How To Promote Business

Seems an odd expression, “how to promote business”. It’s a query I’ve noticed in Google Adwords’ keyword research tool that has many weakly relevant listings in the search results. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of organic and paid listings for sites hawking business promotion tips, services, and tools in the search results.

It’s just that no one has actually optimized their listings for the expression “how to promote business”. That makes this query a rather odd example of a (moderately) competitive, commercial query.

There are a handful of sites (as I write this) which have included “how to promote business” in their page titles, fewer that have used it in their page URLs, and hardly any that are using value-passing links to point “how to promote business” anchor text at them.

In short, no one seems to care about a phrase that generates a couple thousand queries per month (give or take) on Google alone.

We can call this an orphaned query — no one really wants to own it, and no one is really trying to optimize for it. The most heavily optimized listing I found was a Wordpress.com tag page — which, as I understand Wordpress tagging, would have been algorithmically generated by people entering “how to promote business” in their tags.

The general assumption behind the listings I looked at seems to be that people are really looking for ways to promote business online, or promote business on the Internet. I am so tempted to write a “how to promote business” article that actually offers suggestions on how to promote business online, but that’s been done — except it hasn’t been done for how to promote business.

Or maybe it has been done and whomever did it found the conversions were not very good.

This is a typical conundrum for search engine optimizers. When presented with a fairly generic query, they don’t really know what to do with it. “How to promote business” doesn’t really explain itself — that is, you cannot devine the searchers’ intentions from the query itself. There are plenty of similar queries that provide more specific information:

• How to promote blog
• How to promote site
• How to promote book
• How to promote event
• How to promote video

The list of queries is an AdSense spammer’s dream. Even “how to promote yourself” seems rather self-explanatory — at least you know WHAT you are promoting, if not where, when, or how.

Promotional campaigns have to answer at least four of five questions: who, what, where, when, or how. Those of you who know something about writing press releases should recognize the list of questions.

Promotion itself is the art of informing people in a compelling, interesting way about something they have never seen or heard before. Maybe there is a science to it, but there is more likely a science around it — we have documented the effects of promotion better than we have evaluated the means of promotion, which is not to say we haven’t accumulated reams of data through the decades about promotional techniques, methods, and tools.

The problem is there is just so much opinion mixed in with the fact that differentiating between what works and what people believe works is almost impossible. You pretty much have to know how to promote business in order to know whether an article on how to promote business is telling you something useful (and usefulness is not a black-or-white issue — there is a sliding scale of usefulness in each of us that is set by our needs, priorities, and beliefs).

Business promotion is a big business in the online world. A lot of Web sites offer participation in promotional programs. For example, Dreamhost Web Hosting either offers or has offered in the past a referral program, whereby people have written glowing reviews about the company’s services (and one guy wrote this not so glowing review but still offered the referral code to his readers).

Quite a few people in the “Dreamhost sucks” query space have complained about being sucked in by the outrageous positive reviews Dreamhost affiliates have posted. Is Dreamhost the only company that promotes its business this way?

Actually, no. I’ve signed up with other referral programs. Even Google (which people no longer trust as much as they once did) has in the past offered referral bonuses (I never made a dime off them, although I still get decent revenue from AdSense).

Referral networks do help promote business, although one would think there must be an ethical line which should demarcate acceptable business promotion from unacceptable business promotion. An article on “how to promote business” should, if it’s thorough, address the ethical aspects of whatever advice or information it provides.

I think there is a basic model to be found in this vacuum of content for a horde of as-yet unwritten how to articles about a variety of topics (and I go out of my way to discuss this largely because Ann Smarty wrote a nice, concise roundup on the topic).

That is, if you’re going to invest in a “how to” article strategy for search engine optimization, you should spend some time researching factors that don’t usually make it into the old “How To” format:

1. Methodology Pros and Cons
2. Ethical issues for each methodology
3. Resources for implementing each methodology
4. Clear examples for each methodology

Don’t misunderstand me — I’ve read plenty of “How to” articles that cover each or several of these points, but most of the “How To” articles I find on the Web omit this kind of information. The basic SEO-optimized “How To” article tends to be a schlocky self-promotional shmuck piece that recaps commonly known, easily searched-for advice with no real substance. People are just using the “How To” format to give themselves some cheap links.

There is oh so much more potential value to be reaped from “How To” article writing. Your end goal should be how to promote business — your business, the business of the clients you serve, and ultimately business in general (because that would be good for the economy). Business promotion has become integral to the Interweb. A few years ago business owners were shocked to learn that most people were not using search to find commercial content. That was true. Now, somewhat more than half of all queries are thought to be commerce-related.

That doesn’t mean the number of informational queries has declined — actually all it means is that the business community has learned how to promote business better in the online environment.

But they didn’t learn how to do that from an article about how to promote business. The definitive “how to promote business” article has yet to be written for the online environment.