B2B Marketing Promotions

Long tail brand promotion could be one of the best friends of an Internet marketer, if they know how to use it properly.

Basically, long tail brand promotion uses special keywords and phrases on your website that potential buyers might use as search terms to find what they are searching for. They are the niche terms that will bring the most dedicated-to-purchase web surfers to your site. We will explore some specifics to give you a better idea.

Imagine you own an online flower shop. You can ship flowers all over the country, and you have your shiny new website living on a new server to handle the waves of traffic, and you are ready for the orders to start rolling in. But it is not that easy.

When someone searches for “send flowers,” what happens? Big sites and bigger companies that have the brand promotion resources to purchase paid search listings and advertising, such as Teleflora, ProFlowers, or 1-800-Flowers, dominate the search results. They constantly battle against each other to win that number one listing on Google and the other search engines. Your little flower shop and shiny new website does not have the resources to compete with these players on standard searches. So how would anyone ever see your site in the regular search results? The best answer is long tail brand promotion.

The problem is when people perform a search for terms like “send flowers” or “credit cards” or “new laptop,” they will find whoever could throw the most money and energy at online brand promotion. It is not necessarily the best site, or the exact thing they are looking for. So they continue to research until they find exactly what it is they need.

So when someone searches for terms like “Toshiba Satellite Pro L670,” or “credit card double points no fee U-Promise,” they know what they are looking for. They know when they type in “laptop,” they will not find what they need. But by being more specific, they may find the smaller website that offers just what they are looking for.

Those are the people you want at your flower site. So if you provide keywords with great specificity — the long tail brand promotion keywords — it is most likely the buyers who are using those keywords to show up at your site.

What does this have to do with our flower business? You know that with the flower giants, you cannot compete with them on terms like “send flowers” or “flower delivery.” You need to focus on long tail brand promotion keywords to beat the mega sites at their own game. Some online businesses have even changed their entire focus of what they do and sell just to focus on long tail brand promotion.

What if you offered a particular variety of flower that is fairly uncommon? Something the big flower stores do not carry. You could create special keyword phrases like “Angel Kiss rose pink” or “rare Japanese orchid” to set yourself aside from the big websites. Now your long tail brand promotion can gain a foothold, because you offer something the big sites do not offer.

You can then identify and build a variety of different long tail keywords for your brand promotion. While the mega sites fight to win the 98 percent of searches for regular flowers, you can win the other 2 percent of the searches by focusing only on the people who want the rare Japanese orchid, or the pink Angel Kiss rose.

By focusing on long tail brand promotion, you can build up a series of those 2 percent searches. Eventually, if you win enough long tail searches, you can run a fairly successful business that does not have to rely on big budgets and common search terms for its brand promotion. You fill the niche that a smaller dedicated customer base will rely on you for.

Promotional Incentives capitalize on the consumer’s insatiable desire for all things free. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail,” has turned the idea of “free” on its head with his new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.”

In it, he talks about how “free” is often used as promotional incentives. “Free” is often an integral part of marketing promotional incentives, used as a way to get people to try our products, to buy something else, to showcase our products or services, and even to do some work for us.

Here are the four basic iterations of “free” Anderson discusses in his book.

* Direct cross-subsidies – These are promotional incentives that get you to pay for something else. It could be a buy-one-get-one-free item at your favorite clothing store, or a free “prize” given to you by a car dealership in the hopes of getting you to buy a new car. It could even be a cell phone company giving you a free cell phone because you’ll pay for the minutes, the text plan, and the data package.

* The Three-Party Market – With three-party promotional incentives, someone else pays for you to have access so you can use the program or product, in order for you to be exposed to their product — your basic television and radio mass media setup. I get to watch NBC’s “The Office” for free, but I have to watch the ads that go with it. Or I can subscribe to a free trade magazine that covers my industry, but with these promotional incentives, I have to make my name and address available to advertisers. The advertisers need us to consume that product, but we need the advertisers to pay for our access.

