Social Networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ have become a large part of our daily lives and identity. They provide a way for businesses and people to expose themselves to all the Internet has to offer. With so many personal and professional networks, it’s important to strike a balance between personal and professional profiles.

If you’re like most small businesses, you probably have a presence on one or more Social Networking services. In order for your online profiles to best represent your company, it’s very important that you are aware of how your online profiles represent your business on a professional level. There are a number of ways you can balance your professional and personal profiles across the vast number of social networks out there. Here are three common ways to manage your profiles.

1. One Profile For All

This is easiest way to manage your presence online: maintain one profile for for both personal and professional networking. With one profile, all of your activity is seen by both your personal and professional contacts, so you must be careful what you say and post. If you use this approach and manage your profile well, you will have a well rounded profile showcasing the best of both your sides. However, if this approach is used poorly it could create an identity nightmare, with a negative reputation on both sides.

If you use this method, many social networks allow you to group your contacts and select what posts each group can see. For instance, when posting a comment or status update on Facebook, click the arrow beside Post. A menu will open with different options regarding who the post will be shared with. You can also press the Custom button and manually enter people to exclude.

On Google+, you can divide your contacts into different circles and share information and posts with those circles. Click the Circles button, and your contacts will appear, along with circles options. Start a new circle, name it, then simply drag and drop contacts into the circle. When you want to post, in the bar under the box where you put the information click +Add Circles Or People To Share With, make your selections, and click post.

On Linkedin, click your name in the top right of the screen, and select Settings. Click Select who can see my activity feed, then select the category that suits you.

2. Separate Personal from Professional

With this method, you maintain two profiles on each networking site you use: one for professional use and one for personal. This is a good approach for users who want to maintain or improve their work-life balance. Sign in to your personal account when you want to post something personal and sign into your professional account when you want to post something related to your business. This is a good approach because it will minimize the chance that your boss, colleagues, or clients will see something you don’t want them to see.

The biggest downside to this method is you will spend more time on Social Networking sites, and will need to keep track of what profile you are signed into when you post something.

3. Use Different Services for Different Purposes

Users of this method completely separate the different networks, using the strengths of the networks to leverage themselves. For example, use Facebook for personal use, and use Linkedin for professional activity. This is beneficial if you want to use one or two sites and don’t have time to keep up to date with all the new social networks.

Whichever method you choose, your goal should be to show who you are while maintaining a balance. Here are some tips on ensuring a balance:

• Time off from Social Media. It is a good idea to step away from the computer or phone and have face-to-face interaction with people in both circles.
• Separate Time. No matter what method you choose, it could be a good idea to separate the time you spend on professional and personal networking. For instance, set aside time in the morning for professional-related posts, and time in the afternoon for personal.
• Use restriction settings. It is a good idea to restrict who can see your information with in different profiles.
• Think twice before you post, walk away, think again, then post. Remember that everything you put online stays there. Forever. Always take some time to think about what you are about to post. If you are unsure, don’t post it.
• Practice Social Pruning: With new updates and features to many of the networks, you can delete old posts and junk posts.
• Be aware of the ever-changing privacy policies and how they affect you.
• Always have a degree of professionalism. Watch your language, spelling, and grammar. Think: “Will I be embarrassed if my Grandmother reads this?” If yes, then best to leave it off.

With a little effort and knowledge you can set up your profiles to be beneficial to you, bringing out the best you can be. If you would like to know more about balancing your Social Network profiles or Social Networks, please contact us.

I think we can all agree that vacations are nice. We all need them to keep our sanity. As much as I love working at Pronto, I love getting out of Bangkok and completely forgetting about work for a few days even more. I just got back from a long weekend in the mountains of Northern Thailand, eating delicious food, watching the sunrise from a mountain on the Thai/Laos border, and indulging in a few too many beers. But now, I’m back in Bangkok and I have a boat load of emails to get through.

I do my best, usually with very little success, to follow Inbox Zero. But I think lofty goals are one of the best ways to push yourself to improve. In this post, I’ll discuss some tips and tools that might not get you to zero emails, but will hopefully improve your efficiency and organization.

Note: I use Gmail as my primary email client, but before making the switch, I spent years working in Outlook. While most of this post will focus on Gmail, everything discussed can be done in Outlook as well.

