Mobile Engagement through Instagram

Customers and marketers don’t need to be in front of a computer in order to interact with your brand. By using Instagram, a photo sharing app for iPhones, you can either share your story visually on the fly or ask customers to upload their own images of your product in action. With 15 million users, Instagram is close to overtaking Foursquare, and their iPhone app is extremely popular. As John Jantsch advises in his blog post titled How to Use Instagram to Tell and Sell your Marketing Story, “Think about the artsy ways you could showcase your work, your staff or your customers with this tool.”

4.  Reach Business Clients Through SlideShare

Every presentation is better if you include visual aids that help illustrate your points and make your message memorable. Some presenters may not want to spent quite so much time on their presentations since they may only be able to use them once, but with SlideShare it’s possible to turn your old slide shows into lead generation tools.

Magdalena Georgieva of HubSpot wrote at Problogger that “Slideshare is… a great tool for B2B companies, for which presentations have remained a powerful form of social media. In 2011, HubSpot’s presentations hosted on SlideShare accumulated more than three million views and thousands of downloads and social media shares.”

5.  Design with Mobile Devices and Tablets in Mind

As website users access more content on mobile phones and tablets that have smaller screens, too much text can become a liability. The user experience is more visually based and must also provide various browsing experiences that adapt websites to each screen size.

In addition, websites can also incorporate more interactive elements that make it possible for each user to customize the viewing experience for each visitor. As Chuck Longanecker wrote at Mashable, “We’re seeing more interactive buttons, sliding and fading visual elements, parallax experiences on scrolling sites, and even elements of augmented reality.”

6.  Use Pinterest to Drive Sales at Your Website

Pinterest isn’t just about sharing images with friends. Pinterest is a powerful referral and link-building tool that can drive a lot of traffic to your website. Marketing website This Moment notes, “Each ‘pin’ is actually a link to an external website. By pinning content that captures consumers’ attention, brands can drive traffic to their websites. Interested users simply have to click through to visit the brand’s website.”

Pinterest is especially suited for holding contests among users in order to generate more interest about your products. Pamela Vaughn of HubSpot suggests, “Hold a contest that asks users to create a pinboard on their own account to demonstrate what they love about your brand, products, or services… Ask them to send you a link to their pinboard so you can evaluate entrants, and the coolest board wins a prize! Even better — you can also re-pin the top boards to your own Pinterest page and ask followers to vote on the boards to select the winner.”

Tools such as Pinterest and Facebook make the visual elements of website design critical for brands that want to stand out and effectively tell their stories with customers. Solid design is essential for both communicating and receiving more shares on social media sites. With the growth of visual design in marketing, brands now have a wider selection of tools for available for quickly and effectively connecting with their customers.

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In a world gone digital, with resources such as Marketing Automation tools, Email Service Providers, services offering pre-designed and programmed landing pages, the customer feedback survey is easier than ever to deploy.

Recently, I received this email requesting feedback on a company’s Customer  Service. A great example of how to connect with customers.

 The email was…

• Clear in its Purpose: The subject line indicates that the email is in reference to feedback around an interaction I had just had with the company.
• Human: Using phrases like, “We’d love to know how we did!”
• Timely: I had contacted their customer service department two days prior.
• Clear in its Call to Action: “Plase click the link below to take our brief survey.”

Above all else, it was simple. The email was not over designed,  nor demanding in its request for feedback. A great example of how easy it can be to connect with our customers.

But then, the effort fell flat.

Don’t Make Your Customers Squint and Pinch.

Opening the email from my mobile, as about 100 million other smartphone users in the US typically do, the landing page was disappointing.

Just take a look:

The page was impossible to read, and require a lot of squinting, pinching, and scrolling. You can clearly see how small the text is if you compare it to the size of the items in my phone’s “header” info and the title of the email.  Not a good customer experience. And, had I not been waiting for my morning coffee, I probably would not have taken the time to respond.

How to Avoid the Squint and Pinch

Squinting and pinching is not something you want to force your customers to do (even if they do still mark “yes” as their response to your question about satisfaction).

