One of the Twitter profiles I manage, MGM Grand Detroit, just received access to update their enhanced profile.

As an advertiser with Twitter, your business profile receives a verified account, but with the addition of enhanced profiles, business pages now have the opportunity to add a non-linkable banner image (835×90) and, at no additional cost, promote one of their tweets to the top of the profile page.

To add in the 835×90 image or to see if your account has this feature activated, click on “settings” then “enhanced profile.”

To promote one of your tweets to the top of your profile at no additional cost, visit Twitter Ads, then “Create New Campaign,” “Promote Your Tweets,” and then “Target Your Profile.”

To view a number of examples of how brands are using the banner space on their profile pages, visit the Google Images Search for “enhanced twitter profile.” Some of the current top examples are of the Coca Cola, NPR, and Kiva twitter profiles.

From the MGM family, here are a few examples of how 3 casinos are each using the available image space. As a casino focused property, MGM Grand Detroit is using the space to promote upcoming casino promotions, while MGM Grand Las Vegas is promoting their upcoming renovations and contest, and Monte Carlo is promoting their twitter hashtag campaign, #MCVIP.

Negative results in the top 10 SERPS for your brand name? Want to move those negative results down to page 3+ but aren’t sure where to get started? Here’s a simple primer.

1. After you’ve figured out that yes, this is a negative result from an issue that has since been resolved (closed lawsuit, one time complaint from an ex employee/client/competitor, etc) and not an open product or service issue that needs to be addressed, the next step is to analyze the negative results. Is your brand name/keyword in the title tag and url? What is the PageRank of the site? How many links are pointing to the page that is ranking? How many links are pointing to the domain that is ranking? What are the PageRanks of those links? What is the anchor text of those links? Doing some research in the beginning will set the groundwork for figuring out how difficult it will be to move down the negative results and what types of links, sites, and profiles you’ll need to create in order to rank positive and neutral sites higher than the negative results.

2. Find sites that are neutral and/or positive that aren’t ranking on page 1 yet. There might be some great sites out there that have both age (published years ago), PageRank (domain or page), and links that just need a few great links pushed towards them in order to rank high for your keyword. To find some of these sites, follow these steps:

1. Search for your keyword and look at the results on pages 2, 3, 4 all the way to 10+. I’ve seen pages rise up quickly in the ranks that were PageRank 0 but had a high domain PageRank and links and just needed some additional links to the appropriate page. The fact that those sites are already ranking within a few pages for your keyword means that it has the possibility of moving up, it just needs the extra push.

2. Use search operators like inurl:keyword (such as inurl:rachel kuptz) and intitle:keyword. You may find some news sites or even pages on your own site that have a great PageRank and just need to be optimized a bit more and have some links pushed towards them.

3. Create sites. Break out your career, news, charity, blog, locations pages to be their own mini sites or even just subdomains of your site (careers.company.com). You’ll see this often in larger companies when you type their names in the search engines where the results show the company site first, then a number of subdomain and landing page sites in the following results.

4. Create profiles on other sites. Sites like Twitter, Facebook Pages, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn company pages all rank high for your name/company name when optimized properly, linked up, and are updated on a semi regular basis.

Ready to tackle the search engine optimization of your site, begin an AdWords campaign for one of your products or services, or clean up your search engine result pages (serps)? There are a variety of SEO and PPC agencies, freelancers, and services in Michigan that can be available to help you manage your campaigns, but what if you want to learn or take on the SEO efforts on your own?

Even if you want to outsource your SEO or PPC efforts to a reputable agency or freelancer, I would always advise that you take the time to understand the basics yourself. If you understand the basics, it can help you to find and interview the best agencies to ensure that they know what they’re doing (and be careful of the bait and switch — if you’re hiring an agency, interview the people that will be *working* on  your campaign. Make sure you have an opt out in case that person leaves the agency and an agency shuffle leaves  you with a newbie as well.)

I learned what I know about SEO, Pay Per Click/search engine marketing, and Online Reputation Management through working at agencies and trying everything out that I read on blogs and forums.

If you’re really interested in learning from experts, conferences are a great way to go, but that can get expensive. Some conferences that I have attended and would recommend include:

• Affiliate Summit
• Search Engine Strategies
• Search Marketing Expo
• Pubcon

If reading and guides are more of your thing, I would start with sites like:

• SEOmoz
• Search Engine Land
• Sphinn
• SEOBook
• AffBuzz
• Webmaster World
• Keyword Academy

These sites publish posts on a daily basis and are made up of professionals who are regularly working on sites and are the first to know when changes are happening. Some of the sites are blogs, others are news/rss feeds, and others are forums and membership sites.

