Immigrant Entrepreneurs Summit Case Study

November 16, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · 2 Comments

I wanted to pass on a quick recap. I posted on my participation in IES this past weekend where I streamed my talk on Interactive Marketing. I told the participants in my session to Google “Immigrant Entrepreneurs Summit” in 30 days and see where my post was in the results. The net result is that…

My content (both the post and the ustream.tv recordings of my chat) appears on the first page of results and did so within 24 hours of me hitting “publish”.

Here are the reasons that I see for this result…most of which we talked about in our session.

I have used the 3 key words that define the event. I used “Immigrant Entrepreneurs Summit” in my title and it’s sprinkled throughout naturally. I haven’t forced the issue or “tried to pack in more instances that the post deserved.” I’ve also used IES multiple times but there are a lot of organizations and groups out there with that acronym so that will be harder to get on page 1.
I have embedded video that I streamed live and recorded into the post. This is another “content outpost”. Why not stream something live and get the recording with almost no effort? Sure it’s not the best recording but I told my participants as I always do that “I don’t use handouts” but how would you like to replay this entire chat again anytime you’d like to extract the key points? They thought that wasn’t a bad idea. Notice that this recording is ALSO on the first page of results.
I am probably the only person using a WordPress based / blog based site to talk about this conference. The conference doesn’t have its own site yet and anyone with information about the conference has a fairly static site. My blog post was done before I left the conference on Saturday. Was this a lot of effort? No. It took about 15 minutes to write and post.

Summary: I have the platform that lets met rapidly put out fresh content (WordPress). Google loves fresh content and since I’ve been doing this a while…the magic Google engine gives my site a little respect. I used the exact keywords that people will probably search for if they’re trying to get information on this event. I’ve used multiple forms of content (video, written word) and I’ve pushed that content into additional outposts (ustream.tv). This blog post will be part of an automated newsletter that goes out occasionally to my email marketing subscribers too. When I get 5 new posts…the newsletter is “magically created” with no effort on my part thanks to (aweber email marketing). Remember that setting up your infrastructure NOW means you don’t have to think about it later. I also linked out to many other sites in my post so perhaps these folks know this and are now aware of me…increasing my chances of getting inbound links back from them.

BONUS: During the conference, I ended up meeting 3 people that I have known and follow only through Twitter. During the day, they told other people that we’d met and that we were having lunch, attending my session, etc. 10 new people have followed me since the conference and if we consider that they’re ALL Des Moines based…I have just added to my local network in town, solidified some FACE TO FACE relationships that were purely and casually online until now, and created some case study results to share with my audience.

Not a bad 48 hours I’d say. Now anyone who knows me understands that I’m not your typical, “SEO guru”. I don’t know the ins and outs that some companies practice to “back door sites to the top” using buried meta information (did I lose you? me too). Like a good business person, I worry about that which I can do something about…and I pay to have the rest taken care of. I let the tools and systems do their job for me like having a WordPress site with the best plugins to say “Hi Google…I’m here”. Then, I write and create video with rich content with an eye for key words. See…simple.

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Filed under: clients and case studies, findability, multimedia, speaking engagements
Tagged: Google, Search engine optimization, Streaming media, Twitter, Ustream, WordPress

A sign of the times for radio? Google drops ad program

February 16, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · Leave a Comment

So if you’re looking for a trend here, Google has now dropped its newspaper ad model and its radio ad model. Hum. Not tough to see right? Here’s a quote from the story “Google to discontinue radio ads program” from B to B.

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s VP-product management, said in a blog discussing the shutdown of Google Audio Ads: “… we have decided to exit the broadcast radio business and focus our efforts in online streaming audio. We will phase out the existing Google Audio Ads and AdSense for Audio products and plan to sell the Google Radio Automation business, the software that automates broadcast radio programming.

We’ve been learning quite a bit about the radio market here locally in Des Moines. The create WOW media team helped local daily talk show Mac’s World Live begin streaming live daily and built a blog based web site for him. Then, Mac actually began streaming the show live from our studio daily after his recent deal on AM radio fell through.

The number one takeaway so far? “It’s actually more cost effective in our local market to produce and host a 1 hour radio show each week than it is to buy advertising on a show.” If that sounds counter-intuitive to you…I’m with you.

I’m not going to sound the death bell of terrestrial radio because like other things, it will find its place. But think: How many millennials will be getting their information from an AM signal in about 5-10 years? I think Gen X is already about the cutoff point that still even knows that AM exists. Of course it does depend on your market considering in SoCal the ONLY station in my life was the talk radio powerhouse KFI AM 640. If I want a dose of AM radio now, I actually stream it live on the web. Sign?