So what’s a marketer to do? Create a landing page, optimized for mobile, for your feedback survey.

Optimizing for mobile is as simple as…

1. Creating a custom landing page for your feedback survey.
2. Using a single column design with short and straightforward text.
3. Including a call to action button that passes “The Thumb Test” (i.e., it’s big enough for a thumb to easily click – about 44×44 Pixels according to Apple’s iPhone Human Interface Guidelines )

Finally, use an Emulator Tool to see how your design might look on mobile. Here is a good example of such a tool: http://www.testiphone.com/

And that’s it! Now it it is just a matter of collecting feedback and communicating how much all of your customers love you.

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1.  The Best and Worst Times to Share on Facebook, Twitter — Samantha Murphy blogs at Mashable about the good and bad times of the day to announce content on social media properties Twitter and Facebook.

2.  Manage multiple locations more easily with a new tool for Google Places – Managing your Google Places page can be challenging enough, without adding the complexity of a business with multiple locations. Google made it a bit easier this week with their announcement of a bulk listing management tool. A training video makes it easy to learn how to use the tool.

3.  Can There Really Be 85 Types Of Unnatural Links? — Eric Ward has long been involved with links and link building, and his latest column at Search Engine Land showcases his knowledge and experience on the subject, in light of the Penguin update.

4.  LinkedIn for Business: Optimizing Your Company Profile – Part 2 – Jessica Lee at BruceClay.com continues her series on using LinkedIn for business, with tips and step-by-steps.

5.  20 Simple Ways to Boost Blog Subscribers — Pamela Vaughan at HubSpot has another great piece on boosting subscriber numbers at your blog. Nothing new or earth-shattering here, but having top advice collected together in one spot is always a hit!

and a bonus number 6 …

6.  10 Dangerous Defaults in PPC — Elizabeth Marsten at Portent comes up with a post identifying 10 PPC-related default settings in search engine PPC programs that can be easy to ignore or not completely understand. The consequence? Lost ad spend, bad ROI, poor conversions, and any number of other catastrophes. Especially useful for those just venturing into PPC for the first time, but worth a glance from anyone already running campaigns.

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I’m sure you’ve seen top 10 lists in your blog and content strategy for some time. But why not go one step further and visualize this? List infographics might be less data-heavy than traditional infographics, but they still generate quite a bit of interest in their own right.

This infographic below shows how to brain hack the seven deadly sins:

From: Become Career

Have you come across any impressive list format infographics? Let us know in the comments.

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Sometimes these opportunities just fall in your lap.  For our client, it was a great way to build brand awareness and some serious credibility.  For us, as their SEO consultants, it was an opportunity to obtain some of the highest-quality links there are, links that would have been near-impossible to get otherwise.

With only a two-day lead-time, we had to quickly formulate a plan on how we’d take full advantage of this from an SEO perspective.  We knew that there would be a lot of news coverage and expected that the various news agencies would mention our client.  We wanted to take full advantage of this opportunity, but we also had to be sensitive to the needs of the campaign team and our client.  What followed turned out to be a very exciting few days of SEO.

The Chosen Ones

Exhibit Edge designs and fabricates custom, high-end trade show displays in the Northern Virginia Area.  They also happen to be exactly what the Romney campaign was looking for last week when selecting an event location: a woman-owned, small business in Virginia with enough open space to accommodate a crowd.  Romney hasn’t been polling particularly well with women, so the campaign decided it made sense to combine his strength on business with the woman-owned business community in swing states to help improve his position.

No Time to Plan: A Quick SEO Strategy

There was almost no time to plan for the event, so we had to act really quickly once the news came that our client was indeed hosting.  Our initial ideas on how to capitalize on this were to:

1. Write a blog post welcoming people who would be in attendance and provide information on how to find the location, parking, where to grab lunch afterwards, etc.  We thought that this would have a high probability of gaining some links.
2. Offer up interviews with Exhibit Edge staff post-event.
3. Reach out to anyone writing about the event and ask them to make their ‘Exhibit Edge’ reference a link to the website.