When in Doubt, Archive It Out…

…out of your inbox, that is. With the massive amount of storage space provided by Gmail, deleting email is no longer necessary and keep hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox is just foolish. Of course, spam and irrelevant emails should still be deleted, but anything that has the potential to come up again in the future should be archived or moved to its appropriate folder. During the past year and half at Pronto, I’ve saved probably 90% of my emails and I’ve only hit 20% of my storage capacity.

In theory, every message in your inbox should be actionable. If it’s not, archive it, move it to a folder or use one of the tools mentioned below to get it out of your inbox. With so many messages being saved, knowing a few search operators can be very useful for finding emails down the road. Place these in front of your search phrase to narrow things down:

• from:me
• to:email@example.com
• from:email@example.com
• label:example

The extent to which you label emails and move them to separate folders is somewhat a matter of preference. I tend to keep things fairly organized with 6 top-level labels (many of which have sub-labels), but a good deal of messages don’t fit directly into one of these – those emails get archived. On the other hand, Cory has no dependency on labels, archiving 100% of his emails and using his mastery of search operators to find them later on.

Quick tip: Enable the Send & Archive Button in Gmail Labs to respond to a message and archive the thread in one action.

Even if moving emails to separate label/folder isn’t your thing, I’ve found that tagging them with labels (or color-coded flags in Outlook), while still in your inbox, can be very useful when organizing and prioritizing your work flow. At a glance, you should be able to tell how important a message is and which category it falls under.

Memorize Hotkeys and Learn to Love Them

This won’t necessarily move things out of your inbox, but when you find yourself overwhelmed with a huge amount of new messages, hotkeys can help you quickly process them.

To enable Gmail shortcuts, go to Settings and under the General tab, select “Keyboard shortcuts on.” There is a wide selection of shortcuts in Gmail so pick out a few important ones and start using them everyday. If you don’t like the default hotkeys, you can enable a Gmail Lab called Custom Keyboard Shortcuts that allows you edit the shortcut commands.

Quick tip: If you’re only going to learn two shortcuts, know these:
a – Reply All, e – Archive

Outlook’s shortcuts and equally impressive and even more daunting. Again, pick out a few useful commands to start with. Outlook also gives you the ability create shortcuts for any action of your choosing, like moving an email to a specific folder or creating a new email. Before switching to Gmail, I used these:

• Ctrl+Shift+1 – Mark as read and archive
• Ctrl+Shift+2 – Mark as read and move to SEO folder
• Ctrl+Shift+3 – Mark as read and move to Social Media folder
• Ctrl+Shift+4 – Create new email to Pronto Team

Never Forget an Email with Boomerang

Does this sound familiar? You receive an email that isn’t immediately actionable, so in an effort to clear your inbox, you archive it or move it to a folder. Well, guess what? Everyone else on the email chain has done the same thing and everyone is so busy that the project is forgotten about for weeks on end.

With Boomerang, that’s no longer an issue. If no one responds to an email, you can schedule it to be moved back into your inbox on a specific date and time.

You can also schedule emails to be sent at a later time. Great for those of you who tend to burn the midnight oil and don’t want to send any email out at 12:30 in the morning.

The plugin is also available for Outlook.

Check out all my options with the Send & Archive
Button and Boomerang enabled!

Never Forget a Task with GQueues

GQueues is your is your task manager on steroids. It seamlessly integrates with Gmail and provides far more flexibility than the native task manager.

To be honest, I’ve never been good at organizing my tasks. I always end up with email about long-term projects just sitting in my inbox for weeks. GQueues helps me get things cleaned up. Click a single button in Gmail and that message is saved as a new task in GQueues.

Quick tip: Use the GQueues bookmarklet to add a new task directly from your browser with a link back to the page you are currently viewing.

Within GQueues, you can move tasks between categories, create task hierarchy levels, create sub-tasks, integrate with your Google Calendar and even assign tasks and collaborate with others. Although GQueues doesn’t offer any mobile apps, their mobile site allows task syncing on any device.

Here’s a sneak peak at my tasks for the upcoming
Social Media Program reboot we’re working on!

I wasn’t able to find an application that integrates with Outlook on the same level as GQueues, but if you’re an Outlook power user and you’re looking to upgrade your task manager, Remember the Milk offers a freemium service that syncs with all platforms.

Never Forget a Contact with Rapportive

I’m terrible with names. I’m also terrible at keeping my professional contacts organized in social networks. Rapportive helps with both of these issues. Open an email and you immediately get information about the person pulled from various social networks. You even get their profile picture so you get put a face to the name.