Of those sites, if you need more hands on help than just reading a post, SEOBook has a forum ($300+/month) that is really credible and you can ask any questions you want — it’s the industry leader for learning SEO. SEOMoz has some free and paid guides, and The Keyword Academy is great for learning how to choose keywords that will bring in traffic but that aren’t overly competitive and teaches you how to rank for those keywords (without the technical info).

Same thing with affiliate marketing — if you’re interested in learning, start reading sites like AffBuzz and attending conferences like Affiliate Summit. Professionals that make an income from affiliate marketing regularly share their tests and findings through various blog posts and via conference sessions.

I’ve used Unique Article Wizard for over a year now. In the past few months, however, I haven’t been making use of it enough to justify the monthly expense of $67. I’ve been looking at and testing a few alternatives, and so far, there are a few that I like and am considering using *instead* of UAW.

Unique Article Wizard vs. Other Article Marketing Programs

Unique Article Wizard is, well, unique, in the sense that your article is distributed to a number of blogs and sites related to your niche. You write and re-write an optimized article 3 times, then UAW takes that article and the versions of that article and distributes it to sites that have opted in to the system. One article can end up being posted on over 500 sites if you have a general category (say finance, for example). Those articles contain a link back to your site via the “About the Author” paragraph, and if the article is posted on high ranking or relevant site, that can lead to traffic and rankings.

The negative part of UAW is that a lot of the sites that your articles are posted on aren’t highly trafficked, have low in bound links and PageRank, and are just spammy made-for-adsense sites. You may get a lot of links, but those links don’t end up being very beneficial in the long wrong — quantity over quality in this situation. For some long tail, non competitive keywords, UAW can work wonders. If you are looking to start an online reputation management campaign for a name or specific product related keyword that doesn’t have much competition, UAW can be helpful in pushing links to optimized sites and profiles that may otherwise not receive many in-bound links organically.

Other article marketing sites, such as Ezine Articles or GoArticles, allow you to post an article and then allow others to copy and repost that article, keeping your author profile and links in tact. This method can sometimes lead to better quality links to your sites and, in some situations, the article on those sites will rank highly, but you won’t receive as many links. Quality over quantity with those types of sites (although quality can sometimes be argued here, as well).

Alternatives to Unique Article Wizard

ASHelper and Article Submitter

Both of these free, downloadable applications let you upload your article, author bio, links, categories, and other information, save the article, then submit to a number of article submission sites, including the popular ones like GoArticles and Ezine Articles. For those sites that require registration, both programs allow you to also save that information. These programs make it easy to submit articles to some of the more credible article submission sites in a short time, instead of having to go to each site separately.

Article Submission Helper | Article Submitter

Distribute Your Articles

Similar to Unique Article Wizard in the way that they distribute articles to blogs and networks, but this is more of a community than UAW. Worth checking out if UAW has stopped working for you. 3 different plans, rangingn from $34.99/month to $129.99/month

Distribute Your Articles

Review: Unique Article Wizard

What Is Unique Article Wizard?

Unique Article Wizard is an article submission tool that allows you to submit articles to a variety of blogs, directories, and submission sites. Unique Article Wizard has a number of blogs that belong to it’s directory, so finding relevant sites that will list your article is usually no problem.

How Unique Article Wizard Works

Typically, a person may write an article, submit it to an article directory, and then link back to their web site or blog with relevant information. If you’re submitting to a niche site with quite a bit of traffic, this method is great for getting quality traffic. If you’re looking for backlinks for SEO purposes, however, you’re stuck with one or two backlinks. Through Unique Article Wizard, though, you’ll be submitting an article to a variety of web sites by picking categories and topics that your article is relevant to. I’m a monthly subscriber to Unique Article Wizard and have used it to pick up a number of backlinks to my site, as well as to rank on the first page of Google *quickly* for a number of terms. There is a non-disclosure agreement that doesn’t allow me tell you exactly how the articles are submitted, but it’s completely white-hat.

How Can Unique Article Wizard Help Me Rank For Specific Keywords

After you write an article, you’ll be able to write an Author Resource or “BIO” box. In that resource box, you can also include html. So for my web site, the resource box may look something like this:

Karrak Interactive provides a variety of <a href=”http://karrakinteractive.com”>KEYWORD 1</a> and <a href=”http://karrakinteractive.com”>KEYWORD 2</a> resources.

