So how do you get a siteless web presence?

Your website is one place on the web. One place that Google can direct traffic. When a person does a search for your site then you’ll hopefully pop up. If you have the right kind of URL, Title Tags, Meta Tags, and enough relevant content about you on the home page.

Now I’m not saying you need to talk about yourself a lot – just the right keywords. And I’m never into talking about myself too much – you should be talking to your customers, telling your story, and explaining your unique benefits.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll post a blog on what kind of tags you should be using and how they work on a website. Anybody interested in that?

Anyway, back to siteless web presence, after your Google search on your website, other sites pop up. Are they your competitors or just useless information that Google pulls out of the web universe?

You should dominate that page, right? You don’t want a competitor sitting right below you or above you if they know what they are doing with search and you don’t.

You can with a siteless web presence. If you take your content and put it out on other websites that are consistently searched by Google then soon you will begin to dominate Google searches. Now this doesn’t work for all searches but when it comes to a search for you, you should be there.

Here’s what I’ve done for myself, Don Schindler. Now this isn’t guaranteed. It’s a work in progress all the time because Google is constantly updating its algorithm and indexing more and more sites.

Search for Don Schindler through Google.

I come up right away.

But our siteless presence that I can control deals more with putting our content on outside sites, putting the right information in about our company and tagging it appropriately so Google can see it and index it.

Now as far as I know there isn’t a set of steps you can do that will automatically work. It’s more trial and error and if anyone knows a set of steps, please fill me in. But what I’ve found that works is making sure you are constantly updating your external sites as much as you update your own website. By adding more and more relevant content.

Here’s what ad agency, Modernista, did. They took it to an extreme but I think it’s very powerful. Having a site like this is not for everyone and I am in no way saying you shouldn’t have a website.

I’m saying you need to also have a siteless web presence which means letting people take your stuff and put it wherever they feel like it on the web.

Take for example, you sell something in retail – maybe shoes. You have your little store in Broadripple and you are just getting into online selling. Some of your customers that are farther away are starting to buy online and you are promoting it as best you can.

What I would do to give myself a siteless web presence…I would take photos of all the shoes and put them up on Flickr or Photobucket or Smugmug with links back to my website for purchase.

I would take videos of models (my employees with good feet) walking around in my beautiful shoes. I would put them on many video sites using heyspread.com or just doing the standard youtube.com.

I would make a widget using Slide pulling from Flickr and then put that on my blog about shoes (you need a blog, just get over it and do it where I talk about shoes).

I would also allow people to take the slide widget off my website if they want so they can put it on their facebook or myspace profile or wherever they want.

I would get a cool technology company to build me a retail selling widget based on my store so if someone wanted to take my retail store and put it on their site, they could. I would take this widget and put it on my profile pages.

Then I would visit other people’s shoe blogs and talk (positively – no need to flame anyone here) about their shoes and leave behind my link or small slide widget on their forum or blog. I wouldn’t promote my own shoes but I would join the conversations and let people follow the links if they wanted.

Then I would be very careful to watch my conversions in my online presence. Is stuff working or is it not? I would watch my analytics to see if people were using the widgets or visiting the site. Then adjust.

And I would search myself on Google and make sure I was easy to find and I dominated my page…I would work on getting into other searches like basic shoe searches for the brand names I carry, etc… but that’s a blog for another time.

I feel like this blog isn’t finished. There’s so much more I would do but these are some of the basics. Siteless web presence is getting your name out on other sites instead of just trying to get them to come to you. Go where the people are.

What do you think?

Last week I spoke of a siteless web presence. And what I meant by that comment was that you need to stop thinking of your website as a destination stop and more of aggregator of all your web content. Pretty simple, huh?

But first things first. Your website should be a living breathing thing on the web. If you don’t know how to update your site – or if you need your web guy to do it then you need a new website. One with a CMS (content management system) behind it. Updates should be frequent and relevant – so you can get some Google love.

BTW, this doesn’t have to be expensive – it can be almost free if you don’t mind taking some time to piecemeal things together on the web like making a Wordpress blog into a full blown site and adding interesting information widgets like Google calendars/maps and cool stuff from Widget Box. There’s a lot more out there – these are just examples.

But looking at your website and saying this is the end-all be-all of my existent on the web is a mistake especially if you are making good content and treating your website like the media property it should be. You should be and can be everywhere at once.