If you’re not already connected with them on the major social networks Rapportive integrates with, you can do so directly from Gmail.

Don’t forget to add notes about your contacts! Did you recently meet a bunch of people at a networking event? Add details about them in Rapportive so your next email can be more personalized.

LinkedIn recently purchased Rapportive so you can expect to see deeper LinkedIn integration in the near future. Xobni provides a similar service that works with both Outlook and Gmail.

The Future of Email

I’ve read a few articles claiming that email is dying, and to a limited extent I agree. At Pronto, we use a closed Facebook group for non-essential messages, like voting on our activity for the company retreat, leaving our inboxes open for urgent business communications. We also use a Skype group chat to ask quick questions and discuss issues across the whole team.

Perhaps casual email is slowly dying. I would likely write on a friend’s Wall before sending them an email; however, true business email is here to stay – at least for the foreseeable future. So you might as well get good at it! There’s a lot more that goes into Inbox Zero, but being efficient and organized with your email is the first place to start.

Tim Kelsey,
SEO & Social Media Manager

SEO is only getting more complicated. As a website owner, it’s hard to balance all the aspects of your Internet Presence and often, SEO can be a major time sink and constant source of concern. You’re plagued by questions like, “Which updates will have the greatest SEO impact for my site? Which Google algorithm updates do I need to worry about?” When someone comes along and says, “Hey, I can take care of all of this for you,” it’s easy to just say yes and shove another item off your plate.

Unfortunately, not everyone who’s offering SEO services has your website’s best interest at heart. SEO scammers know that most site owners have only a basic knowledge of SEO, and they’re looking to take advantage of this. Here are a few tips to avoid shady SEOs.

1. Unsolicited Email

Every website owner has seen their fair share of these. It might be sent through a contact form on your site or through a direct email, but the message is always the same – vague promises about improving your website.

Professional SEO companies do not randomly send spam emails looking for new clients. They follow the same marketing tactics that you do – email campaigns, customer referrals, blog posts, online advertising, and of course, SEO.

An unsolicited email should be an immediate red flag. Mark as spam and move on.

2. Guaranteed Rankings

You might come across something like, “We guarantee your site will rank #1 for XYZ.”

There are a couple things to dispute here. First, no one can really guarantee a ranking for anything. Search algorithms are so amazingly complex that making a promise about the outcome is absurd.

Second, SEO isn’t really about rankings. Rankings are simply an intermediary step in the process. SEO is about driving quality traffic to your site through search engines. Ranking #1 for a keyword doesn’t mean anything unless that keyword has the ability to bring traffic to your site.

So, when you start hearing promises, ask yourself if ranking for XYZ is really going to provide any benefit.

3. The Details of Their Service Are a Mystery

With so many uninformed website owners out there, I think it’s an SEO’s duty to be very transparent. Any SEO company worth its weight in search results should be able to explain the details of their services. If they are building links for you, they should be able to tell you what kind of links they are building and the basics of how they will go about obtaining those links. If they are making updates to your site, they should be able to explain what they are changing and why they are changing it.

However, don’t expect full disclosure. Every SEO company has proprietary information that they won’t share with you, but they should be able to explain their services with enough detail to make you feel comfortable.

4. Search Engine Submission

This one’s a classic. Back in the ‘90s, websites had to submit their pages directly to search engines. This went out the door in the early 2000s when search engines developed the ability to crawl links and start indexing sites on their own. Search engine submission is 100% unnecessary and is something you definitely shouldn’t be paying for.

NOTE: Don’t get this confused with local SEO, which requires submitting your business information to Google Places, Bing Local or Yahoo Local, or with sitemaps which are submitted to search engines via Webmaster Tools as a best practice.

5. Unrealistic Prices

You get what you pay for. If someone offers to build links for $50, you’re going to get $50 worth of useless links. SEO for a small business should cost around $300 – $1000 per month. Prices can vary based on the scope of the service or the competitiveness of your vertical.

There isn’t really an upper limit to SEO spending. A medium-size business could easily spend $5,000 on some quality work, while very large businesses might spend tens of thousands each month.

How to Avoid the Scams?

Most SEO scams are built to take advantage of a lack of knowledge, so the best way to combat them is by informing yourself. If you feel absolutely clueless about SEO, the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide is a great place to start.