* Freemium – One of the promotional incentives we’re most familiar with: we get a free sample to try a product: the food samples we get at our local supermarket, as a way to entice us to buy the really huge bag of pizza rolls. Or in the digital world, giving us limited access so we’re willing to pay full price for total access. Anderson mentions Flickr.com as an example of the freemium promotional incentives. We can use Flickr for free, but can only include 200 photos in our general timeline. If we want to have all of our photos available, and/or we want some premium features, we need to pay $25 per year.

* Nonmonetary markets – The idea that people give away things with no expectation of payment is not one of your regular promotional incentives. Wikipedia is one example. Hundreds of volunteers have created millions of articles in 10 languages about a variety of topics. Wikipedia doesn’t charge for this access, it’s free. Sure, they’ll take donations, and in fact, this past Spring, they had a donation drive to help cover the costs. But there’s nothing else. No banner ads (three-party market), no limited access (freemiums), and no direct cross-subsidies (“get Wikipedia free if you buy a copy of Photoshop”).

It’s this last version of “free” that most people are becoming used to, which can make your own promotional incentives campaign a success. Since marketing promotional incentives in the digital world is cheap and easy, there are different ways people can use them to promote their services (i.e. a Freemium).

One example of promotional incentives is when a consultant posts free articles on her blog as a way to not only showcase their knowledge, but to get a potential client to consider them. Or a book author who offers a free audio version of his book on iTunes and a Kindle version, knowing that if people get the free version, they’re more likely to pay for a real copy too. This is one of the latest promotional incentives to hit the publishing world, and one that more and more authors are using to boost their own sales.

What kind of promotional incentives are you using to drive customer traffic? How are you getting sales leads? Have you thought of using free items as a way to do this? Consider all of the options when you launch your own promotional incentives campaign.

All digital promotion campaigns must have redemption coverage. Without it, you are setting up your digital promotion to fail, or worse, succeed wildly, sending you in the negative. Redemption coverage will not only insure your profits, it will also insure you will not end up in the hole. Redemption coverage can protect you against overexposure errors on contests, coupons and giveaways.

When running a digital promotion you must be covered for several reasons. Because it’s easy for marketers to miscalculate or underestimate their promotion costs, redemption coverage helps them know their costs before their digital promotion campaign ever hits the market. This way, if someone tries to overspend or overextend the contest, the redemption coverage will keep those costs in line with the original budget.

For example, if your company ran a “hole-in-one wins you a new car” contest, you can be fairly sure that no one will win. Your campaign costs are limited to the cost of the promotion. But what do you do if, against all odds, someone actually wins the car? You could be out $20,000 – $40,000 with the swing of a club. It is easy to think you are safe, until someone actually wins the car. Then companies running these campaigns find themselves in the hole, worrying about how to pay for the car.

Even in a digital promotion campaign, something can spin out of control, costing you thousands of dollars. Your free song giveaway may suddenly go viral, and thousands of downloads turns into tens of thousands of downloads. This is why redemption coverage should be your first step in your digital promotion campaign.

Another advantage to getting redemption coverage to accompany your promotion campaign is, it stops the overexposure of redemptions. For example, there is no overspend or underspend because you know the exact contest cost and guidelines. Redemption coverage gives marketers the “you have a chance to win” cushion to base their digital promotion campaign expenditures.

This is a great safety net for those talented marketing agencies that are used to only wearing their creative hat instead of their accounting hat. Instead of worrying and trying to calculate the odds of someone winning, just make sure you have redemption coverage.

The biggest advantage to this insurance, also known as promotional risk coverage, allows your company to launch bigger digital promotion campaigns and give away larger prizes than you might originally have done.

In all reality, using redemption coverage with your digital promotion campaign is more than smart and strategic. These strategies are exactly what builds a great brand and customer loyalty. Customers will work to win your prize, telling their friends, spreading the word. You’ll build fans, increase sales, and ultimately boost your ROI. This way, everyone will be successful, and you’ll rest easy knowing you’re not going to lose your shirt.