We were confident that ideas #1 and #2 would be great ways to get a number of links from high-quality sources.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to execute these strategies.

Number 1 was ruled out because the Romney campaign wanted to keep word of the event fairly low-key so that just loyal supporters would show up.  Making it very easy to attend by posting directions and parking details on the Exhibit Edge blog would run the risk of making it a bigger event than either the campaign wanted or the location could support.

Number 2 on our list was also ruled out because our client did not feel comfortable conducting interviews after the event.  A few years ago they were interviewed on TV, and their thoughts were misrepresented through clever editing of their words, so they just wanted to avoid that altogether, lest they risk damaging their business.

With our first two ideas ruled out as options for link building, we focused on Number 3 on our list, reaching out to everyone who was writing about the event that wasn’t already linking to our client’s website when they referenced the business name.

The Results and Lessons Learned

The coverage of the event was impressive.  The speech was streamed live on CNN and other news outlet websites, and many local and national papers published stories on it.

We created Google Alerts to catch anything that mentioned “Mitt Romney” and “Exhibit Edge” together, but we quickly found that Alerts just didn’t work fast enough.  What worked the best was performing that same search in Google every 10-15 minutes, since the freshest stories would appear in the results.

We found that writers were much more willing to update their story with the link to Exhibit Edge if you caught them just after the story was published.  At that point ‘Exhibit Edge’ was still a brand present in their mind, and it seemed easier for them to just go in and create the link.

Below is the actual email template we used when we reached out (we modified it slightly for each pitch, and modified it further for ‘post-event’ requests):

You’ll notice that we didn’t come out of the gate asking for a link right away, we first asked if he wanted more information or an interview.  Although our client didn’t want to do live interviews, they did say they’d exchange emails with reporters.  After we softened up our link target, we then hit them with the request for the link.

We also tweeted to reporters that didn’t have an easy-to-find email address.  It was pretty simple actually; here is one of the tweets and his response:

 The end results were great.  We obtained the strongest links that this client has ever received.  Some of the bigger sites that updated their articles with a link include:

• WashingtonPost.com (PR8)
• Slate.com (PR8 – link publish is still pending)
• PilotOnline.com (PR7)
• 3 Local Patch.com sites  (PR7)
• 4president.org (PR5)

If we could have implemented some of the other strategies from our quick brainstorm, we probably would have received even more links.  But, all-in-all, these links are great and add some serious domain authority to ExhibitEdge.com.

What Else Could We Have Done?

Before I get to what else we could have done, one thing that I see now as I reflect upon this, is that a lot of companies might have received very little SEO benefit out of such a large event.  You see, most of the links that Exhibit Edge obtained through this were at our request.  Most news sites and articles didn’t link to Exhibit Edge on their own.  If we weren’t on top of this, they would have only received 1-2 links naturally – ouch!

Looking back on some emails we received, another idea would have been for us to have our own professional photographer there who would have taken pictures and then provided them for free to various news outlets and blogs in exchange for a link.

Several websites asked for original pictures, and while we had some, it would have been better to have a more professional offering for them.

There are probably a lot of other opportunities that were overlooked simply because of the quick turnaround required and the lack of time to prepare properly for the situation.

With that said, given the restraints of the situation, what would you have done to earn more links?  Are there any other thoughts or ideas on how to replicate this success, without actually having to jump through the complex hoops that hosting a presidential candidate required?

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Defining Negative SEO

For those who are new to this topic, SEO or search engine optimization is defined as the process of enhancing the visibility of a website or a web page on a search engine’s results page (SERP).

If you want to generate more traffic towards your website, it is ideal to appear on the high-ranked list of major commercial search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.  As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO practitioners come up with ways to work with the algorithm of search engines and increase the ranking of a particular website.

Negative SEO, on the other hand, is also an Internet marketing strategy. As the name implies, however, it accomplishes the exact opposite of SEO: it aims to bring down the SERP rankings of a website.

