I’ve owned the New Rules of PR and Marketing for long enough that mine’s a hardcover, and that on first reading the titular adjective didn’t feel out of place. Now, having re-read it six years after publication, a lot no longer sounds new but common sense, and even a little dated at times. Mostly, that means David Meerman Scott was right, and that the book is a good collection of online business dos and don’ts. Here is a very short summary of ideas I took down:
- Use media (video, audio) freely: there’s software and hardware out there that makes it cheap and simple (e.g. Castblaster)
- Make purchasing easy: link to purchase pages
- Make the website reflect your (company’s) personality, especially on the About me page and the testimonial page
- Think of buyer personas and design the site around them, even with separate landing pages for them (a 21-year-old and a 61-year-old will want different champagne for different purposes)
- Who might blog about your site and product? Comment there, appropriately and knowledgably
- Try to find out how people find your site – search terms used, incoming links, etc. – and reuse what brings in the right people
- Get a good domain name that’s as unique as possible for search engines and describes your product; and for certain pick a unique company name
- Make pages “sharable”; enable social bookmarking like Del.icio.us, DIGG, Reddit
- Think of keywords and use them – all over
- Link to other content providers, even competitors
- Make free information available, downloadable even, especially if it can establish you as knowledgeable in your field
- If you blog (and by extension, tweet), have a plan and follow it: random blogging is likely to bog down
- Tag pages
- Send David Meerman Scott the blog link
It’s up to you to make and sell something now!