It sometimes takes corporations years to find the right sales persona, or spokesperson for their advertising. It makes sense that such a persona is required when advertising on TV, but such a persona is also required in the written and visual mediums of websites and brochures as well. This is one of those areas, which tends to get missed in the creation of Internet publications. As an Internet Publicist is my professional goal to find the voice of the company, and to insure that the voice comes across in the words created to attract attention to the corporation or person I’m working for. This attention comes in many forms; readers, fans, customers, clients, investors and search engine robots. Not all of my readers are human, but all of them are equally important.

Web Content

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Don Winslow, writer of several novels and soon to have two movies base on his work ( one of them with Robert De Niro as a staring role), asked me to create his web presence.

His main concern is not sales (he's already a best seller with his novel (Power of the Dog)), nor does he really feel that a Web Presence is required for his fan base. What Don Winslow is mostly concerned with is another writer, whose name is also Don Winslow.

The trouble begins when a college or book store would like Mr. Winslow to come out to their campus, or place of business, and give a talk. Then they search the Internet to find out more about Mr. Winslow, and find another Winslow, who writes erotica, and not very good erotica. It is the type that would offend most people, and even if not offended, it does put them off inviting him to their school.

While Mr. Winslow and myself have no problem with rights to free speech or even making a living writing what many people find to be entertaining, he would prefer to not have to face an interrogation every time he goes on a book tour.

So the challenge here is not only getting to the Top Ten, but also insuring that for the Top 20, the other writer's listing is not present. Since I'm not a "Black Hat" this takes some diligence in the persuasion of the web bots.

Don Winslow has several novels on the shelves and continues to be an active novelist, so this helps a great deal. What I find most effective in cases like this is Blog entries, forum comments and other passive marketing techniques, which continue to bring Don Winslow into the eyes of readers, along with the titles of his books. It is not necessary to create "links" to his web site in these entries every time, nor is it necessary when creating links, to link directly to his web site. Linking to Wikipedia, Amazon.com, BN.com, or articles written about Don Winslow and the novel I'm commenting on, are even more effective, because it builds a base of preference. Which is my bottom line goal. When someone searches for Don Winslow, I want to search engines to prefer to show Don Winslow the Novelist and author of Winter of Frankie Machine, rather than Don Winslow author of slave girls in rome.

Glenn's Desk, Internet Marketing

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While there is really no substitute for content on a website to insure indexing and possitioning on search engines, my recent experience using the Google Site Maps has been eye opening. Google's Site Map is an XML file listing all the pages on your website which Google should index for search result listings. You can rean about my latest experience, and more about the Google Sitemaps in this artilce I wrote for the Search Engine blog.

Glenn's Desk

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