If you already have the basics covered, start reading SEOmoz’s blog posts or check out their Q&A Forum to dig into some more advanced topics.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t going looking for an SEO company. They are many reputable agencies and consultants out there that can do wonders for your site. If you are unsure about any company or don’t know where to start, just ask us! We spend time learning SEO so you don’t have to, and we’re happy to make recommendations.

You might also find it helpful to familiarize yourself with the SEO services covered by Pronto so you don’t end up paying an outside consultant for something we already have under control.

Tim Kelsey,
SEO & Social Media Manager

Bump in Visits from Organic Search Showcases Importance of Business Listings Identity Management

Sterling, Va. (January 30, 2012) – Localeze, a Neustar service and a trusted business listings identity management provider for local search, today revealed the success of its partnership with channel client Pronto Marketing, an Internet Presence Management provider for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). Through this partnership, Pronto Marketing revealed that clients using Localeze’s business listings identity management solution over a 90-day period received more than 30 percent more visits to their web sites from organic local search traffic than clients that did not.

Read More…

In last week’s Pronto Insider, we announced important updates about your blog content. If you haven’t done so already, we want to remind you to update your subscription preferences. This will only take a few moments of your time and ensure that you have the blog content that really works for your unique business.

Questions? Read: How to Update Your Subscription Preferences

The next super important thing you can do to ensure that the content Pronto delivers to your blog each week is right on target, is to join the discussion in the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums.

Pronto’s Managing Editor, Barb Levisay and I are actively involved with clients in sharing and developing ideas for new blog articles. You can shape the content on your website with your active participation in these forums.

More White Papers in 2012

In the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums, you’ll see: Forum White Paper & Copy Ideas & Discussion. We have a few open discussions on new white paper topics including Cloud Services, BDR and Business Continuity Planning. We’d love to have your feedback so we can deliver new white papers you can really use.

Don’t wait – update your preferences and join in the fun by visiting these forums. Let’s make 2012 the best year ever for the content on your website.

 

I am very happy to announce that Pronto and our newest team member, Barb Levisay, are expanding our partnership in a new and exciting direction. Barb has now taken on the responsibilities as Pronto’s Managing Editor.

Many of you may know Barb and her company Marketing for Partners, from her years of work in the channel with IT service providers, partners, ISV and other companies just like yours. Others of you probably know Barb from her weekly “Marketing Matters” column in Redmond Channel Partner magazine. Regardless, one things is clear – she has a really unique blend of industry experience with technology companies and the ability to tell their stories with effective marketing and editorial content.

In 2011, we launched our services for Microsoft Dynamics partners with Barb. Right away, Barb’s depth of professional knowledge and fantastic editorial skills were made clear to the Pronto team. All of this combined with Barb’s delightful personality made her an excellent choice to join our extended Pronto team. Given the opportunity to work together, we decided to expand our partnership with Barb and have her take on the role as Pronto’s Managing Editor for our blog and newsletter content.

Over the next month or so we are going to more than triple the number of blog articles we write, improve the overall quality of articles and give you the opportunity to both contribute ideas and tailor the content to your specific business needs.

IMPORTANT ACTIONS FOR YOU

Update Your Blog Topic Subscriptions

First, if you haven’t already, please go to your WordPress Dashboard, and update your blog article subscription preferences. You’ll see the “My Subscriptions” link in the upper left corner, right under your Dashboard menu. There you will find over 40 blog topic categories that you can select from.

Tell Us What You Want

After you’ve updated your subscription preferences head on over to the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums. It is super easy share some of your ideas and requirements for YOUR blog content. Barb and I are actively involved in these forums – taking client ideas and developing them into content that meets your business requirements. Of course Barb will be developing many great article ideas on her own, and she will share them in the forums as well, but this is your opportunity to make sure that Pronto is delivering the right message, on the right topics for your unique needs.

We’re sure over the coming months you’re going to be very pleased with the breadth, quality and frequency of your blog updates. Help us help you, by updating your subscriptions right away and then joining the discussion in the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums.

Thanks,
Derek Brown
Managing Director

2012 is the year of data analysis at Pronto Marketing. Well, 2012 is going to be the year of a lot of things at Pronto; but for me, the first week and a half has been all about data analysis. We’ve kicked off the year by taking a look at our Business Listing Management service to see how effective the program has been.

