Pawsible Marketing Blog

Why it's important for you to own your pet business relationships.

After spending many years in the corporate environment and in the pet business world, there are a lot of important things I have learned...but none more important that the need for business owners to own their business relationships and not farm them out to a wide variety of agencies.

Whether those relationships are with your pet business vendors, retailers, suppliers, media or bloggers, building and maintaining those personal connections yourself can be incredibly valuable to your pet business.

Let's say for a moment that you hire or work through a public relations agency to connect with consumer pet magazines on your behalf. They put together a great press release, send it out to the all the appropriate consumer pet magazines in their database, then follow up to see if that media is interested in covering your new pet product or service.

Sure, you may get some press out of that contact. But what happens when that public relations agency pitch person no longer works for that PR company, or that PR company no longer works for you? And what happens when the media has specific questions that your agency's pitch person can't answer effectively?

Not only have you lost that contact and have to start all over building that wonderful relationship, but the ease and speed of communication is lost. In the fast paced world of communications, this could be a detriment to your business and you may loose out on the great opportunity at hand.

Here's a much better scenario. You hire a PR or marketing agency, they write a wonderful press release about your product/service with just the right pitch, then provide you with a great intro email and a list of the pet business media who would find your information interesting to their readers, visitors, listeners, or viewers.

Then you send the email.

This method creates a means for you to build a wonderful and productive relationship with that pet business media representative or blogger; and allows you the ability to answer any media questions, quickly, easily, efficiently and very effectively.

When I was a VP of marketing at an Internet banking technology company, and on the other 'side of the fence,' I fought tooth and nail to bring the public relations marketing activity in-house and under my guidance after utilizing a public relations firm for a year or so; much to the doubt of the president of the company . Why? So we, as a company, could build and cultivate those great relationships with the tech media ourselves, without outside interference and hindrances; and it paid off in spades.

Because I had formed these great relationships with the media through email communications, press junkets, catching up at trade shows and conferences, and staying in contact with those writers and reporters throughout the year, not only would they almost always cover our new developments, but many times when they were working on a story that related to a product line or subject matter that we were an expert in, we were one of the first sources they would call for a quote for the article; allowing us even more exposure within our field.

And this happens frequently with my own pet business marketing consultancy. When the pet business trade magazines are in the process of writing articles related to pet business marketing, they frequently turn to me for tips, ideas and quotes that they can share with their readers. This allows me to share some great tips to help pet businesses be more successful, and provides my business with just the type of visibility I want with my target audience.

So the next time you are thinking about outsourcing the important communications and relationships for your pet business, think again...or at least think about how you can work with your agency or agencies to own your own relationships for the long term health of your business.

Christmas in July - now is the time for pet businesses to prepare for the holidays.

Whether you are a pet retailer, manufacturer or service provider, now is the time to get ready for the Christmas Holiday season.

From selecting new products, or marketing your products to prospective retailer and distributors, or planning promotions for your retail or service pet business, July is THE time to dig in (pun intended :).

What are just a few items that will be hot this holiday season?

Interactive is the word for all toys for all pets.
Quality vs quantity will be a priority for pet loving shoppers.
USA made in lieu of recent problems with foods, treats and products from China.
Eco-friendly and green items will be hot again this season as consumers look for healthier, safer alternatives.
Bundling products for gifting will also be popular.

Leslie May, founder of Pawsible Marketing was recently interviewed by Lindsey Wojcik, associate editor of Pet Business Magazine, for her article 'Honing for the Holidays.' Read up on some great ideas to help your pet business get ready for the busy holiday season, and remember to utilize all the available tools in your marketing toolbox together to have the highest level of impact on your marketing efforts.

If you'd like to talk with us about how you can most effectively take advantage of the holiday season, email us for a free 30 minute consult to see if we may be a good fit to help you market your pet business.

