This post is a little different than what you might be used to. Instead of talking at you, I would like to talk with you. I would like to propose a blogging outline, not actually blog on the given subject (yet!).
First, allow me to explain myself. I have been under-utilizing my blogging privileges the last three months and I would like to try to make this up to all of you. I have made the same excuses that everyone makes. “I am too busy,” “I’ll get to it later," “My dog ate my keyboard.” I know these are bad excuses (except the last one) and so do you. There are plenty of people who work many more hours than I do (i.e., Rand) and even more people who write excellent blog posts who have less material to work with than me.
The truth is, I love blogging! It is my favorite part of my “job” and quite possibly the aspect that has taught me the most about the internet. Every time I post, I eagerly read the comments and obsessively follow the conversation if it travels around the internet.
Here is the part that involves you.
I would like to write posts only about material that you want to read about. Below is my proposal for you. If you choose not to accept it, I would love to hear your feedback so that I can be led in the right direction.
My Blog Proposal:
You wouldn’t start an offline company without considering marketing, yet many people try to start online companies without considering internet marketing and SEO.
I want to start an internet company and document the entire process from an internet marketing perspective. There are plenty of blogs about about starting a company, but very few (if any) that explain how to do it while solely focusing on internet marketing.
I will not include general start up advice. Instead, I will write as if I am the SEO manager whose only job is to do SEO for the company. To be perfectly honest, I do plan on trying to make money from the company but it is not my main concern. I have acquired a lot of internet marketing knowledge over the past year and I feel like if I don’t start applying it soon, I will explode! This is my effort to stop thinking and start doing.
Blogging Outline:
This is not a definitive plan. It is not tested yet and I plan to try these ideas out and blog about the results. I have only started one company in my life and it ended in a scary legal battle. I do not claim to be even a moderately skilled entrepreneur, but I do have enough SEO skills to make a notable attempt. Below is my plan:
(Each category will be at least one blog post.)
- Formulating the idea
- What marketable problem does the idea solve?
- Who will want to visit your site
- What will they be able to accomplish
- Unique Selling Proposition (Thanks, Dr. Mani)
- What "unfair" advantage do you have over your competition to make you better than them
- Identify two degrees of difference
- How will your content build links?
- Who will write your unique content
- How will this website do if it only has 100 users?
- Know the space before you get into it
- Identify the thought leaders and Linkerati
- Understand the internet neighborhood and the neighboring internet neighborhoods
- Socialize in the space
- Identify user wants and needs
- Find inspiration (aesthetic design, ideas, concepts)
- The art of stealing ideas (It’s fine to steal little pieces from different websites. Give credit where credit is due)
- Keyword research
- Start early and design with flexibility in mind
- Run test PPC campaigns (Thanks KS-Katz)
- Identify themes
- Decide how this will affect your design
- Setting goals
- What do you want to rank competitively for
- Is your online marketing plan primarily: Social Media, Paid Search or Natural Search
- Is there a goal to marketing other then selling the product
- 1 hour of marketing for every two hours of coding?
- Plan
- Make a flexible outline
- Think SEO and marketing from the beginning
- Create an early stage marketing plan
- Create a high level long term marketing plan (do not expect ANY press)
- What will you blog about?
- How many posts per week?
- Milestones
- Keep the big picture in mind
- Get a domain (doesn't even have to be the final. you can always 301)
- Base on your keyword research and your intuition
- New domains
- Domize
- Identify pros and cons of the domain name early
- Have a friend spell it without seeing it. ("Hey Jeff, how would you spell ziontd")
- Buy canonicalized versions (.com, .org .net -- others not necessary)
- Buy typos
- Remember engines are registrars, so private registration is useless
- If you need to buy a currently owned domain...
- Weigh the pros and cons of the title (Is it worth the price? Google, Delicious, Wikipedia are all nonsense words)
- Use a reputable source
- Allow 2 months for transfer proceedings
- Work before the work (Start building links early)
- Execute your early stage marketing plan
- Make a blog
- Host funny images on your server
- Social media links
- Local search registration
- Mockups (include SEO, Info architecture, siloing, H1, title tags)
- Think scaffolding, not colors
- Write out your title tags and H1, H2 on your mockups
- Plan your information architecture (3 click theory)
- Entire section on navigation
- How will your homepage spread link juice
- Establish a clear call to action on every page (Thanks, Jordan)
- Development design (hardware and middleware)
- Pick a CMS
- The SEO pros and cons of going custom
- HTML formatting (how does it look? how does it parse?)
- URL structure
- Bot killers
- Server administration (Thanks, Darren)
- Apache vs. IIS
- The importance of IP addresses
- DNS management
- Pick a CMS
- Design design (frontend)
- User and search engine focused design
- The 3 Components of web design
- Interface design
- Clickability
- Banana (call to action)
- CSS
- Alt tags
- Aesthetic design
- UX
- CSS
- Branding
- Information design
- At this point it should already be planned
- Now figure out how to implement into design
- Breadcrumbs?