Instead of increasing the visibility of a website through approved practices (e.g., high-quality content), those who practice negative SEO resort to tactics considered to be unethical and malicious. The idea is for search engines to penalize the website under attack, allowing the attacker’s own website to rise on the SERPs.

The Practice of Negative SEO

There are a number of methods which are considered to be under the banner of negative SEO. Take note that some of these are legitimate practices. However, when used with the intent to bring down the ranking of a competitor or take their website offline, then it is considered as negative SEO.

1.  Classic techniques

Most people are aware of these classical techniques in attacking a website. The purpose is to find the security vulnerabilities of a particular website, then exploit them in a way that will prompt search engines to take them out of their list. This may come in the form of:

• Infecting a site with viruses or malware – End users are the usual victims of viruses or malwares injected on websites that will install themselves on their computers. Search engines will then flag these sites as potentially dangerous, possibly removing them from their SERPs.
• Hacking – With the technology in place these days, there are plenty of ways to hack a website that will negatively affect their SERP ranking. One way is to edit the robot.txt files of sites, which will either block the Google bot or restrict certain IPs. Another way is through the Denial of Service Attacks (DoS; may also be called DDoS [distributed denial of service]), which simultaneously floods a target website with plenty of requests using different computers. With DoS, the volume of traffic will block up that site’s bandwidth, which will effectively cut it off from the reach of Google and legitimate users.

2.  Spam

When a site is tagged by search engines as “spammy,” they will rank these down on their SERPs or remove them. To accomplish this, they can use:

• Google Bowling – Google Bowling refers to techniques used to make Google believe that a particular site is full of spam. One way is to send out the link of the target website to link farms and other automatically generated spammy pages. Once the website gets thousands of links back and shows up on Google, it will trigger a spam alert that will bring down its rank. Another way is to manipulate the URL of one of the webpages of the target site by creating slightly different URLs but with the same content (e.g., http://www.mycompetitor.com/index.php?page=11, then change it to page=12, page=13, and so forth). If you send out hundreds of these links to blogs, forums, directories, and other websites, Google will eventually see this as black hat and take necessary measures.
• Black social bookmarking — With search engines now including social networking sites on their SERPs, this kind of technique becomes more effective. It uses social media like Facebook and Twitter to create fake accounts, which will be used to make spammy links directed to the targeted site using keywords such as “porn,” “viagra,” “warez,” and many more.
• Creating a similar “spammy” site — The key is to create a very spammy version of the targeted site using a similar URL, the same domain registrar, and the same hosting services.

3.  Manipulating the content

Since content is important in the SEO industry, practitioners of negative SEO have found ways to use this to their advantage, including:

• Reporting offending content – While this is a legitimate practice, those in the negative SEO can turn it around to make this work for them. Once an offending post is made on a forum, a person can report it to the moderators or blog owners. If the moderators deem the content as a violation of their rules, they will take it down.
• Google Insulation — This is another legitimate SEO practice that involves promoting non-offending content. If your company receives a negative comment, you can create a positive one, and then apply SEO techniques in such a way as to coerce the bad comment/PR down the SERPs.
• Promote Competition — Another way is to promote a competing client. Say, if a competitor sells products 1 and 2, while your client sells only product 1, you can promote another company who only sells product 2 (but is not in direct competition with your client).
• Race them to have your content indexed first — Once a competitor changes one of their pages, those into negative SEO can create the same content with the same metatags. The purpose is for the search engines to crawl the latter’s content first before the competitor. Once a copy of a webpage is done, negative SEO can submit a sitemap containing that page on the indexing list of Google, Yahoo! or Bing. If they do it fast enough, search engines may index their content first and deem the competitor’s page to be duplicate content.