Mobile campaigns are great promotion tools. Because the use of smart phones and high speed wireless networks, companies are marketing more through mobile devices. It’s fast easy and trouble-free. The cost is less than a traditional advertising campaign, and it can offer have a bigger reach for their target audience.

Foursquare, a smartphone application and website, is actually a location-based app that turns your entire social life into a mobile campaign. Foursquare allows participants to take advantage of discounts, special promotional offers to mayors (people who have checked into a location more than anyone else).

Jagtag launched a mobile campaigns promotion for Axe as part of the launch of their newest addition to the Axe fragrance portfolio: Axe Twist. The target audience of this mobile campaign was males between the ages of 18 – 24, a group that is more than known for its use of cell phones and smart phones.

Because Jagtag is the provider of video, audio, images and text to both smartphones and standard phones, mobile campaigns like this are not too difficult. Marketers who want to try mobile campaigns would do well to find an agency already expert at creating their own.

Starbucks, the leading competitor in coffee today, gets the importance of mobile campaigns. In fact, they partnered with Foursquare, which gave mayors of the individual stores a special promotional offer: “As mayor of this store, enjoy $1 off a NEW however-you-want-it Frappuccino blended beverage. Any size, any flavor.”

On a smaller, but possibly more successful level, Scotty’s Brewhouse of Indianapolis, Indiana credits social networking strategies and mobile campaigns for a majority of their success. Back when social media was taking off, owner Scotty Wise cut his advertising and marketing budget for his 6-location chain, and focused solely on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, saving a total of $250,000. Their concern was that none of the ad salespeople could promise him an ROI on their ad spending. So rather than blow $250,000 on techniques that could not prove an ROI, Scotty created the restaurant’s social media and mobile campaigns, and managed them himself. The long and short of it is that Scotty’s has seen an increase in business through social media, all of which is measurable, and he has not had to lay large amounts of cash to see the increase.

These are just a few of the many marketers who have found success through mobile campaigns. They focus on the new advertising and marketing channels, like mobile phones, targeting their audience, forming relationships, and giving them some entertainment and additional value in the process.

Implementing promotional marketing strategies for small businesses is one of the biggest hurdles most small business owners face in their business marketing.

The Internet is rife with all kinds of promotional marketing strategies and ideas: Write a company blog. Start a company Facebook fan page. Engage people on Twitter.

But actually implementing the promotional marketing tactics is tough for small business owners. “I’m already busy enough, and now I have to do more?”

We feel your pain. We’re in small business as well, so we’re constantly dealing with the same struggles. If you’re a single person operation, or a small partnership with big aspirations, you’re wearing a lot of hats. You’re in charge of sales and marketing, and then fulfilling whatever you sold. You manage the billing, accounts payable, and taxes. You make sure the office is running smoothly, and that you maintain your business network. And now you’re supposed to try some new promotional marketing strategies.

But don’t worry, we’re not asking for much. In fact, we may make your life easier. Here are a few ideas you can use to implement your promotional marketing strategies with a minimal amount of pain:

Track the performance of all your promotional marketing efforts.

This one is crucial. You need to know what’s working for you and what’s not. The mistake many small businesses make is they don’t keep track of the ROI of their promotional marketing. They’ll run Yellow Pages listings, newspaper ads, radio spots, and dabble in social media. But they don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Do things like sticking unique discount codes on your promotional marketing campaigns. Use special phone numbers in your Yellow Pages listings. Put analytics tracking on your websites. Track the sources of your leads, and see which campaigns result in traffic to your location and your website.

Then count up all of that traffic, and see which leads turned into sales. Total up the sales from each promotional marketing campaign, and then subtract the money you spent on that campaign. The amount remaining is your ROI.

Drop the promotional marketing tactics that don’t work.

This part is easy. If the money you spent is bigger than the money you made, you lost money. If you made more than you spent, you have a positive ROI, and that promotional marketing effort was a success.

