Email marketing: Is a form of direct marketing – sending emails out to customers / clients with interesting offers as well as industry news will help get you noticed and promote specific areas of your website.

Blogs: A company blog will enhance your presence online providing you give your audience interesting and useful information, whether it’s about your brand or the industry sector you are in. It helps to include links and produce SEO friendly content to ensure good search engine visibility.

Articles: updating your audience by providing current news updates through press releases will help improve traffic if you use high quality links and fully optimised content, as well as good quality online news wire resources.

Social Media: maximise your blog posts and articles by publishing links on social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

More traditional ways to help improve web traffic includes, search engine optimisation (SEO), link building and pay per click (PPC).

Optimising your article could mean that 1000 people read it rather than 100. Getting your thoughts or article read from across the World Wide Web could be very important for your online status and reputation building.

I’m trying to get at how PR and SEO cross over, how doing some keyword research and optimising your text can get you known in your area of expertise. Here are a few simple rules I generally use:

1. decide on your subject area
2. do some keyword research, general, then narrow down your search topic
3. keep the keywords safe, as they could come in handy another time – always do a quick check to ensure you have picked the most searched for terms
4. write your text keeping your keywords in mind
5. When reading back your text insert your keywords > N.B. make sure the text still makes sense.

Inserting keywords can make all the difference to how many people view your piece.

“On travel companies not reviewing Web 2.0/Social Media as part of a comprehensive Internet marketing and distribution strategy, together with website re-designs and optimisations, search marketing, email marketing, strategic linking, online sponsorships and display advertising: Many travel companies don’t have the resources or confidence to think holistically.” said Scott McNeely, Director of Consumer & Affiliate Web, Viator Inc. also recommends that travel suppliers should constantly update content.

take a look..

The need to keep up-to-date with social media and business is imperative to promote the brand as much as possible…SEO, SEM, link building, web design etc

The WebCertain International Search Summit event about Social Media and International opportunities will be held in London @ the British Library on 14th May 2009… Find out more

This is one of the cornerstones of writing press releases and remains unchanged. You imagine the grumpy sub-editor who has a chip on his shoulder about supposedly overpaid PR types, looking for grammatical mistakes as an excuse to spike your story. You imagine the stressed out young reporter who has a target of x stories per day to write and might just be tempted to overlook the fact that this is a bloody press release, because it won’t need much re-writing and it just about comes across as a kosher news story (not that working in the media has made me cynical. Oh no…)

But now if you work in online PR, you are more than likely writing on social networking sites and imagining your audience is a much more complicated affair (ignore the hecklers shouting, “it’s easy, they’re all geeks!”).

For example:
On Facebook, my boyfriend updated his status with the esoteric statement “…is baking in the boulangerie of the mind”, which was understandable to precisely one person (me, it’s a long story).

Again on Facebook, a friend posted “…thinks 5-0 will do very nicely, thanks.” This is understandable to everyone that knows that he is a Man Utd fan.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Laure is wondering where John is (and appropriately enough in this mixed up, muddled up world, this is a reference to said John’s unexplained disappearance from Facebook). Meanwhile I’m confusing people with an oblique reply to Oscar about the mayor of London (“who’s Boris?” I’m asked by a third party).

My point is that on social networking sites you are often addressing different overlapping audiences, with different interests, and with different levels of knowledge about your subject matter. Confusing things even further is the presence of friends-of-friends who don’t actually know you at all.

It’s obvious that if your boss or clients might be reading, this isn’t the place for letting off steam at the end of a bad day at work. Correction, it should be obvious.

If you are planning on using social networks for marketing or online PR, you need to go back to basics and define who you are and who you want your audience to be.

You have the choice to be an online mate, a handy bite-sized news source, the straightforward corporate face of your company, or the knowledgeable (but human! I am human, look what I had for my lunch while I was finding you that link to the latest data on web usage in Uzbekistan!) SEO-expert networker – the latter accounting for approximately 50% of people on Twitter by my reckoning.

NB – Imagining my audience for this blog is super-easy – it’s the most intelligent and beautiful group of humans known to man – aren’t you! Do leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this.

Recently the tour operator Activities Abroad sent out an email to all its clients and contacts apparently as a “tongue-in-cheek” marketing strategy! I haven’t been working in online PR and marketing for very long however, I do know that offering ‘Chav Free’ holidays wasn’t the best angle to go at, the offence that its contacts have taken especially over typecasting people’s names is understandable when you work damn hard for a living etc, you can check out the story on The BBC website

Mr McLean, Director of Activities Abroad claimed he was sticking up for ‘Middle Class’, I don’t believe there are class systems in this country anymore, or am I mistaken? Surely there are better and more inventive ways to market holidays, especially through email marketing and online, its the fastest growing segment way to market, is it not?

“No link juice with E-Shots is there though?”

This got me thinking (Carrie Bradshaw-style) and so I wondered, can you generate link juice from email marketing campaigns?

Firstly, link juice is never going to be the prime mover in email marketing. As with other online PR strategies, the priorities are building brand awareness, relationship management and generating immediate site visits.

However, there are ways to exploit email campaigns and gain SEO benefits.
1. Host your email newsletters on a stand-alone domain. Optimise this site so it ranks – identifying it as a news site. This is an effective way to increase top level search engine visibility for your brand, products and services. (Part of the Ring of Fire)

2. Use your site CMS to build content pages for your e-newsletters and e-shots, the back pages, rather than the front page which appear in your readers’ inboxes. This is all good, relevant content that can be indexed by the search engines.

3. Do you send out messages with a strong visual impact? If you have designs that are genuinely interesting, it might be worth putting them on FlickR and other image directories.

4. Make a feature of the newsletter sign-up function on your website and make sure it is also included on any corporate blogs and forums. If you produce a well-rounded newsletter that isn’t just a list of points-of-sale, there is the opportunity to promote this as feature of your company / website in a PR campaign – thus, generating links!

I’m sure there are lots of other things, I’ll add them when I think of them. Have you got any tips to add?