4.  Attack their advertisements

Negative SEO can also use the advertisements on targeted websites by:

• AdSense banning — They can click on Google AdSense as many times as they want, until the target website’s account is suspended.
• Click fraud — This involves having a team click on targeted website’s adverts three to four times a day. It works well if the competitor has AdWords. This technique will use up the target’s budget and change the number of genuine visitors. Another click fraud technique is to have people click on your client’s site and sites below the target website.

 5.  Tattling!

This technique is used to make Google believe that the targeted website infringes their rules. Negative SEO can report paid-for links, grey-hat SEO practices of the target website, or claim copyright infringement.

The Use of Negative SEO

Considering the controversy surrounding the practice, why do people engage in negative SEO? Why risk your reputation? With recent Google announcements about the Penguin algorithm changes designed to identifty webspam, the potential payoff must be good if sites continue to engage in these type of black-hat techniques.

Three major goals include: (1) Targeted Negative SEO or TNS where negative SEO techniques are deliberately used to make a competitor’s website less attractive to search engine robots; (2) Lower the rank of target websites — also known as “SERP bubbling,” this forces down the target website’s rank, so that your client’s site will rise further up the SERPs; and (3) Bury negative content about the client — Companies are very careful with their reputation, online as well as off, so the goal here is to downgrade the ranks of websites that posts negative content about a particular company or organization.

No matter how unethical the practice is, the truth of the matter is that negative SEO works. So much, in fact, that search engines at the present have a hard time tracking these techniques. Even though Google’s Penguin update is aimed at  stopping spam and negative SEO, it is still necessary to take note of these types of practices to protect you or your client’s websites against such attacks.

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Here are five of the most newsworthy and noteworthy posts from the week that will help you understand what’s important to know this week in online marketing.

1.  Penquins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo — Dr. Pete at SEOmoz provides an exceptional outline of the last two big Google updates code-named Panda and Penquin. He includes ways to tell if you’ve been affected and a number of strategies for dealing with the damage and initiating recovery. Even more important, he tells you what NOT to do. Perhaps the best bit of advice in the article is how to decide if you’ve been affected by Penquin — “If you saw major traffic losses between Thursday, April 24th and Friday, April 25th, odds are good that Penguin is at least part of the problem.”

2.  Google’s Love Affair With Wikipedia Far More Serious Than Bing’s — if you’ve wondered how Google and Bing compare in terms of how often Wikipedia results show up high in their SERPs, this study by Conductor will tell you. There’s also a link to an earlier post detailing Google-only material.

3.  Flickr, Behance, Vimeo and YouTube Add New Pinterest Attribution Tool — Liz Gannes at AllThingsD illustrates the new attribution method introduced by Pinterest this week which will help copyright concerns over material pinned that originates from these four properties.

4.  Dan Loeb Alleges “Discrepancies” on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s Resume Related to Computer Science Degree – Kara Swisher (another AllThingsD item) provides details of the controversy over new Yahoo CEO’s academic credentials.

5.  Bing Gets A New Look – the Bing blog announces a new look to Bing that is quite reminiscent of a slightly older Google. But will it encourage more searchers to switch?

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Internet users today are used to receiving information quickly online. If a web page doesn’t load within a few seconds the visitor is already frustrated by the experience. Anything slower than a few seconds and the visitor might not even wait around. They may be clicking the “back” button and looking for the next result.

The search engines take this user experience factor into consideration when ranking a website. The search engines want to provide users with the best possible search experience to keep them happy. If your website is loading slowly and visitors are bouncing from the page quickly, the search engines take notice. Unfortunately, your site isn’t providing a good user experience and that will affect a search ranking in a negative way. Every industry is competitive in the search engines. If a competitor has a better website with a faster load time, there is a good chance that they will outrank you.

Besides clicking around your website on a few different browsers to gauge speed, there are a few tools that can help you determine the speed of your website. Since Google is the most prominent search engine, a good place to start is the Google PageSpeed Online tool which provides you with an overall page speed score out of 100 and a summary of suggestions for improvement ranked by priority. Desktop and mobile reports can be generated. Pingdom is another helpful and free tool that tells you what your load time is, gives you a grade, and compares your website speed to others.