Drop all the campaigns that lost you money, including the ones you thought were doing you some good. (Note: this does not include youth team sponsorships. There are some things, like goodwill in the community, that you just don’t mess with!) Pour that reclaimed money back into the campaigns that worked the best. Or if they all made you money, drop the lowest performing ones.

Social media promotional marketing in minutes a day.

When you try something new, like blogging, Facebook, or Twitter, you shouldn’t jump into it with both feet, and spend hours a day on it. You’ll run out of time to do other things, and when you go to play catch-up, everything will be too overwhelming, and you’ll quit. Then, you’ll say it was a complete failure, when in actuality, you haven’t touched that promotional marketing tool in nine months.

Instead, just pace yourself. Work on it a little bit each day. If you’re blogging, just write one 300 word blog post per week. It should take you no more than an hour, and can take less time per day if you break it up. If you’re using Twitter, just spend 30 minutes a day on it, 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the afternoon. Eventually you’ll reach a point that you’re so good at it, you’ll find that you’re actually spending 20 minutes a day in 60 second intervals, throughout the day, and wondering if you’re doing too much, rather than not enough.

Promotional marketing for small business is going to be what keeps you in business, but only if you actually try out some of the tactics you read about. Don’t make the mistake of trying something for two weeks and then quitting when you don’t see any results. It takes time, patience, and some work. But if you can make the time to do these tactics, whatever ones you’ll choose, you’ll be rewarded.

Building your online brand through social media marketing is a snap. Okay, a long series of snaps spread out over several days, but still it’s easy, and it’s free.

If you’ve been paying attention to what people are doing online, you’ve heard of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging. Basically, if you found this article, you’re technically savvy enough to deal with tools like that. You know they can build your online brand.

But, what most people don’t realize is that building an online brand doesn’t just involve opening up the social media toolbox and blasting out sales messages. Nothing will harm your online brand quicker than social media spam.

Social media marketing isn’t about numbers, it’s about relationships. Do your customers feel like they have a relationship with you? Do they know you care about them as people, not as sales targets? Online brands that build these relationships with people tend to be more successful than those that just treat them like numbers.

Here are five ways you can improve your brand through proper social media marketing techniques.

1) Listen

Rather than sending out constant messages about upcoming sales and special offers, “turn the bullhorn around,” Tara Hunt says in her book, “The Whuffie Factor.” People are talking about you, whether it’s complaints, questions, feedback, or compliments. Social media tools help you listen to them, and answer back where they are, rather than where you want them to go.

It’s also important to listen before you just jump in and start talking. Whether it’s Twitter or a specialty social media group, listen to what people are saying before you start talking about your online brand. Learn what the tone of the group is, and match it. Make sure the tone is right for your online brand, and a place you would actually want to associate with people.

2) Answer questions

This is where your online brand can prove some real worth to potential customers. Take any opportunity you can to answer questions in your field, not just about your online brand. If you’re a video marketing consultant, answer anyone’s questions about how to make online videos. Whether it’s about the best video camera to buy, how to edit video clips, or even how to do video marketing (yes, seriously). By doing this, you’ll establish your online brand as being someone who is knowledgeable and helpful.

3) Be a resource

This goes hand in hand with answering questions. Rather than waiting for people to ask something you can answer, push out other helpful information and articles. Forward articles you’re reading to your network. Help them learn, and show potential customers that you’re constantly keeping up to date. By staying on top of industry trends, you’re more able to help them with their own issues.

4) Be yourself

This sounds like advice our parents gave to us in high school, but it’s still good advice, even [**system error**] years later. Nothing kills an online brand like being inauthentic. This is where your personality and your face needs to shine through. Remember, you are your brand. If you’re a funny, quirky person, then your online brand should match it (within reason, of course). If you’re a caring person, then your online brand should be caring as well.

5) Gather more people like you

This is the fun part. This is where you build your network of people who can be potential customers, or even potential referral partners. The easiest way to do it is just to check out people who are already in your network, and see who they’re following or are connected to. You can be fairly safe in assuming that the people they’re following are people who have similar interests and are in the same field.