We started by dumping tens of thousands of data points from Google Analytics and organizing them into different traffic sources: Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search (PPC), Referral, Email Campaigns and Social Media. Next, we grabbed a data set covering a 90 day period (October through early January) and starting comparing clients enrolled in the Business Listing Management service to those not enrolled.

Analyzing the Results

The first thing we noticed is that enrolled clients had 34.7% more traffic from organic search than non-participating clients. Since the Business Listing Management service works by building citations and local listings (both important for local SEO) on directories throughout the Web, this was an encouraging figure – but inconclusive. A quick look shows that enrolled clients performed better under every traffic source, so perhaps our group of enrolled clients just happen to get more traffic in general.

Time to Dig Deeper!

To get a better understanding of Business Listing Management’s impact, we decided to look at the performance of clients over time. We started the program in early May of 2011, so we grabbed another 90 day data set from February to April. When compared to the more recent data set (October-early January), we found some fantastic numbers.

Over an eight-month period, clients enrolled in the program averaged a 14.58% increase in organic search traffic while those not enrolled only averaged a 3.67% increase. On top of that, the average number of visits decreased or remained consistent for every other traffic source. Only organic traffic showed an increase over the reporting time frame.

 

These are great numbers that show the results of a great program. Feel free to review the full results. Plus, read more about the Business Listing Management service, how it works and why it’s an important part of any local SEO strategy.

Tim Kelsey
SEO & Social Media Manager

When it comes to picking your domain name, you have two basic options: a keyword domain or a branded domain. Both have their pros and cons.

Keyword Domains

An example of a keyword domain might be something like computersupportphoenix.com or automechanicsanjose.com. The primary benefit of domains like these is that Google looks at keywords in the domain as a ranking factor. So if someone searches for Computer Support Phoenix, computersupportphoenix.com has a better chance of showing up on the first page of results.

However, an exact matching domain is by no means a guarantee of appearing on the first page. In fact, neither computersupportphoenix.com nor automechanicsanjose.com show up for their exact matching search term. Granted, there are no site currently hosted at those domains, but there are hundreds of other factors involved in ranking that tend to be more important like the number of inbound links, the quality of the content, the quality of the user experience and the level of competition for the keyword phrase.

Each year, SEOmoz publishes a report reviewing search ranking factors. They correlate a potential factor with actual search results to determine the level of influence it has on rankings. This year an exact match .com domain had a 0.22 correlation with higher rankings (if you’ll recall your high school stats class, a value of 1 would be a perfect correlation). This is down from 0.38 the previous year so it looks like Google is giving less weight to keyword domains and relying on other ranking factors instead.

Some other important things to consider when deciding on a keyword domain: the exact match ranking correlation is much lower for non-dot-com domains, and using multiple hyphens or having a lengthy domain name can have a slightly negative affect on your rankings. Remember, Google wants to provide quality results and these are signals that the site may be spammy.

Branded Domains

A perfect example is our domain – prontomarketing.com. The main benefit here is that the domain is easy to remember and fits in well with your other marketing strategies. It’s very likely that people hear about Pronto Marketing from a source outside of our website, and it is not a stretch for them to guess that our website is located at prontomarketing.com.

We don’t get the benefit of an exact keyword match, but as with many businesses, our services cover such a wide range that there isn’t one keyword phrase to sum up our business plan. Likewise, hosting your site at computersupportphoenix.com could improve your results for that one keyword, but gives you no extra benefit for additional important keywords like Managed Services, IT Consulting, Cloud Computing, etc.

Short and Sweet

There is no clear winner. In the end, it really comes down to your preference, but no matter what you decide, make sure you keep it short, simple and easy to remember. Your domain name is just one small piece of your website. Don’t spend too much energy picking one out. There are other tasks that are much more deserving of your time such as link building, adding quality content to the site and making sure the overall usability of your site is in tip-top shape.

Tim Kelsey
SEO & Analytics Manager

In out last post we talked about not switching marketing horses in midstream, and now we are looking at the other side of the coin.

There are always two extreme points of view on both sides of every issue, but the truth usually lies in the middle. While you don’t want to change your IT marketing plans willy-nilly, you also don’t want to keep going the same direction when there’s evidence that it’s not working.

Sometimes you need to stop and evaluate what’s happening in the market and see if there is a need to make changes. The real question, though, is how will you know when you should buckle down and keep going or pull back on the reins?

