The Public Relations industry has not been the same since the advent of the internet. The first wave of change in the PR industry was the advent of corporate websites and the ability of the information on corporate websites to represent organisational opinion, a brand and make PR announcements. PR professionals had to adapt by adding and controlling content on the PR sections of corporate websites.

Online News

Managing PR content on corporate websites as a tactic was short-lived and not sufficient enough in the ever changing internet. With the sheer speed of information on the web through news sites, PR professionals had to figure out how to also grab attention from ‘authoritative’ old and new media news websites.

Online PR & SEO

The major seismal change for PR was the emergence of professional ‘online PR’ sites and Search Engine Optimisation. Online PR sites like PR Web & i-Newswire are the new ‘wire’ PR professionals send announcements through to in order to grab the attention of journalists, their industry and the web in general. PR professionals have had to figure out how to use these PR websites to their maximum capabilities. This is where the SEO/PR crossover has taken place.

As you know, Search Engine Optimisation is a collection of methodologies and processes aimed at improving the search engine rankings of websites. PR sites work well with the search engine optimisation process because they improve the link popularity of websites they promote. Because of this change, PR Professionals have had to either work with SEO professionals who undertake keyword research in order to discover popular, more commonly used keywords and help with link placements or have had to learn SEO themselves. I remember I used to provide our PR department with a set of keywords to use for press releases they sent through PR websites.

Blog

The next major wave to hit the PR industry was blogging. The advent of blogging empowered masses of people to have an opinion. The blog publishing industry tree has hundreds or perhaps thousands of branches of subjects and genres with loyal followers. Blogs have meant more specialisation on topics in the publishing industry. There are obvious quality issues in the blogosphere but there are also established authoritative blogs in every industry. PR professionals not only have to think about getting their brands out on Top notch blogs but also need to build somewhat authoritative blogs for their brands. Corporate blogs at the moment are the medium through which of PR departments can self-publicize the brands.

Twitter

Like blogging was not enough, micro-blogging has arrived. With roughly about 2.5 million users, Twitter is the defacto micro-blogging platform at the moment and is an area PR professionals and brand managers need to adapt to. It’s brevity is its strength and its potential to reach thousands of people must not be overlooked. Twitter can take your brand to another level if your PR strategy is well thought through. Business owners might have to look for Social media professionals to work with the public relations and marketing team to get the most out twitter. Its probably not the last platform PR professionals would have to adapt to but its certainly the current platform garnering huge attention at the moment. Social media in general should be watched really closely.

I will be blogging about tips on marketing on twitter and social media in general.

For further reading read…

The importance of Online PR (slideshow)

A Short Story About the Romance between Public Relations and the Internet…so far is a post from: Fuzz One Media

I have had this podcast lying on my desktop for a little while now, with the intention of sharing it on a blog post. It’s a Duoblogger.com interview by Hendrik Kleinwächter with Matt Smith, a Google Adsense publisher that currently earns an average of US$3,000 per day from a single website – freeforeclosuredatabase.com from Google Adsense. A consistent stream of US$3,000 per day over a year would yield about US$1.1m per annum.

A full listen of the podcast is highly recommended (it takes about 24.31 minutes), but for those of you too busy to listen, here are some of the most important points from the interviewed I put together:

The Steps

• Obtain valuable public data that consumers want but is difficult to access or can be accessed only via payment
• Uniquely organise the data like no other site has done and create value
• Place well optimised Adsense units on your website’s template
• Outsource all the development – ask a team of software developers (preferably off shore) to organise this data
• Device an SEO strategy to drive traffic to the site

3 Methods of Generating Useful Content on a Website for Adsense

1. A publisher creates user content on her/his own (via online publishing / blogging)
2. User generated content (risky) via forums, social networking sites & communities
3. DB approach – gather content buy buying it, renting it or organising free data in a unique way that provides value to prospective visitors

Other Points About Matt

• Matt has invested a total of 100 hours of his time in the last 3 years on freeforeclosuredatabase.com
• His success balls down to system based organisation – i.e. anything that can be automated, should be automated
• Duplication of content issues can be averted by introducing differentiation in the presentation of publicly available content
• Inbound links are a key success factor of any traffic generation strategy
• Matt has devised a unique strategy (he would not divulge) for generating links – an automated method for generating QUALITY, REAL LINKS from Realtors with his ANCHOR TEXT of choice generates as many as 15 ‘real’ links per day
• He is process driven
• Completely outsourced website development – with no full time staff
• Offshore labour based in Ukraine
• No customer service – ‘its free content if you like it’
• Finally, his goal is to LIVE his life – businesses like this make it easy

First Hand Advice from a Google Adsense Millionaire (podcast) is a post from: Fuzz One Media

In response to several requests from webmasters about the core aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO), Google has just released a compact Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide. The 22 page PDF document outlines the basics of SEO that make a huge difference for new and existing sites.

According to the report, aspects of on & off page search engine optimisation that shouldn’t be taken likely are:

• HTML title tags
• Meta Description tags
• Search friendly URL structures
• Navigation and hierarchy of sites
• HTML & XML site maps
• 404 pages
• Unique & ‘fresh’ content
• Internal linking and Anchor text
• Header tags
• Image tagging
• Robot.txt files
• No follow links
• Ethical external site promotion &
• Analytics

It covers quite a lot for a 22 page document. This takes me back 5 years ago when I was learning the ropes of SEO.

Google has been quite reluctant to publish a compact ‘SEO guide’ for years now. I think this move just goes to say how important good SEO is  and also firmly confirms SEO best practices.

You can download the SEO Starter Guide PDF and also read the announcement on the Google Webmaster blog.

Long awaited SEO Starter Guide from Google released is a post from: Fuzz One Media