These techniques will apply to any social media tool. Remember, social media marketing is about engaging in relationships and conversations with customers. By using these techniques, you can help build your online brand and reach your ideal customers.

Local Internet marketing is becoming increasingly important to your success on Google and other search engines. As Google continues to move toward local search results, your effectiveness at local Internet marketing can have a major effect on your bottom line.

Let’s try an experiment. Go to Google, and type in your industry or niche, and your city and state (e.g. Italian restaurant, Wichita, KS). What will pop up is a map of some of the Italian restaurants in Wichita (or whatever you typed in) that may or may not include yours. If it doesn’t, that’s a real problem, but it’s one that’s easily solved.

Optimizing for Google’s Local search is an important part of local Internet marketing. They’re the biggest search engine, so they’re the gold standard for search engine optimization. They also already have your company information in their servers, so it makes sense that they put that information to use by helping their users find you more easily.

The great thing about Google is that it also scans different review sites, like Yelp or Urban Spoon, for user reviews. So B2C businesses (business-to-consumer) may end up getting some great local Internet marketing juice if people leave positive reviews on the different review sites. These reviews also make Google map listings more useful, because people can see whether they want to visit your establishment or not.

Should Regional and Online Businesses Do Local Internet Marketing?

Even regional businesses and online businesses should optimize for local internet marketing. While most of your customers may not come to your location, this will still help improve your search engine ranking. In fact, local Internet marketing is one of the most effective and efficient forms of SEO.

That’s because you need as many inbound links to your website (links that go from another site to yours) as you can get. The more you have, the more valuable Google thinks your site is, and so the higher it appears in search results.

But you also never know when you are going to get a local visitor. While you may not want visitors at a home-based business, it’s worth doing if you have an actual office. You’re already going to do it for SEO reasons, so just consider any visitors who find you this way as a bonus.

Should B2B Do Local Internet Marketing?

Companies that focus on business-to-business should also take advantage of local Internet marketing. For one thing, a number of your customers may be local. You want them to know you’re in the area, so filling out your Google Local profile is going to be a big help.

While your local customers may only be two percent of your customer base, you might as well take advantage this. Besides, if your competitors are already on here, you want to make sure they’re not beating you. And if your customers aren’t on Google Local yet, you could be the first. Take advantage of their absence.

How Can National Chains Do Local Internet Marketing?

You’re probably thinking I’m going to tell you to manually enter in each store location on Google’s Local Business section. And while they would be a great job to give the interns, you can just upload a list of your locations, including the addresses and phone numbers, and Google Maps will place the markers for you.

Where Else Should I Focus My Local Internet Marketing Efforts?

Don’t think that Google has the lock on local Internet marketing. There are several sites, including the aforementioned Yelp and Urban Spoon, that may be worth your time. There are also the Yellow Pages, Super Yellow Pages, Yahoo Yellow Pages, and other similar directories that can help your local Internet marketing. There’s also Yahoo’s listing service, and the new kid on the block, Bing, has a local business listing you can take advantage of. Visit them and update your listing information.

Local Internet marketing can greatly help your search engine results, but you don’t have to be a search engine optimization expert. This is something you can do in a matter of minutes, and it can make all the difference in the world. But if it seems like something you don’t want to mess with, call a local online marketing expert. They’ll be happy to help you out.

Online B2B marketing (business-to-business) is a completely different animal from B2C marketing (business-to-consumer). Whether it’s the medium, the message, or even how you target your audience, online B2B marketing needs to be handled differently from your typical online B2C marketing efforts. There are plenty of similarities: you’re trying to persuade people to take an action, whether it’s visit your website, download a special report, or even buy a product from you. But there are enough differences that online B2B marketing needs some special considerations.