- Visual Hierarchy of information
- Interface design
- Code
- Start coding
- SEO audit
- Get a different SEO to look at your site
- Nofollow
- Title tags
- H1
- SEO Browser
- SEOmoz tools (Term Targeting)
- Marketing
- Stunts
- Blogs
- Community
- Social media
- Paid (YouTube)
- Tracking/Analytics
- The infinity loop (This process never ends)
- SERPS
- Reputation management / social media tracking
That's all I have for right now. I look forward to hearing your opinions and expertise in the comments. As always, e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that's not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) and/or Linkedin (Danny Dover). Thanks!
Seeing as I didn't understand even half of what you mentioned I guess I should follow your posts!
I think that this is an excellent experiment and would love to lend my thinking cap to the mix. Here's some additional ideas for blog posts:
- I know that you're playing the role as an SEO manager; however, there are some practical applications of using PPC to test out keywords to make sure that your wishlist of keywords are going to convert. I'd like to see a piece that tests out the keywords using PPC.
- Usability. I know, you're an SEO manager, not a usability expert; however, I think usability and SEO are natural partners.
- Client Management. As an SEO, managing client expectations is one of the biggest challenges we face. I'd like to see some posts devoted to helping clients understand what we do.
- Under Tracking/Analytics, I'd like to see some posts that go past your typical web analytics. There are a lot of good solutions for tracking social media and those deserve their own posts.
Well, that's my two cents. Hope it helps. :)
Wow, I wish I could shake your hand. Great suggestions.
Really like the PPC idea. I have not actually used PPC in this way. Seems foolish not to use that resource.
Agreed about usability. I will write a little about it here and maybe more about it on a different blog. (Trying to stay SEO focused here).
I will have Lindsay, our new SEO manager, tackle the client management posts. Shes awesome and I look forward to learning more from her on this topic.
Social media tracking - Agreed and added.
Looking forward to getting your suggestions in the future.
Hey there, KS-Katz, I like the way you think.
1. I use PPC as part of my keyword research, since I often do SEO for Hebrew sites, and the number of keyword research tools that support Hebrew, or have a Hebrew database, is miniscule. I've also found it useful for English language clients who are really set on a few specific keywords, that I don't think are being searched for at all - useful trick to prove them wrong!
2. Usability, or Design. I recently gave a presentation on bad design elements, and how they negatively affect SEO. You can find it at https://tinyurl.com/c2womx (beware - it's a hefty pdf).
3. Biggest problem when trying to close an SEO deal with a small or medium-sized company - managing client expectations. Sometimes the problem is worstened by not managing your own expectations of what you can do for them ... In any case, I try to explain most everything I do for my clients - I want them to trust me, and not think that it's all witchcraft.
4. Tracking and analytics - something that so many webmasters don't understand is part of THEIR job to include, and to explain to the client. Even before you get to the more in-depth stuff, I've heard to many webmasters say "oh, no - that's part of SEO". I try to explain to my clients that tracking is part of knowing what their business is up to.
So, at least 2 dollars worth, not 2 cents :-)
Now THAT sounds like an interesting blog post.
Short Story: I started a social network (before it was a fad, I might add) and outsourced all of the coding. My hosting company was in Bangladesh and it was majorly damaged by an earthquake.
The data that survived was transferred to a hosting company I had never heard of in LA. They messed up the file permissions (left some writable) and the site was hacked.
The hosting company allegedly needed to replace thousands of dollars worth of hardware due to the breach. They threatened to sue me. I freaked out and had them delete everything (which they couldn't originally because of our contract.)
Result: Danny Dover sad. Mark Zuckerburg rich as hell.
Lesson learned (-;
P.S. I realize the hacking damage does not make sense. But that was the allegation.
Your story hurts my heart. :(
Wait, is that why you work at SEOmoz? ... to be close to Sarah and her legal prowess?
Did I miss what this internet company is going to be about?
:-) Open sourcing people rather than software. Pretty crazy I know, but I found a great angle on a incredibly difficult problem.
I like the mention of the 3 click theory. What I have found a lot of lately is people are getting so obsessed with having a blog and lots of content that the architecture of the structure almost becomes impossible to get the cusomer to the end result you are looking for. I also like the comment about the branding. With the tools out today, you can have a pretty amazing header or design that can really catch the readers eye.
Well done Danny!
A very good list for a fascinating plan.
I'll stay tuned... ;)
This is a great list for any new company or an existing one to revisit and rethink where they are at and where they are going!
Are you nuts?
Don't you know clients call and tell you "I launched my site last week and I need SEO". If they did it your way this job would be fun, rewarding, exciting and all the other things WORK is not supposed to be.
Seriously though, you have good food for thought for anyone starting an online business, or deciding to get serious about an existing one before actually building a new site.
Thanks for the hard work. I appreciate the opportunity to benefit from your sharing of well organized thoughts.
This is an excellent idea!
I'm looking forward to following this develop.
I was going to add some comments but remembered that you're looking at it from an Internet Marketing perspective rather than the other aspects.
Danny - I think this is great.
Since I have so much time on my hands (ha ha ha!), I've started working on a new Internet Company. I'm in the middle of the business plan, and just starting the technical design.
I did have a number of SEO related ideas in mind, of course, but this list ROCKS! I'm definitely going to use it, right now, together with the other plans.
