Last week, I wrote about how to succeed with B-list bloggers, but maybe some of you aren’t convinced.

So, this week, I want to draw an analogy to successful Google AdWords approaches so that you can see how to apply that same technique to blogger outreach. When it comes to reaching out to bloggers online, there’s a lot you can learn from Google AdWords. Long-tail blogger outreach is like long-tail Google AdWords advertising. Instead of putting all your money on the top 10 most expensive and popular keywords that everyone bids on, smart advertisers segment their markets and hyper-target their highest-performing keywords with their most compelling ads and content while always pruning away their worst performers.

The same should be done with blogger outreach. There will always be blogs that are out of your league and your target audience. Instead of hitting your head against the wall by trying to make it onto TechCrunch and Mashable, learn to segment your blogger list, target more precisely while expanding your pool of bloggers past the top most blogs that tend also to be the most exclusive and difficult to break into — out of your league — to blogs and bloggers who are just starting out, who blog more from passion than ad revenue, and who are naturally more receptive to your content and your message based on a natural affinity.

Affiliate marketers have learned that they can reliably make money by spending money on Google AdWords by finding keyword phrases with such low bids that they can make money from the relatively small commissions or bounty they get from converting the click throughs to sales. Millions in yearly profits cent by cent, dollar by dollar. A cascade of small sales made by people who were so well targeted to that they were almost powerless to resist.

The same thing can be done with blogger outreach. If you’re able to find yourself thousands of bloggers who have yet to be discovered by your all your competitors, you’ll be able to secure hundreds of earned media mentions. In concert, hundreds of earned media mentions both drown out a single post on TechCrunch and also do a better job or finding what you really want: sales.

All the most successful AdWords gurus, such as Adam Viener of imwave, realize that you can only make money in affiliate marketing with Google AdWords if you can make more money from your converted sales than you spend. You can’t do this unless you find the magic sweet spot where there aren’t many competing bidders who are bidding up the price of your keyword phrases so that you can both keep your spending low and also increase the likelihood that those who do stumble upon your ad will not only click through, costing you money, but also make a trackable major purchase, resulting in a commission–in commissions–that cover the costs of the ads and then some. This is not easy and the field fluctuates.

It takes expertise and vigilance, Adam tells me, and a mistake can be costly. One possibly apocryphal story reported that there was a very profitable keyword phrase that suddenly also became popular and the bids shot up without someone noticing, resulting in the equivalent of a Range Rover being lost in one day. Because of such high risks tantamount to the stock market, these folks are very good at discovering and milking the long tail, realizing that making a little bit here and there spread concurrently over hundreds and thousands of ads and keywords is more profitable, long term, than making a single big score.

If you’re loaded with cash and don’t really care about extracting value from your campaign, you can spend all your money on trying to get your ad copy at the top of every Google Search just to see it there but being constantly outbid by others, ultimately clearing out your budget or maxing your credit card; the same can be said with regards to blogger outreach: you can spend all your budgeted time and money pursuing the top bloggers while constantly being blocked by content from bigger, sexier, richer, more impressive national and global brands that have exclusive content and truckloads of valuable review products, better assets, and a promise of more and better traffic resulting in higher advertising revenue.

The most obvious thing you can learn is how easily it is to get outbid. Another thing you’ll learn is that AdWords can rapidly burn all your cash with nothing to show for it. Finally, you’ll learn that Google doesn’t wage a fair fight — they both play favorites as well as giving preference to quality of ad over quantity of bid.

What this means in Google AdWords ads is that you’re rewarded for the following: 1) Having lots of cash: a fool and his money are soon parted 2) Finding new markets: Being willing to hunt out holes in the market — keyword combinations that are not so obvious but are hyper-targeted to appeal to a new segment of visitors, bringing new opportunities for Google to make money 3) Creating an irresistible ad: no matter how much money you’re willing to spend, Google doesn’t make money unless visitors are compelled to click through 4) Becoming a long-term client: there are many cases where no amount or money and wit will claim you the top ad position on Google search, inline with organic search, because that spot almost always goes to the client who has made Google the most money, historically, over time.

These lessons map perfectly to blogger outreach.

The blogosphere rewards specialization and laser-targeting

The most desired, desirable, and “easy” keywords are like the top bloggers with the highest Alltop rankings and Klout scores are constantly being pursued. How realistic are you that you can even compete with all the others vying for their time and copy? If you’re Dell or Sony, you probably have the sort of brand recognition and respect to be able to get a blogger to schedule time to review your new gizmo pretty thoroughly. You’ll probably also have the sort of marketing budget that would allow you to offer a review product to everyone you engage.