How online B2B marketing differs from online B2C marketing

Online B2B marketing is a lot different from online B2C marketing. For one thing, it’s more formal. In an online B2C setting, you’re going to have customers and visitors with a wide variety of interests, education levels, tastes, and even sense of propriety and appropriateness. You need to make sure your message appeals to the widest possible audience in a B2C setting. With some variable data and creative programming, you can deliver more tailored messages to your audience, but you either have to write one message as generically as possible, or write several messages tailored to each possible group.

But with an online B2B marketing audience, you can narrow your appeal. You’re writing only to the decision makers. You can reasonably assume certain levels of education, attitude, and professionalism among your customers. So your messages can be tailored to a specific group of people, without worrying too much about the non-industry crowd.

How to create the online B2B marketing message

Don’t forget that your online B2B marketing audience is someone else’s B2C audience. They don’t just stick decision makers in a closet at 5:00, and pull them out at 8:00 the next morning. Your B2B customers go home every night, watch TV, get on Facebook, and in general, still respond to the same emotional cues and language at the office that they will at home. Appealing to a person’s fears and desires in your message, showing them how to avoid pain or achieve goals, will work in online B2B marketing the same way it does in B2C marketing.

In online B2B marketing, you also want to focus on the benefits of your product or service, rather than the features. Don’t tell your customers what your service can do (“our Kick-Starter booster is made of titanium and polypropylene”), tell them what they’ll get out of it. Of course, make sure you personalize it whenever possible: “Our Kick-Starter booster will increase productivity by 20%, which can mean an additional $100,000 each year for Jones & Wells.”

Where to find your online B2B marketing customers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of social networks and apps that will help you find your customers. But rather than trying to reach as many people on as many networks as you can manage, focus most of your energy on the best networks. We typically find our online B2B marketing audience on places like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even industry-specific networks like you’d find on Ning.com. While it’s possible to find the B2B audience on Facebook, you’re going to be spending a lot of time and money trying to reach them, while broadcasting your audience to people who don’t care. It would be like buying TV ads in a city just to reach 10 people on it.

Take a look at your online B2B marketing audiences age and technology expertise too. How do they use technology? The basic tenets of Internet marketing assume that your audience are online somehow. But where are they getting their information? Is there a niche social network for your industry? Or are the decision makers getting most of their information from email and websites? Or do they use mobile videos and texting as their primary form of communication? Your marketing campaign needs to match where your customers are, not where you want them to be.

Business promotion is getting easier and cheaper, thanks to social media. However, don’t mistake cheap and easy with ineffective or a waste of time.

Many experienced businesspeople are still married to traditional marketing and business promotion techniques. They still think in terms of advertising in broadcast and print media. They still think about eyeballs, open rates, and CPMs (cost per thousand views). They’re thinking about impressions, drive time, and prime time. But business promotion has grown beyond traditional marketing and advertising, and moved online.

Why Is Business Promotion Changing?

It’s because of Generation Y and the explosive growth of social media. There are 82 million members of Generation Y (compared to the 78+ million Baby Boomers), and 96% of them are on a social network of some sort. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or other networks, these online tools have reshaped business promotion as we know it.

If you want to reach Generation Y through business promotion, consider social media as your best bet. It costs less than traditional advertising, can be targeted to reach only the people you want, and can easily be measured. The problem with traditional advertising is that you can’t effectively measure whether it was your TV commercials or billboards that resulted in increased sales, and even if one of them was more effective.

How Can I Use Social Media for Online Business Promotion?

Social media is all about communicating and building trust through relationships. By speaking to your customer base on their terms and their turf, you can earn their trust a lot more easily, which can make your business promotion much more effective. Generation Y spends a lot of time online, getting their news and entertainment from the web. They communicate via text messages on their cell phone. And they are the biggest consumer of mobile videos of any generation.

Social media is becoming more popular and widespread. The biggest demographic on Facebook may still be Generation Y, but the fastest growing one is women 50 and over. If that was your biggest customer base, how would you reach them? You could advertise during shows that women over 50 typically watch, but you’re not going to necessarily reach them. Plus, you need to repeat those ads many times, which will get expensive. But with Facebook, you can create fan pages and groups specifically for your target audience. You can even purchase ads that are served only to women in their 50s. You can’t do that with traditional advertising.