Pull the Troops Out – Or Surge?

IT Services marketing can be much like conducting a military campaign when the question arises regarding whether the current war strategy is working. One of the dilemmas that often develops in battle is trying to determine whether you have enough troops, or whether you need to conduct a more limited campaign. Most Generals will tell you that they base these decisions on the prevailing conditions on the ground. This means that if things are going badly and you’re losing, then it’s either time to send in the cavalry – or pull back the troops and regroup!

The same philosophy should be considered when evaluating the effectiveness of your IT marketing campaign. If you have been faithfully staying the course for several months and nothing even remotely positive is happening, then it might be time to stop the press so you can change the marketing message or model. Once you reach that decision, then you have to decide what changes to make, and how.

Research, Research, Research…

The only way to make an intelligent decision regarding what adjustments to make will naturally come from research. This simply means you should know the cause of the failure before you start making haphazard changes. Should you immediately run out and hire a high-priced Madison Avenue research firm to provide that data? Only if you have that kind of money – otherwise, you should just listen to the troops on the front lines.

If you have a veteran telemarketing team with some business savvy, they should always be asking “why”? If asked, most prospects will disclose why they don’t have an interest in what you’re offering. If this data is tracked properly, a trend might appear over time that will illuminate the problem and you can adjust your message accordingly. As a result, making changes to your IT marketing will be more successful, and you should return to a healthy ROI.

John Black is the Marketing Director at MSP Telemarketing and has over 10 years of experience with IT marketing on behalf of Managed Services providers.

His experience ranges from writing articles, blogging, IT telemarketing, sales coaching, and speaking at events.

Howdy! A couple of months ago, I laid out some general ideas on how to start building inbound links for your site. Today, it’s time to dive into one (well, one and a half) of those items in more detail.

Every webmaster and blogger wants quality content for their site. The only problem is that quality content isn’t easy to produce. It takes time or money or both. Often, site owners will jump at the opportunity to post an article on their blog written by a guest.

Quality content is to B2B marketing as catnip is to LOLcats.

Guest blogging isn’t easy either, but the links you build to your site and the connections you make with other site owners can prove invaluable in the long run. AND, you have an amazing tool at your disposal to make this much easier – your existing blog posts. You already have hundreds of articles on your site ready to be used as guest blogging articles.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – you have total control of the articles posted by Pronto on your blog. Feel free to use them however you please.

Here’s an example of David Spire at United Systems Computer Group leveraging an article to build a link from his local Chamber of Commerce’s blog. David accomplishes two important things here: 1) he built a quality, relevant link back to his site and 2) he exposed United Systems to a wider audience that might not normally visit his site. In short, he increased his internet presence.

These guest blogging opportunities won’t just fall in your lap. You have to go out and find them. David did a great job of finding a blog within his local business community. This is a perfect place for you to start too, but where do you look after that? I’m sure we all have our favorite tech blogs, but TechCrunch and Mashable probably aren’t looking for guest bloggers. So where do we go? To the internet!

Google has several advanced search operators that can help you find exactly what you are looking for. I’ll briefly discuss two of them that can be useful for our purposes here.

The “inurl:” function limits the results to pages that contain a specific word in the URL. Searching for “pronto marketing” returns all kinds of pages from our site and other domains, but searching for “pronto marketing inurl:blog” cuts out everything that doesn’t include the word “blog” in the URL.

Now, you can pick out a specific service that you offer, add inurl:blog to your search query and BOOM – a list of blogs on that topic.

The “site:” operator restricts results to a single domain. A search for “site:prontomarketing.com” returns every page indexed by Google on our domain. There are tons of uses for this search operator but in this case we are going to use its negative function (-site:) which removes a domain from results. This can be useful if one domain is dominating the results, or as in the example below, you want to remove UK websites from the results – no offense to our friends in the UK!

Now get out there, find some blogs and send a message to the site owner! I recommend getting as specific as possible. Is there a service you specialize in that most other companies don’t? Focus on that! Don’t expect a perfect reply rate. Any blog worth its weight in LOLcats gets a ton of messages everyday – be patient and stick with it. You’ll hear back from someone eventually and it will totally be worth it.

Sound interesting? Good! Here’s a much more detailed article on guest blogging.

Tim Kelsey

SEO & Analytics Manager

P.S. MORE LOLCATS PLZ!