Secrets to Success Deborah Cole Micek and John-Paul Micek

Succeeding in new-media marketing

LAST WEEK we discussed the third, fourth and fifth of the Ten Commandments of New-Media Marketing Success. They were:

» No. 3: Thou shalt keep thy marketing an ongoing conversation;

» No 4: Thou shalt understand your target audience and honor their wants, needs, and desires;

» No. 5: Thou shalt listen, learn, observe, and adapt.

HERE are the next three guiding principles for successfully marketing with "new media."

» No. 6: Thou shalt participate, comment, and converse in context.

If you enter a conversation on a blog, find out what's being talked about and whether the conversation is relevant so you'll have a better chance of successfully contributing.

What are they looking for? How can you solve a problem, meet their needs, or remove pain? If you can answer these questions, you will be successful in the online networking world.

Regarding context, make sure your comment adds to the conversation in some meaningful way. Don't just say, "Oh yeah, I wrote an article about that on my blog; go check it out."

Your comment is your opportunity to prove that what you have to share is valuable -- the more valuable, the more likely people are to check you out further.

» No. 7: Thou shalt only call it content if it's linkable.

If you post any type of content (written, audio, images, video), people need to be able to reference it on their blog with a permanent link for all of your content.

There should be no "rotting links." This happens when a site posts an article then moves it to an archive. The original link changes with no auto-forwarding feature, or worse, you get a "404 error: page cannot be found." These annoying things stop the new-media marketplace from working properly, and affect your credibility.

» No. 8: Thou shalt assume that readers will enter your site from any page.

Old-school Internet thinking: Put up a Web page. Visitors will come to your site though the home page and then spider out into those other pages. Today, your search-engine rankings come from the keyword-rich content anywhere on your business blog. When people visit your domain coming from a regular search engine, they're going to be coming in through any page on your blog.

Think about what your blog site looks like -- how it is structured for name capture, taking the conversation to the next level, and making the relationship with your readers even more personal.

NEXT WEEK we'll cover participation on individual pages, and testing and tracking.