Don’t ask me how you get your page ranks up if you don’t want to hear the answer. I’ll tell you, and then you probably won’t like it. Why? I think I’ve maybe met one person in the last decade who actually LOVES to do what’s necessary. Everyone else, it’s a chore. Something that takes them away from what they actually enjoy doing. Or worse, they just work for the company and don’t even enjoy the job, and then they’re being asked to put on a smiley face and stand outside the Disneyland gates waving. For a significant number of people they’d rather die in a gutter, apparently.

Marketing yourself, your company, your organization, whatever, online is not necessarily easy. Particularly if there is alot of competition. When we went to the second iteration of orcapack.com we changed from being a product focused company to one offering the standard web design and site creation for various companies. This was back in about 2003. I remember talking to one of our business advisors and they asked me “Who is your target audience?” and I said “I dunno. Everyone?”.

It’s hard to market to everyone.

That’s one reason we eventually created oClubhouse.com, oFitnessclub.com, and oDaycare.com because they were businesses we had done alot of work for and had the expertise to turn them into products and they provided us with specific markets for us to target with SEO and Internet Marketing.

So if you want to get your page ranks up, my first advice is to figure out what your target is. Who are you trying to reach? Get that whittled down. The answer can’t be everyone.

I’m gonna skip a few steps here to get the meat of my point, but you’ll want to do all sorts of stuff for tracking your sites, figuring out keywords for your content and SEO, internet marketing, yadda yadda yadda. Ask me again about thos sometime…

Anyway, so glossing over that stuff, we get to the point when we know your target, and we know what words they’re searching for online, and we’re watching for them….Time to get into the social media marketing.

That’s where people’s hearts sink.

I say “You can do it in an hour a day.”

They look at me with a blank stare.

“I hate blogging.”

“I don’t know how to use tweeter.”

“I don’t want to waste an hour a day on that crap.”

“Can’t I hire an indian or malaysian company to do that for me or something?”

I’ve heard it all. It’s like someone asking how you order a pizza to be delivered to your house, and you give them a number to call, and a basic script to follow and they look at you and ask you if you can call for the pizza instead of them.

Twisting people’s arms is probably not a strong enough metaphor. People HATE to do this stuff. They see it as a complete waste of time, but it’s what works.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post which focused on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman, this is how stuff gets done.

Let me give a specific example for a friend of mine. I won’t name names, so lets call him Shawn Rodgers, and pretend he’s a wedding photographer in Pittsburgh, PA and his company is Ovation Images located at http://ovation-images.com/

Ah damn…I named names. Well it’s good for his SEO for me to do that, so I’m sure he won’t mind. Shawn is an amazing wedding photographer. Seriously. I wish he’d shot my wedding. He’s got the expensive gear, and a great eye, and he’s an insanely particular guy (seriously…he’s INSANELY particular….he notices all the little things). Now this is a kind of annoying thing when you’re trying to buy some hot sausage to grill up for your fishing trip, but in a wedding photographer? You want the guy who notices ALL the details and actually cares about making it look perfect.

Anyway they’re like on page 100 of search results for “pittsburgh wedding photographer” and there’s lots of competition, but Ovation Images is probably top 10 in quality in the region, maybe even top 5. They should be up there in the rankings above lots of these other photographers.

Ok so we know the target (young brides and grooms in western pennsylvania) and we know the search terms (there are more than “pittsburgh wedding photographer” but that’s the big one).

So what do they need to do to get their page ranks up now that they have that info? They need to leverage social media.

First they need to use their blog. It’s at http://blog.ovation-images.com/. The last time it’s been updated was January 9th. Before that twice in December of 2009. That’s just not enough. They need to turn that into a mini-site. A targeted website. Have it just be about great wedding photography shots. Every day put up a different picture, talk in a brief paragraph about what makes it an amazing wedding photo, and then have a set signature blurb on the page about them and pittsburgh wedding photographer linking back to their main ovation-images.com site.

If they can’t update it everyday, that’s fine, but they need to spend an hour a day on their overall social media marketing, so it’d be cool to stack up some photos they can use. Doesn’t have to take long. Put up a photo, write it up, stick up the blurb, post. The point is to have more content pointing towards them, more keywords, more stuff people can find that’ll lead them to the main ovation-images.com website.

If possible they should even change the domain on it to somethign with the keywords. great-pittsburgh-wedding-photography.com is available for instance. You get those keywords in the URL it helps.

Maybe also have a contact form on the blog as well that asks some questions. A questionaire about what they’re looking for in a wedding photographer, or in wedding photography, just some sort of little thing to provide a ‘service’ to people to help them find a photographer that fits them. “Do you like natural shots, or pictures of you posed?” etc.

Then every day after posting that picture on the new external mini-site have a twitter account, and tweet about it, using the keywords.

Go onto the ovation images facebook account and post the link there. Put it on your personal facebook as well. Get your network involved.

Now… There’s a ton more they could do. A ton. I’m not going to go into everything else here though. It’s the stuff that whole books are written about. This is just a first step of many to reach the kids that are getting married. I could suggest a hundred more things, but before anything else, there has to be a commitment to doing just an hour a day of regular posting and then leveraging social media.

And no, I won’t allow you to hire a Malaysian company to outsource your blog like I do.

So my current project is to revamp the content on our main OrcaPack site. Right now it’s basically describing a company that no longer exists. We’ve undergone so many transformations, it frequently feels like we’ve spent 8 years doing not much.

Of course we’ve been in business for 8 years doing some of the worst economic times since the Great Depression, and we’re still going. There’s something to be said for that.

We started as a product company though and over the years we morphed into a services company, and that’s what the current website shows. We did fine at it, but fine isn’t good enough, and in the end it wore us down. We got sick of working hard for other people. Having bright ideas to make other people successful, all while generally being treated like crap, or like web monkeys, and generally not listened to.

Oh sure there were great clients here and there, people who got it. People who respected what we were doing for them. More often than not though they didn’t really care, they didn’t really value what we were doing, and they nickel and dimed everything we did while asking us to work our asses off for them.

Well that’s on the way out…and on the way in. The new OrcaPack.

Tim my partner (timhinkel.com) has got the initial site together, but I’m going through and rewriting content. Really all our new content sucks. It’s way too technical, it doesn’t sell what we’re doing or what our products are, or why they’re important or needed. The hope though is that our sites and content will sell themselves. That people need the things we’ll be offering, and will see our sites and it’ll make them contact us, because we look to fill that need.

So first step is to get OrcaPack updated. We have a new logo, new designs, and new content….I just need to kick it into gear and get the rest of it written and not waste more time getting my wordpress blog to look pretty.