If you find that your load time isn’t as good as it should be, it’s important to try and figure out what the problem is. Graphics, images, and other multimedia files are often the cause of a slow website. If your website is heavy on these kinds of files, consider whether they are actually necessary. Remove any extraneous photos, videos, or pop up ads that aren’t needed or reduce the size of them to speed up the rendering process.

Another culprit of slow load time is when a website is poorly coded. If there is too much HTML information on a page it can really slow it down. As a website ages and is edited over time the code can get sloppy if it’s not in the hands of a professional. It’s a good idea to hire a consultant to look through the code and remove what’s not needed.

In today’s fast-paced culture, you will never thrive online if your website loads slowly. It results in a poor user experience and has a negative effect on a search engine ranking.

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While it hasn’t been around that long and certainly hasn’t yet scaled the heights of Facebook, Twitter or even Google+, Pinterest has racked up some decent brand members and is steadily building a cult following. While it may not quite classify as being a ‘must use’ social media site for your brand, it is precisely because Pinterest is still flying under the radar that you ought to jump on board.

Sporting everything from dinosaurs, cupcakes and cookies to weight loss tips, wedding dresses, holiday destinations and home offices, Pinterest really is a giant pin board. This cornucopia of topics can make it hard to stand out and even more difficult to figure out just how to get started. Follow these easy steps to get up to speed…

1.      Request an Invite

Pinterest is an ‘invite only’ social network but, you can request an invite directly from the site. Simply click on the link and input your email address to request an invitation. It can take anything from a few minutes to a day or more to get up and running so patience is key.

2.      Complete the Basics

As with any social networking presence, completing filling out your profile information after getting the invitation email through is a sensible first step. The profile fields are somewhat limited but, you can integrate with your other social apps such as Facebook and Twitter so even if you feel that the Pinterest profile is too narrow to be creative, you can direct interested parties elsewhere.

One of the most basic areas to get right is the business profile – make sure you use the space to the max. Succinct, original and engaging profile writing does take practice but simply copying and pasting from your About Us page almost always fails to do your brand justice.

3.      Widen your circle of interests

Now the initial steps are complete, you can really start to delve into what makes Pinterest tick and determine how it can work for your brand.

Pinterest has a strict rule about self promotion which means that your Pinterest page can’t be solely about your products and services or you risk having your account terminated and your hard work come to nothing. At this point, it may seem like more trouble than it’s worth but, the fact that your competitors likely aren’t on Pinterest yet should be reason enough to persevere and maintain your competitive edge.

Broadening your circle of interests works really well on Pinterest and, while not directly promoting your own business, will help you better connect with your target audience which in turn can help with conversions. As an example, imagine you run a hotel or bed and breakfast. You’ll want to add some pictures of your rooms and amenities in order to get Pinterest working for you but, you’ll also need to broaden what you pin in order to keep on the right side of the rule book.

If you’re creative there are lots of ways in which you can add value to your Pinterest board and still be driving sales. You could add images of local attractions, or team up with local bars and restaurants to add some images of their delicious local food and drink specialities which your guests may enjoy. A reciprocal agreement with those businesses means you’ll get some extra promotion as a result.

4.      Follow the right people

Just as you’ll follow similar accounts to your own on Twitter and like the Facebook pages of suppliers, you can repin materials of interest on your own board. Following, commenting on the things they pin and re-pinning can build bridges between your two brands and, can mean that some of that board’s fans end up following you.

You don’t need to spend hours and hours following people initially in order for this aspect of your strategy to work well. In fact, taking more time to hunt out accounts to follow can actually be a much more profitable strategy as you can focus on those boards that are best aligned with your own demographic.

5.      Promote, promote, promote

Don’t forget, you need to develop a strong following to enjoy Pinterest at its best. Be sure to add a Pin It button to your website so you direct traffic, just as you display a Facebook or Twitter icon to generate followers and likes. You can also link from other social media – such as posting a photo on Facebook and commenting that others can also be seen on your Pinterest page.

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