You’ll probably have a graphic design department and a staff of copywriters who can develop an amusing and compelling pitch which could include press junkets and personal meet and greets. Finally, a company like Dell is able to commit the long-term time, staff, and expense account towards making sure their communications team developed and professional as well as personal relationship with as many online influencers and online journalists over time — to use Google AdWords parlance, they have learned how to appeal to Google on all levels.

How many levels are you able to compete on? If you’re unable to compete on any of these levels, you’ll go bankrupt trying. It’s not that A-List tech bloggers are corrupt, it’s just that they’re under pressure as well. They have only 24-hours/day and they’re heavily rewarded with traffic when they’re able to get exclusive content from a national player such as Dell. In the same way that Google AdWords rewards its clients for trying harder and digging deeper into the “long tail” in order to find new, under-served, markets, the blogosphere also rewards specialization and laser-targeting.

In a perfect world, one should only spend one’s AdWords budget on keywords phrases that display ads only to people who will convert into clients and customers. The better one knows one’s market and customer and the more time one spends finding out who and where they are and engaging them there, the more value you can extract from your sweat and cash.

Let’s say you’re preparing to launch your new book online and you want to use bloggers as an essential distribution channel, both great ideas. However, let’s think this through. Are you internationally famous crime fiction writer James Ellroy or are you an unknown first-time, self-published, crime fiction-writer? Do you have a huge war chest to fuel your promotional campaign or are you running on sweat equity? Do you have thousands of friends online who are already committed to buying your book because you have been developing your popularity online by sharing chapters and answering questions and giving free advice or have you been busily scribbling your work on yellow pads and consider your work protected by strict copyright and not something to dilute by giving it away?

Novice Google AdWords users waste a lot of money with limited results when they start out because they don’t understand how the competition works in contextual ad-buying: It’s an auction. A complicated auction.

In short, the way it works is that every keyword combination, such as “social media marketing,” competes with four things: the general popularity of the search, the quality of the keyword ad, the long-term success of the campaign, and how much money others are willing to bid for their ad based on their keyword choice, also dependent on their prior successes, ad spends, and long-term commitment. In shorter, while how much you’re willing to bid for a keyword phrase is important, it isn’t that simple.

With blogger outreach, you face the same odds as for paid search. If you are targeting only the top blogs, you’ll face immense competition and can easily be outgunned by bigger foes. If you target the long tail of bloggers, you can more easily land your targets and will build up success one blog at a time, rather than in one fell swoop.

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz viaBiznology

Related articles

• The Long Tail strategy for AdWords works for blogger outreach (socialmedia.biz)
• A long tail strategy for AdWords for blogger outreach (marketingconversation.com)
• How the Long Tail AdWords Approach Works for Blogger Outreach (biznology.com)
• Live people over Robot Armies and Zombie Hordes (chrisabraham.com)
• How to Launch a Google AdWords Campaign the RIGHT Way (hubspot.com)
• 3 Adwords Metrics That Make All the Difference [Guest Post] (distilled.net)
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Google+ launched prematurely — so take advantage!

There is unnecessary unrest that has been buffeting the launch of Google’s newest online social network, Google Plus, and the reason for that is simple: Google was forced to launch G+ because Twitter blocked Google’s real-time and direct access to Twitter updates. This is now becoming old news but it explains everything. This is why Google+ didn’t have a brand page similar to Facebook Pages, built-in upon launch, resulting in either a transparent and compliant real name membership or deletion, with the exception of Ford Motor Companyand a few others that are the only brands that are in a testing phase, the sort of testing that happens in limited and private beta.

What has been happening even before the real names scandal is the scandal that any and all Google Plus profiles that were not simply real users with real names were deleted en masse. Most of the very early adopters who did not read the explicit terms of service (ToS) took the opportunity to not only create a G+ account for themselves but also set up Google Plus profiles for their brands and companies as well.

Within a day of being allowed in via viral invite or connections, there were thousands of connected, fleshed-out and promoted ad hoc corporate and nonprofit brand pages popping up everywhere.

This is a pretty common behavior in any new system as the tech-savvy flood in and test boundaries and limitations even if they have read the ToS closely. The truly unique and impressive (or tyrannical) response was in Google enforcement, which was immediate, insidious, terrifying and often sloppy when it came to brands. Brands were deleted that were, in fact, true names run by true people, often celebrities.

I remember adding Vin Diesel to my circles. He was removed, though I never discovered if real Vin or brand Vin or fake Vin fell under Google’s sword. Another was Captain Kirk (William Shatner), who was deleted but who really was who he said he was.