Thanks a million,
Debi-Z
This is an excellent post Danny. I've made a couple of very random posts to my blog, but haven't been overly motivated after working all day writing at work. This post motivates me to sit down and really think it through and provide myself with some good direction.
One last thing I will add to your already thorough list is persona creation of whom I might be attracting to my site. That way I can cater my content to those personas. (My love of personas may also just be my non-traditional brand advertising backgroud shining through!)
P.S. Danny, I wrote that last sentence in parnetheses just for you!
Hi Steph!
Quite honestly, my biggest motivation for doing this post was to get it all out on the web so that I feel pressured to actually write the posts. I had the first version of this list sitting on my computer for months and it wasn't going anywhere.
I feel much better now and I recommend doing the same if possible.
Great comments on adding a persona. People say it is a hard skill to master but is absolutely worth the time. I am adding it to the outline.
P.S. I quickly checked the post to make sure I didn't mess it up! Ignoring the examples in the outline, I passed. Apparently, you tought me well.
Being at a similar point myself, I read your outline with interest, and am taking notes. Will be following progress, nice work.
Three areas I'd add to the list you have made:
Branding (color, logo, font, design etc)USP (your company's reason why)Interactivity (esp. client support via helpdesk)
Dr. Mani,
Very helpful advice! Those topics tend to be more realted to general internet marketing than SEO and I think that is great. Thanls for opening my mind a little. :-) I am looking forward to learning more and writing about implementing and defining a USP early.
Thanks
This is a great idea! Can you set up a feed so we all can always have an easy way to stay updated and participate fully in the conversation?
Danny,
I really look forward to hearing more from you as your idea develops. Personally I was just wondering if you had classified ensuring some sort of "call to action" was implemented in the Interface Design. I personally can understand clickability and so forth, but I think it's important to plan on highlighting the call to action (maybe even in the aesthetic design).
I'm not sure how you would classify that within your structure. I think it's very thorough, but personally I have always been interested in how companies fail to provide a straightforward call-to-action throughout their web pages. Maybe this can be something you can address.
Looking forward to your work,
Jordan
Jordan,
I couldn't agree more. "Call to action" has become an important phrase around the office lately. It is definitely important to internet marketing. (Its no use if the user gets to a given page if they don't know what to do once they get there.)
Thanks
Eureka!
I've been wondering how many bloggers out there think along the same lines as I do.
Starting a business and putting your online expertise to good use is a terrific idea, however like any serious venture you need a solid business plan FIRST.
Don't get stuck in the trap of analysis paralysis either; like the Marines say, once you're 70% sure of yourself: Act.
Cheers on the new venture and please keep us updated on your progress (I imagine you'll have lots of help by framing this idea as a social media conversation).
Seems like a fairly comprehensive list Danny - good work. I'm looking forward to seeing the plan in action!
will be great to see this come together Danny...
Great Idea! Straight Forward step by step development helps beginers if they are stucked!..
Thanks!
I do think "How are we going to monetize it" is a very serious question for startups.
I say this because you can build a great platform and not make a profit (youtube, facebook, etc). And the idea of twitter saying 'we are cool for a few years with our VC money' I think this is ridiculous.
Maybe I'm old school (although I'm 21.....) but this assumption 'oh, we'll innovate something' is too generous. I think questions of partnerships, affiliates, and making products should be valid questions.
Having the visitors is one thing but converting them is another ball-game.
P.S. Oh, I love https://domize.com/ FTW!!!
thats an awesome list, now you should have setup a pdf version with a checklist that we could have downloaded and it would have been awesome!
about the hosting solution, if you are looking at 301 redirects I strongly suggest Linux... windows can be quite evil for using Htaccess files, so it can be more trouble than its worth!
the domain points should be in bold, if you are going to spend months/years building a brand and thousands of dollars, spend the extra $10-20 and get the other domain extensions .net,.org...
maybe i could try this, i have several new campaigns that im due to start over the next few months?
Good call,
I will be sure to make PDFs when I write the individual posts. Thanks!
I second the feed, unless it will defiantly be in the main blog? What about using micro sites?
This sentence is a bit unclear. Do you mean that you should research the existing domain using Google, Delicious and Wikipedia?
Agreed, I was refering to the fact that Google, Del.icio.us and Wikipedia were all nonsense words before they got big. (Although, as you will see in the future post, I am less certian about this strategy now.)
Fixed in the outline
Cool. This is exactly the sort of action outline I'd love to be able to link my friends to. I'll be watching this topic closely.
--Naomi
VERY VERY GOOD E USABLE ARTICLE!
THANKS MOZ!
How do you way pros and cons?
Fixed.
There are plenty of people who...write excellent blog posts who have less material to work with than me. Hey... wait a minute... are you calling me stupid?
One thing I didn't see in the outline is web hosting: server administration, DNS setup, etc.
Good call. I'll add some stuff on the importance of IP addresses and choosing web servers (Apache vs. IIS).
I am a little hazy on DNS management so I will be sure to add that to the list as well. Thanks Darren.
P.S. Your icon/avatar almost scares the helpfulness out of your comments ;-)