(By media property, I mean you are treating it like a TV/news channel where you are throwing out good entertaining education on your products – and don’t ask me what these things are – you know what they are, you are a consumer. You’ve seen other websites product videos or blogs or forums or whatever and thought “Hey, that’s pretty cool.” That’s what I’m talking about.)

I kinda rambling today with all these tangents but I swear I will get back to my topic. Look here it is.

Siteless web presence means that you are putting your web information out in multiple locations on the web and making sure that people can take your information with them – if they want. One example would be that if you make a video – it should go on your site but it also should be out in all the places where people watch videos like YouTube and Revver and everywhere. You can even do it all at once with HeySpread.com.

Another thing – Don’t ask me why they would take it. I don’t read minds. But I will tell that they do take it for whatever reason. They take it and mash it up on their website or they use your product video in a blog they are writing.

So how do you get a siteless web presence?

I’ll save that for later this week.

No!!!!! The last thing you need to do is replace the person who knows your company inside and out and is dedicated to spreading the word about your success.

But you do need to understand that they probably need some love and attention.

For a small business, having a marketer is a true benefit. Most of the time it’s the CEO or President or the new intern who just came on board (BTW, that is a seriously bad move – the last person I would want to be giving first impressions about my company is the new intern – no matter how cute they are).

But that marketer may need some help. This is no longer a world of brochures, radio spots, TV ads and tradeshows. Or even static brochure-like websites.

Your “new” marketer needs to understand the basics of new media – especially if you, like many others, believe that the web is the most efficient way to reach new customers and reconnect with old ones.

Your marketer is used to start and stop flight dates. They are used to working hard on brochures and flowery language or a biannual magazine and huge annual report. They may not even be used rules of social networking, blogs and forums. They may not understand what a widget can do.

So instead of shouting at them to get these new Web 2.0 components online, maybe you should be asking the marketer what kind of education do you need before we jump in and start conversing on the net.

Let me tell you – they aren’t going to get that from a one-time seminar from AgencyND or by reading a book. They need to be immersed in it. They need to spend some time learning and USING Web 2.0 things before they start a social community or a blog or a forum.

I’ve set up hundreds of social tools. Some have done great and some have failed miserably. There have been almost none in between. What was the difference? The marketer behind the wheel. If he/she understood how to use the tools, how to listen to the audience and participate, the social tool flourished.

If you are thinking that you don’t need these kinds of things for your business, then I wonder why you are even reading this blog. There’s some irony for you.

Here’s a list of things that I believe your marketer needs to know before you go Web 2.0:

1. Enthusiasm for the possibilities of the web – if they are not on board, don’t force it. They will sabotage the online effort and then tell you “I told you so.”
2. Learn the nuances of social networking as a person not a marketer. Social media marketing must be authentic and subtle. If you are shouting about how great you and your product are, they will black hat you in a heartbeat. If you want to know where to start socializing, then email me and I’ll tell you.
3. Learn some HTML – seriously. It’s not that difficult. And it’s part of the job. If they have to hunt down the web guy every time they need something done on your website then you are wasting both the web guy’s and the marketer’s time.
4. Experiment with different tools. There are tons and tons of great FREE resources out there. Don’t buy the first one you see or use. Never get locked into technology unless you know they are stable in the marketplace (like Google). In other words, there are ways to get things done by mashing new technologies together instead of buying a custom solution. Like for instance, this wordpress site can actually be made into a normal looking website with a great CMS tool behind it.

There are many other things that marketers need now. Don’t expect your in-house guy or gal to be able to pull off every little marketing thing that comes along.

Prioritize the marketing list. If you are updating brochures every couple of months and they are sweating over every last detail of the brochure, you might want to go digital so they can change things on the fly.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, right? Well, for marketers, it makes it harder because now you guys want us to do all the new stuff and maintain the old ways of marketing. You can’t have both unless you add more hands.

Maybe this is all wrong and most marketers out there would like to keep doing the same things year after year but if you aren’t doing social media now, how hard do you think this job will be in five years when you are just getting into it. I personally like to learn when everyone else is.

What do you think?

We were working on doing a brand statement for a company when a colleague Scott passed along some good information he received from an expert in the field.

Start with:

To (target audience), (your company) is the (blank) provider/service of (blank) delivered through (blank).

This helped us a ton to put together several brand statements.