I won’t get political here and talk about whether it is OK or not to demand and enforce real names or if anonymity for safety’s sake is what should be allowed — except to say that if you’re not savvy enough to effectively fool Google, then you’re not savvy enough to escape detection and maintain the integrity of your privacy and anonymity. So you need to make sure any privacy and anonymity processes you adopt needs to be foolproof. If not, you’re really deceiving yourself as to how protected you are behind your nom de guerre if someone really wants to identify or harm you. OK, enough of that.

Why did Google give birth to a preemie?

The meat of this article is why Google would give birth to a preemie when there really was no reason to release until everything was perfect. Well, there surely was an intense flame under Google’s seat that made them roll something out that was bound to be more trouble than it was worth, and that’s the real-time web.

Until Google Plus, there was only one true source for real-time news and real-time trends: Twitter. While Facebook speaks about its Social Graph and is privy to real-time trend data, only Twitter shares with the world by default. A microblog instead of an online social network. By default, Facebook profiles tend to be walled gardens, sharing only with explicitly-approved-of friends. Facebook Pages are much more open and search engine optimized, but still suffer from being very proprietary and more difficult to directly hitch onto in the same unfettered way that Twitter has been known for — until now.

Back on July 3, Twitter cut Google off. The details are murky (and if you do know details, please help me out in the comments), but before that happened, Google was able to build an entire new product: real-time search results. If I searched for “Chris Abraham“ or “chrisabraham,” I would see a short, scrolling, section towards the top of the search results that would cycle through my latest tweets as well as tweets that were related, such as mentions of me or retweets.

This real-time search that tapped Twitter’s real-time web become one of most exciting and interesting Google killer apps–something that Yahoo! and Bing couldn’t match, matched only by Twitter’s own search.twitter.com. Real-time web results also amplified the value of Google’s old reliable Google Alerts service, allowing it to become one of the most valuable early-warning reputation management tools in marketing — and all for free, at least $600 less than professional social media monitoring dashboards such as Radian6, Sysomos and Visible Intelligence.

When Google’s full-pipe access to Twitter was mysteriously cut, for whatever reason, Google scrambled, attempting to keep up appearances by turning up its sensitivity to secondary sources like Friendfeed and Tweetmeme as well as its focus on blogs and other sources that receive nearly immediate updates, but nothing was able to surf the real-time Web the same way that Twitter does, globally, in one normalized and consistent XML feed.

The results were that after the direct access to real-time tweets was cut off, the latency between a tweet and when Google was able to reflect that plummeted. Compared to the world pre-Twitter, it was nearly real-time; however, it was more akin to the free stock market numbers that you can get on Google and Yahoo! Finance: there was often a 10-minute time delay–way too long to be the best, way too long to appeal to journalists, activists and businessmen to use Google as an integrated news portal instead of where you go after you see what’s going on on Twitter, where the true pulse is.

Google Plus was launched prematurely as an emergency heart transplant to save a patient that had lost his pulse because it wasn’t in possession of its own heart — it was reliant and dependent on Twitter to maintain the pulse.

Google+ was a very smart idea, but it only makes sense in its half-assed Tonka Toy sort of state when you consider the above. If Google can activate every single Gmail user on Google+, then Google will have over 220 million new users and sources of real-time updates for their real time search product, matching or bettering the number of users that Twitter has. If they make it happen — and they’re being very aggressive with their methods since they pretty much just give an account to anyone with a Gmail account.

Plus, for anyone that really cares about being part of search, anyone who cares even a little bit about Google’s search hegemony, there’s another benefit to participating in Google+:  search priority, search timeliness and search relevance. There’s a good chance that the best way to show up first on Google search is to invest your brand and your time force-feeding all your content and trends to Google products such as Plus and YouTube.

Why it make sense to use Google Plus: Reach

That’s the reason why I go out of my way to make sure I cross post to Google Plus in addition to Facebook and Twitter. I want my content to remain relevant and essential when it comes to Google’s serendipity engine. When it comes to my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, 80% of all of my traffic comes from Google and other search.

I wonder what’s going on with Twitter and why Google was cut off, but this obviously made Google not just nervous but quite irrational and more willing to play the “beta test on paying customers” game that Microsoft is well-known for. While I believe that maybe Google is post-beta and post-labs, there is no branded indication that Google+ is more than a work in progress on its way to a fully formed being.

It surely is not fully formed. It’s a chalked suit that’s in the middle of being tailored, but is far from finished. Google+ was deployed too soon to really be able to invest in down the long-tail. Luckily, Google+ is still very much the home of the technorati, the technical elite. While Google+ likes to portray itself as being modular and flexible, it is really a hodgepodge mess that is far from being intuitive.

