Yahoo at CAPS Toronto

Last week Jacques Brunet sent me off to a CAPS event in Toronto. Ostensibly, the event was for speakers to market themselves online. In actuality, the event was for anyone to market themselves online. I was a little disappointed at how generic the information was but pleased with who Yahoo sent including their Canadian head of PR and their National Director of Search Marketing.
My favourite sound byte from the day was from Martin Byrne... " We spend our day trying to make sure that the people who guarantee you top placement in organic search results in 5 days...are liars."
Because Search engines are about relevance and predictability, they don't want their natural search listing to change much - especially as that would make people less likely to pay for placement.
Another useful piece of advice he gave was on social marketing... I have advised my solopreneurs that unless they naturally enjoy building networks around them, to not waste their time on social marketing. In a sense, I was wrong. I had missed an aspect of social marketing sites that has nothing to do with the social side. Yahoo gives your link more credibility if it has lots of quality incoming links (as does Google). Posting content on the popular sites like youtube, del.icio.us, and flickr as well as responding to forum posts gives you a chance to include a link back to your website from these high quality sites. BUT you have to remember to include your link - in full. include the http:// to be safe. What a fantastic paradigm shift for me. Social marketing without the huge investment of time but with solid benefits.

So put up a photo gallery of your product or service at flickr, create a 2-3 minute video for youtube, share your powerpoint slides at slideshare and link back to your site! Share your new content here to start the traffic building : )