Where keyword 1 and keyword 2 are, those would be html links and you wouldn’t see the code. By distributing your article to upwards of thousands of blogs and article sites, Unique Article Wizard is placing keyword anchor text for you, something that could take hours if you were to do it yourself. You have the potential of placing hundreds to thousands of targeted anchor text on high PageRank and trafficked sites, increasing your chances of ranking for the keywords you are targeting.

How Fast Will I Begin Ranking For The Keywords I Am Targeting?

Unfortunately, that’s not a question that can be easily answered. If you’re trying to rank for a highly competitive term, it may take quite a bit more than article marketing to rank for the keyword. I have, however, ranked for competitive terms by solely using Unique Article Wizard. My site already has links pointing to it, but my technique consisted of pushing out 1-2 articles per DAY. If each article is posted to 800-1,600 sites (per the category I was targeting), that’s a potential of 8,000 links a week, on the low end! I make sure to switch up my keyword anchor text, though, using a variety of phrases and pages so that all the links count, instead of being counted as duplicates.

How Can I Check That My Site Is Benefiting From Using Unique Article Wizard?

A few days after I get the notice from Unique Article Wizard that my article has been submitted, I take two steps:

1. Run a Rank Check Report: Using Aaron Wall’s free SEO Book plugin, I type in the keywords that I was targeting in the article and see where I currently rank. Over a week period, if I’m aggressively distributing unique, informative articles, the ranking will steadily increase.

2. Check In With Yahoo Site Explorer: After a week or so, backlinks from your article marketing should begin showing up. I use Yahoo’s free tool to find out how many links my site now has, and I use tools like SEOPro (free) to find out the PageRank of those sites, the anchor text that is pointing to my site, and whether that anchor text link is nofollow or not. Yahoo Site Explorer is a quick way to confirm that, yes, my article marketing is getting me backlinks, while SEOPro is a more time intensive way to confirm that, yes, those links are providing value.

Is Unique Article Wizard Worth The Money?

That’s also a hard question to answer without knowing your situation. For me, the answer is YES. Actually, it’s MOST DEFINITELY YES. Unique Article Wizard will cost you $67 a month via PayPal. If that’s not in your budget right now, then obviously it’s not worth it to you. If you’re on the fence about ordering it, the nice thing is that Unique Article Wizard IS a monthly subscription, and you can cancel at any time.

For me, Unique Article Wizard provides benefit in that I am at no loss for new article topics, and Unique Article Wizard makes it easy for me to distribute those articles to relevant sites AND get quality backlinks back. I submit anywhere from 1-10 articles a DAY via Unique Article Wizard, albeit for a variety of sites and client web sites. If you are only going to use Unique Article Wizard once a month or so, the cost may not be justified. You can easily submit a few articles to sites like Ezine Articles or Go Articles, but you may not get as many backlinks.

The other thing about Unique Article Wizard, the thing I want to make ABSOLUTELY clear, is it’s not an end all be all for link building. For a link building strategy to be successful, you need to partake in a variety of methods: press release distribution, directory submission, blog commenting, forum commenting, image alt text, link bait, AND article marketing. Article Marketing may quickly get you to the top spot for a long tail keyword, but for competitive keywords and niches, it’s only going to nudge you a few pages. What article marketing and Unique Article Wizard CAN do, though, is push you to the top if you’re ALMOST there — maybe a few links behind your competitor. Your competitor  will have to work extra hard trying to find new links, not knowing that a few articles are all it took to get you thousands of links and to the top of the rankings.

I’m Not A Writer. How Will Unique Article Wizard Work For Me?

This is where I tell you to outsource. I, in fact, outsource the writing portion of my article marketing tactics  for a few of my affiliate sites that would take me hours of research for one 500 word article. For subjects I’m passionate or knowledgeable about, I can knock out a few articles a day, but there are  a variety of places to find credible writers at. Check out a site like FreelanceSwitch or FreelanceWriting for writers that know their stuff – you may pay a bit more, but the quality of the article will be a lot higher. There are a lot of article marketing services that claim they provide quality articles at $3 per article, but I’ve found that you do often get what you pay for.

READ THIS PART IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN BUYING UNIQUE ARTICLE WIZARD:

If you have any questions about Unique Article Wizard, ask them in the comments and I’m happy to respond. I have been a subscriber to Unique Article Wizard now since January 2009 and it has helped me to rank for some highly competitive terms.

When most people think of press releases, they think media attention. Press releases can also be used to gain quality inbound links to your web site, though. As part of your overall link building strategy, there are a few reasons why press release writing can be beneficial: get one way links from quality sites, earn links from sites that find you via a press release, and get placed on relevant directories that re-distribute press releases.

