094 – Philip Singleton: How to Stand Out in a Review-Based Economy
Today my special guest is Philip Singleton, CEO of Kansas City Web Design & SEO. Philip works in the web development space where he helps companies convert their static websites into lead-generating marketing platforms.
He has since written several award-winning and best-selling books on lead generation, search engine optimization and web design. His book, SEO for Growth, was named be Forbes as the #1 SEO book to read for entrepreneurs. It has been endorsed by over 50 of the world’s top marketing experts, and listed as a top marketing book by Inc., Mashable, Oracle and The Huffington Post.
In this episode, we talk about his entrepreneurial journey towards becoming THE SEO expert, launch tactics he used on his best-selling book, working on your online reputation, the power of reviews, and a lot more.
If you’re an entrepreneur, or if you want to make a mark online, click on that play button below to listen to the rest of the episode.
Book launch tactics and endorsements – more than just “book bling”
One of the things that Philip did during the launch of SEO for Growth was to work as many influencers as he could in the book, so that they will have a reason to link bank to it, talk about it and maybe even help him promote the book.
“It got 50 endorsements. We purposely sided over 200 different digital marketers in the book and footnoted them and we also named 16 experts, so there was a specific expert with at least a one-page write-up at the end of every chapter.
They basically became part of this book project, and in fact, the 16 authors that we had, we actually sent them their bios and then in every case, they actually edited it and gave us some feedback and kind of tweaked their chapter.
So they became part of the project and invested in it, because we were saying, “In terms of this chapter we’re writing about, you should follow this expert because they’re at the top of their game in this chapter that we’re covering.”
What we did when the book launch came out is we notified every single person in the book that had some kind of part. They became willing to help us in a lot of cases – not all of them, but a good percentage of them actually helped us market the book.
Just a tweet from somebody like Larry Kim – Hubspot helped us market to some degree to their group because we had Brian Halligan who’s a co-founder of Hubspot – that was one of the things we worked in was to keep an SEO mindset and try to keep your web presence more of the book and drop more Easter eggs in there, so that you can get more benefit.”
Most people think of endorsements as just “book bling” or to give it credibility, but it’s actually a way for you to propel the sales. We actually sold a lot of books and got best-seller status on Amazon for longer than I’ve ever had any book on it, because other people endorsed it and also helped us market it.”
Your website is more than a digital brochure
“I think the biggest mistake to me is that people still look at their website as a digital brochure. The reality is, these days, we are all internet companies because there’s no way to avoid some type of a followup search online.
Unless you’ve got a website that you treat as a marketing platform that’s a referral source for the stuff that you’re doing, where you’re documenting your work and your testimonials and whatever types of things you have about you that get people to know, like and trust you and build that credibility, it has to be documented there so people can look at it.
We have people call us up all the time, they don’t understand why when they invested in print, or TV or radio in the past, they got a predictable amount of sales, and they say, “We don’t think it’s working anymore”.
It’s probably working really well, but the thing is that they’re going back to the internet to follow up on it and you’re losing to people that are working on their SEO and their online reputation and their social media presence.
This happens all the time; we get people who invest in TV here locally and when you go look them up online, they have two one-star reviews. You just lost 90% of your TV demand that you created because the guy that’s above you that has 20 five-star reviews just got your TV advertising money.”
Your online reputation is important
We’ve become a review-based economy. Everybody almost looks up everything and everybody’s looking for social proof. If you don’t make trying to collect some client reviews and document that and republish on your website, making sure that it’s on the key places that you need it to be like Google, then you’re losing a huge opportunity because more and more people are looking for that evidence online to choose you.
In fact, they’re not looking for a solution to a problem; they’re looking for THE solution to a problem.
If your website kicks butt and if you have more reviews than anybody else, all of a sudden you’ve warmed up and now that sale becomes really easy because they come to you so warm that they’re almost hot.