Your online business promotion campaign should consist of Twitter, Facebook and/or MySpace, and blogging. Set up accounts, fan pages, blogs, and communicate with your potential customers about the things they want to talk about. Don’t tell them what you do, talk to them about what they do, like, and enjoy. Become a resource for their interests by forwarding articles, providing tips, and telling people about other resources that meet their interests and needs.

Whenever possible, use online business promotions to support your offline promotions as well. If you’re attending a trade show, are sponsoring a special event or team, or are still using traditional marketing, tell people about it through your social networks.

If you’re at a trade show, encourage people on Twitter to stop by your booth. If you’re sponsoring a special event, talk it up on your Facebook fan page. Or if you’re sponsoring a sports team, consider setting up a fan page for that team. Put your Twitter account and Facebook URL in your advertisements, and encourage people to follow you or become fans. There’s no reason these two business promotion methods have to be separate.

While we’re not predicting the death of traditional marketing methods, we are encouraging you to add social media as a big part of your business promotion toolbox.

Reverse SEO’s importance never became more apparent than it did a couple of weeks ago. I got a call from a potential client — we’ll call him Ken H. Block — who had a Google problem.

Ken was a former sports anchor, well-known to sports fans in his area, and has been online for years. He does video marketing for a couple of very large, multi-national companies, as well as some smaller clients. He banked on his name, but hadn’t done very much to promote it. The problem was that there was another man — Ken S. Block, a convicted felon and scam artist — who had the same name. The problem became obvious when the CEO of one of the companies had Googled his name, and found Ken S. He knew Ken H. was not Ken S., but he couldn’t resist teasing him about it. During a phone call with other company executives.

Ken H needed some reverse SEO badly.

What is Reverse SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website so it appears at the top of search engine results. Conversely, reverse SEO means you push down unwanted, negative results by piling your pages on top of the negative one, pushing it right off the page.

Most people only have to worry about name doubles stealing their thunder, but Ken H. had a problem with people confusing him with a convicted felon. While it wasn’t an issue for the people who knew Ken, it could be a problem for the people who wanted to hire him. And short of paying for a Google Ad that said, “Ken S. Block the felon is not to be confused with Ken H. Block the video marketer,” reverse SEO was going to be his best option.

What can Reverse SEO do for me?

Since Ken H’s search results were a single blog post, it doesn’t look like it will be that difficult to knock from the top rank. But it is not always this easy. We know people who share names with other notable people, and they have worked hard to maintain a top search ranking. One friend shares a similar name with a Big Ten running back, which can sometimes lead to some interesting search results.

There are only a few steps we would need to take for Ken S, but we need to do them many times until we achieve the desired result.

• Blogging is the primary tool in our reverse SEO toolbox, and should be the hub in your social media campaign. Ken H should blog about anything and everything related to his work. He should also write about the Ken S./Ken H. confusion (“I am not Ken S. Block”), and try to focus on getting that as a featured post so people will find it during future searches. By winning searches with that post, he can reverse SEO the Ken S. Block page down from the top position.
• YouTube videos are a great reverse SEO tool. And since Ken H. is a video marketer, he needs to use video to promote his work anyway. And as videos become more popular, easier to access, and available on mobile devices, this will become more important in reverse SEO campaigns.
• Backlink to your website. This is a practice for regular SEO, so you know it’s going to work for reverse SEO too. Basically, the search engines put more stock into websites with a lot of links going into them (that’s a backlink). The more you have, the higher your site appears. In Ken H’s case, if he were to increase his backlinks, his blog will rise to the top of the rankings, which will push Ken S’ name down.

Reverse SEO is not that difficult. It’s just time consuming. You can’t just do a couple of optimization tricks and sit back and relax. These steps need to be repeated many times, and in the right places, if you’re going to have a successful reverse SEO campaign.