To write an optimized press release, start with these steps:

Define Keyword

When writing a press release, identify one keyword that you want to rank for. There are a few free tools that you can use to determine which keywords receive the most traffic, including Google Keyword External, SEO Books Keyword Tool, and ActualKeywords.com. Pick a keyword that is relevant to your site, receives a considerable amount of monthly traffic, and that will be used on the page that you are trying to rank. The keyword should ideally be in the Title of the page, in an H1 tag, included in the body, and used in your internal linking structure.

Include Keyword Throughout Release

Once you’ve identified a keyword, write out a rough draft of your press release, making sure to include the keyword throughout your release. The keyword should be included, at minimum, in the header of your press release, one to three times in the body of the release, and at least once in the “About” section of your press release.

Hyperlink Thoughtfully

For press release services that allow you to include hyperlinks within the release, make sure to hyperlink from the keyword you identified instead of using non-optimized keywords like “click here.” While not all press release services allow html or hyperlinking, most will allow you to at least include a link back to your site in a resource or contact box, or once in the “about” section.

Consider the Upgrade Option

If presented with the opportunity to upgrade, in most cases, do so. Upgrades generally offer you the opportunity to specify the anchor text of a hyperlink or in some cases, include a hyperlink that a free package doesn’t allow. Not all upgrades are created equally, though. Consider the page rank, traffic volume, trust factors, and cost when determining whether to upgrade or not.

Distribute to a Variety of Services

When submitting press releases for link building purposes, don’t submit to just one service – instead submit to a variety. Some press release sites will check to make sure that your release is unique, however, so make sure to distribute to those sites first. Start with the quality sites that have a number of links and tend to be picked up by the press; also re-write some of the verbiage in your release so as to avoid duplicate content. Simple things like re-writing the header or a few sentences within the release can make sure that your release will be picked up by a number of services.

I’ve been working with Facebook Advertising since late 2008 — 10/19/2008 to be exact. My first ads went to a Facebook Fan Page in order to increase my fan base and be able to market to those fans over the long term.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of testing and figured out a few tricks and things that do and don’t work.

It’s not super easy to get a direct sale via Facebook ads, although I have had success selling affiliate products via Facebook. A person isn’t searching for your product when the come across your ad, you’ve just targeted them (hopefully through relevant means) as a prospect because of interests or demographics listed in their profile. I’ve found, for most of my products and advertisers, that Facebook is best for promoting your brand to a very targeted audience (branding), capturing their data via a Facebook Fan Page “like,” email list or newsletter, or as a lead in general (subscribe to rss feed/enter a contest and capture email/etc), and then keeping them updated with relevant content and promoting your product/service through your sites or newsletter/email list.

Create Multiple Versions of Ads

When I start off with a new campaign, I always make multiple versions of each ad in order to test different variables. First, I create 5-10 ads with the same headline, ad copy, and targeting but different images. After I run those ads for a day or two, I pause the under performing images. Next, I’ll take the 2 or 3 best performing images and create multiple versions of those, keeping the ad copy and targeting the same but with different headlines. After that, I”ll start testing ad copy, and finally, targeting. With targeting, I usually start off really general (location and age range) then start narrowing it down (cities, specific ages, interests, etc).

Start With CPC

I’ve found that it’s best to usually start with CPC ads. With CPC, you’re pretty much guaranteed clicks (unless your ad or targeting is horrible), which is great for testing. Once you have an ad and targeting that you know is getting a great CTR and converting well (whether your conversions are leads or sales), you can then change your ads to CPM. You really have to keep an eye on CPM campaigns, however — if you don’t, you can end up spending your daily budget without a single click. Shoemoney discusses this, and more, in his free video, Facebook Advertising Soup to Nuts Guide.

Test Images and Make Them Stand Out

Your image will have a lot of white space around it, is going to be 110×80, and will be grouped into a pack of 3 or 4 ads on the right side of someone’s Facebook page. Real photos, images with borders, photoshopped/edited photos — those stand out and tend to get clicked over images that are stock photos or bland. You’ll have to change out your images fairly often, though — once your image/ad is shown to your target audience (inventory) a number of times, you’ll see your clicks starting to go down. The easiest way to refresh your CTR (for a limited time before having to change out your targets) is to change out your image on your best performing ads.

Note: According to a study (shown in Shoemoney’s Facebook Advertising Soup to Nuts Guide), top images clicked on had either cleavage, a recognizable brand name, or were blended images.