What’s worse is that none of my iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry apps, such as FourSquare, Hipstamatic, Selective Tweets, or any of my normal cross-posting tools have yet to integrate Google Plus, so I can’t, as far as I know, add a hashtag to my SMS tweets to 40404 that cross-posts to Google Plus the same way I can do to Facebook with a #fb.

When will Google Plus Brand Pages arrive?

All in all, today, a quarter of a year after Google+ was prematurely born, there are very few solutions for sharing, cross-posting and auto-posting that don’t include grabbing code snippets, hacking JavaScript, and dancing with Chrome 3rd party ad-hoc solutions that nobody short of a coder would be able to sort out.

So, Google Plus assures us that Google+ Brand pages will be awesome, be better than Facebook and meet all our needs as social media marketers. However, Google has been reporting that Brand pages will go public “later this year” and this is later this year, at least in relationship to the July 2011 announcement. We’ll see how late in the year Google Plus Brand Pages will come to fruition; however, if I am right about the rush-opening based on panic and desperate need, then it will be closer to the tail end of the year than any time in the Fall.

That said, I spend an extra hour a day making sure everything I share and say on Facebook and Twitter is shared to Google+ as well. Why? Well, if everybody’s bailing on Google+ already, then there will be relatively little competition for the “real-time web” search results on Google. I assume that since anything I tweeted showed up immediately before the break in Google Search that everything I “Plus” will be immediately indexed and show up in real time web, real time Google search as well–as long as I always remember to select “Public” every time I post things.

So, while it might be a half-assed product with a lot of promise but very little cohesion or continuity, it is also all that Google’s got right now, so they’ll be leaning very heavily on anything and everything that is being openly and publicly shared on your wall. So it is stupid and short-sighted to roll your eyes, turn your back, give Plus that hand, and go away until Brand Pages go public.

Take the extra time, become an expert in the space, work on your Google Plus celebrity, and enjoy the added prestige you’ll enjoy as a direct reward for your taking the risk and investing in this new platform — and Google Search cannot deny that it’s nepotistic and favors and rewards early-adopters and devotees, so make sure you spend a little time becoming OG+ (Original Google+) and you might discover that you’ve discovered a secret weapon in your messaging, marketing, publicity and organic SEO campaign.

But don’t you dare try to create a Google Plus account in anything but your very own true name, because Google seems to have a hair trigger when it comes to summarily executing any members who it doesn’t deem absolutely authentic.  Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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• Google Real Time Search v2 (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
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I try to read through my RSS feeds every day. Today I stumbled upon an article by my friend Christopher S Penn, entitled Social media now directly influences search rankings.

It shows that Google is playing Tri-D chess in a world where most companies are mastering checkers:

If you’re marketing something, there’s now a direct incentive to build your network as large as possible among your prospective customers. Size matters.

Long story short: every search you make on Google returns results that are weighted heavily to favor people in your social network, especially those people and brands to have a lot of friends, likes, and followers.

In other words, you can access top organic search engine results for your company, brand, products and services by really diving into social media marketing and eveloping connections, followers, likes, and lists–getting people to like your brand on Facebook or follow your brand on Twitter hasn’t ever just been about brand awareness, it has also become an essential secret weapon for search engine ranking.

You should read Chris’ article for sure, but I have my own example to show how personally-tailored Google search has become

A few days ago a journalist friend of mine popped me a note to ask me if I knew the Rosetta Stone CEO. I didn’t, however, he thought I must because my name came up twice when he searched for ‘Rosetta Stone” on Google.

See, I blogged for Rosetta Stone for a while and have used their products for years. When I did the same search, I didn’t show on the first page at all. Online, my friend’s world is heavily colored by me.

I showed up because he and I are connected via LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Talk, Gmail, Twitter, and who knows where else.

His search reality isn’t objective at all. It is being heavily adjusted by the connections he has and will make to other people and brands online. In real time, immediately, to order, based on dozens of tacit connections.

Google isn’t stupid. I won’t show up in all of his web searches–only those that are relevant to what he wants. However, if I have ever written and published anything online that is, in fact, relevant, there’s an excellent chance I will turn up on page one, possibly even if he’s logged out of Gmail.

With the multitude of social network profiles that I possess and maintain, the nearly five-thousand friends I have on Facebook (including the high-caste of many of my friends), the 38,000 followers I have on Twitter, and my 12-year-old blog, my 2,200 contacts on LinkedIn, 3,400 folks on FourSquare, subscribers on FeedBurner, all my content on YouTube, and others, means that Google generally tries to include me in other people’s searches of the Internet, gaming serendipity to the point that I come up as a few of the search results on such a competed-for search term like Rosetta Stone in the Manhattan offices of one of the top global newspapers.