Make Use of The Reporting Features

Facebook ads have a reporting tool that you can make use of. One of the the reports I run frequently is “Responder Demographics.” In this report, it will break down the demographics, sex, age group, and location of the people that clicked on your ad. From one of my ads that was just in the beginning testing stages and was being served to both men and women, all ages over 18, and in the U.S., the reporting tool told me that the majority of people who clicked on those ads were males, 18-24, who lived in California, New York, or Illinois. I also found from the reporting that males over 45 made up less than .1% of the click thrus. From that data, I created a sub-campaign that was targeted only to males, split up into age groups of 18-24, 35-34, and 34-44, and ran in the states that had the highest CTR. I still ran the general campaign to test out different items, but I put a larger budget towards the new, targeted campaign and was able to spend a lower cost per click for more clicks (the campaign eventually switched to CPM once I was confident in my targeting). Without that reporting data, I may have continued to paid a higher cpc, targeting to age groups and locations that weren’t clicking and were costing me more, for a longer time before figuring out via testing who my specific target should be.

Test Headlines

With any ad copy, testing the body copy and headline is usually a given. With Facebook Ads, however, I’ve found that different techniques work for each demographic you’re targeting. Some headlines that have performed well for me include:

Questions: One ad that performed extremely well for me asked “Are You Fun?” The ad asked a question but also spoke to the product I was selling (bachelorette party goods). I tested the headline by creating another ad, with the same body copy and image, asking “Are You Boring?” Turns out, “Are You Boring?” worked better than “Are You Fun?”, but I would have never known that if I had been content with the CTR of my first ad.

Speak to a Timely Matter: I’ve run ads that were associated with movies, holidays, and events that had a great CTR — for a limited time. When the movie Sex and the City 2 was about to come out, I ran an ad to a cocktail related site that provided recipes relevant to the movie.

Be Totally Vague: This one is my favorite. It works. It’s annoying, but it works. For a poker site, I ran a headline with a quote that said “I’m Not The Sucker.” The ad copy read a quote from the Poker movie “Rounders.” If you target the right people, they’ll get the idea of what the ad is supposed to be about (poker in this instance), but you’re not directly telling them WHY you want them to click on the ad, or what you’re even promoting, and that gets some people’s attention. You have to be careful with this one…

Link Ads To A Facebook Page Customized Tab

Facebook is always switching things up when it comes to advertising. They recently removed the “Estimated Impressions” counter that used to appear on the bottom of the advertising page once you entered in all of your targeting information, and in the past few weeks, they’ve made the “Like” button appear only under ads that go to a Facebook Fan page, while ads that take a person off Facebook have the URL mentioned underneath the ad.

You’ll have to do testing based on your conversion goals, but with a custom Facebook tab, you can still collect email addresses for leads (newsletters, follow ups, etc), or count a lead as a “Like.”

I wasn’t originally planning on participating in HAPPO from the job seeker perspective, but after seeing all of the amazing tweets and posts today, I was inspired to join in.

While my degree is in Public Relations, my career has led me down the SEO and Internet marketing route. Since 2004, I have worked in a variety of search engine optimization, pay per click, and online reputation management roles for corporations and agencies, eventually going full time as a freelancer/consultant in early 2009.

For the past year, I’ve solely focused on online reputation management and Pay Per Click  jobs. I’ve worked with PR firms and individual clients to manage negative press that appears online about companies, business people, and products. It can be a fairly controversial subject, but I help companies to push down negative results for specific keywords by optimizing positive and neutral results through SEO and link building tactics. I work through PR agencies that have already gone through the crisis management steps with a client, companies that have been cleared from lawsuits that still appear online in top ranking positions, and individuals that are haunted by negative comments left on a blog.

While most negative press cannot be removed and will always show up in top rankings for specific keyword searches, there are certain cases where an ORM campaign is crucial – a negative web site showing up as the #2 result for a company name, a negative article showing up about a person with a similar product/name/company that clients start associating with you, or a lawsuit that has since been settled yet still shows as negative.

While it’s beneficial for clients to work with PR firms to solve their overall reputation issues, I can assist with one part of that equation – the online portion. Through methods such as link building, web site creation, profile optimization, and positive online press, negative results can be pushed down to page 3+ for specific keywords, including company names.

I’m hoping that through this post, I can be of help to PR firms that would like to offer ORM as a service. The PR community has been extremely helpful to me in the past, so even if you’re not interested at this time, I am more than happy to answer questions about ORM for those who would like to understand it better or that have smaller clients and just need a quick answer.

For more information on orm services, please visit online reputation management