I chose to use this example because I have invested myself so heavily towards building these connections shamelessly. People wonder why I would engage in promiscuous “follow back” on Twitter and maintain the maximum friends on Facebook? Surely I am not special. I, like anyone else, cannot maintain close friendships in excess of Dunbar’s Number of 150 friends.

I have been doing this for myself, for my company, and for my clients, using myself as the most shameless example to prove the concept that having the “right” friends online, following the few “right” people and brands is not only wrong but dangerous.

Yes, get the right followers, but also get as many followers as possible. In a world where people get their search results based on who their friends are and what they’re looking at or doing, you’re going to want to become connected to as many as humanly possible, possibly indiscriminately but certainly promiscuously. The more people you touch via social media and social network connections, the greater the chance that you will always be a top result whenever they do a search in your general direction.

Sure, my level of social media populism is not for everyone because it does take a lot of work, and pursuing the Cluetrain long tail of everyone can surely scare away some of your elite contacts and friends, which it has done, personally, because I do create a lot of content and “noise” to someone who only has 150 friends on LinkedIn, on MySpace, Friendster, and Twitter. I have surely driven them away and hear, “I had to unfollow you because you were the only person I ever saw on my
Facebook wall.” Fair enough. No worries.

While this example is personal, all of these map across to brand beautifully. I am co-founder and president of Abraham Harrison and Google knows that. It is on my Google Profile (you really need to look at this and set this up and try to get all your employees to set their profiles up as well). Google met me halfway when it came to the profile, too, as it was mostly already sorted out for me when I arrived. I just made sure they didn’t miss anything.

This might all seem like Mickey Mouse child’s play but the net effect is that the experience of daily search for tens of thousands of people online tends towards returning content that I have liked, dugg, retweeted, blogged, stumbled upon, thumbed up, shared, starred, emailed, and recommended, including a mainstream media highest-caste global newspaper journalist, and others. Their search reality is strangely influenced by my Internet behavior. That’s powerful. In the attention data game, I am considered a super-node.

In terms of an SEO strategy, this means–and has meant for a while–that simply nailing your site’s information architecture, naming convention, keyword-rich URLs and titles, content, keywords, ALT tags, and link strategy is not nearly enough.

The new secret weapon for Search Engine Optimization is digital Public Relations and Social Media Marketing.

Even more info on this strategy over on Steve Rubel and SEOmoz. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmdia.biz via Mike Moran’s Biznology blog.

I popped into AdSense earlier today, as I do as obsessively as anyone online with Google AdWords ads running on their sites, and something new popped up:

How exciting! It has all begun today! I clicked on “Get the code snippet” and here’s what I saw:

Here’s the basic code you can put anywhere on your site, preferably embedded into your site’s template:

<!– Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag –>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>

<!– Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render –>
<g:plusone></g:plusone>

I have already installed a plugin for my WordPress Installs called Google +1 which is working perfectly.

If you want to learn more about Google +1 then please visit Google Webmaster tools — and here’s a helpful video about what Google +1 is:

Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz

Ellen Ewart has some fantastic advice to the business that is social media-curious but has yet to take the first step towards engagement: listen — If You’re Not Ready to Participate, Listen.

If you’re not already online, check out some blogs before you dive right in. If you’re not using your voice or moderating comments about your brand, chances are that hasn’t stopped other people from doing it. A good way to start is to simply listen and gage what your brand looks like in the online space. Perform a simple Google search to see where you are mentioned.

This is very important to do. It all comes down to measuring thrice, cutting once.  It is also important if you think of yourself as being a brand new gold fish entering a new tank: spend some time acclimatizing.   Here are some questions that Ellen Ewart offers you to ask before you take the first cut:

1. How have others perceived your brand? Is it in line with your corporate identity?
2. Is your logo familiar or trusted?
3. Has anything you’ve done in the recent past been controversial? If so, how have people reacted amongst themselves and has your company responded in any way?
4. Is there consistency in how people interpret your brand?
5. Are there any consistent keywords associated with your brand? Check keywords between sites that mention your brand.
6. Do people believe that you fulfill your brand promise? If not, how far do you fall short?
7. Are there any media outlets that don’t cover your news? If so, identify how to reach that audience.
8. Are your press mentions positioned accurately?
9. Do your employees participate in any conversation about your brand? Do they properly understand your brand’s promise?
10. Perform this type of research on your closes competitors to get a sense of how each fares.

These questions are a gift and you should read the rest of the article and the Bizzia Brandcurve blog as well.