Photo courtesy: El Caganer and Olaf

Where to find photos for your pet business marketing materials

Whether you are blogging, or writing newsletters or articles for your pet business, it's always good practice to include a good photo to go along with your writing. Studies show that photos engage readers more effectively, and get more attention in the newsfeed of Facebook than other posts.

The best photos you can use are personal ones, ones of your own pets - dog, cats, ferrets, hamsters and more. I always have a camera with me, whether it's my cell phone, my point and shoot or my digital SLR to be sure that I can always capture a good shot of my dogs and cats. I have a library of 1000's of photos I've taken over the years that I can pull from anytime.

But if you don't have the right personal photo, several sites offer free to use photos listed under the Creative Commons Public License. Remember it's very important that any photos, illustrations, or images you use fall under this license, otherwise you are not legally allowed to use them and can risk facing legal action.

Here are my favorite sites to find photos that fall under the CCPL:

EveryStockPhoto.com - a search engine for free photos, that come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo's license by clicking on the license icon, near the photo.

Stock.xchng - owned by Getty Images this site is one of my favorites for free stock images. Make sure you check the license under each photo for instructions on reciprocal linking requirements if required.

FreeFoto - another free image site under CCPL, but with less photos. A search for animals returned about 2000 images. But could potentially be a good resource.

And if you can't find just what you are looking for with these free sites, you can always check IStockPhoto.com for very inexpensive professional looking images. They have a vast library of a wide variety of photos, illustrations, images and more that I've used for years for my clients.

Photo credits: Camera and Johann and Gracie Google

Link building: the good and the bad.

Some believe that large efforts in link building with their website is very helpful in improving your search results on Google. If you've ever been contacted by an SEO company, that is one of the things many of them tout as the way to get you #1.

I've never subscribed to the notion of large link building strategies as a way to fool Google and improve search results. Why try to game a system?

According to Google, this type of 'gaming the system' linking building is not a helpful tactic for increasing SEO, and may now be very harmful.

Google's Penguin update has been operating now for about a month. One of the most significant algorithm changes in the update is the de-emmphasis on links that serve no real purpose or are not relevant. Google is putting more emphasis on quality content and quality links, real links that come from respected sites, and not from low quality sites, just for the sake of a link.

There are two parts to the Penguin update that may or may not effect your website.

The first one is site-wide links. These types of links are usually found in the footer, header, or side bar (of a blog) and appear on every page of the website. They are attempts at SEO improvement, but many times just appear as a long list of random links with key words.
The second part are low quality links, or links to pages with no real value, including websites built just for links or links purchased or connected from low quality websites or networks.

According to Matt Cutts, "we've done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we've been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we're turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money."

If your website has been effected by the Google Penguin update because of link building tactics there is a way to recover.

The first step is to remove all site-wide and low quality links from your website and/or blog.
The second step is to not purchase links from companies that sell them just for linking sake. Don't trade or drop links just to get a link, and delete these links if you can.
The third step is to concentrate instead on building relationships with trusted, high quality sites, other companies, bloggers and media, that will take an interest in your content and share with their audience.

And those spam comments you get on your blogs with links? We delete them, of course, and hope you do too. These are perfect examples of low quality links, especially if those comments are not relevant to your content. Hopefully with this update, link farms that sell these services to companies will fade away as folks see that links won't help and can hurt a website. And, those somewhat reputable companies that aren't technically spamming, but just leaving semi-thoughtful comments with the ultimate goal of getting a link back will fade away, as well. We can dream!

The most important step is to be true, sincere and honest in your website development, appearance, and at the same time provide valuable, engaging and link worthy content on your website and on your blog. With that, you will attract attention from higher traffic, quality and respected sites that will be interested in linking to your site and, with this new Google update, improve your SEO, as well.

Additional reading and resources:

Matt Cutts On Penalties Vs. Algorithm Changes, A Disavow-This-Link Tool & More
OpenSiteExplorer.org - tool for finding inbound links to your site.
Matt Cutts: Another step to reward high-quality sites

Free tools to help you monitor your pet business website uptime and downtime.

When your website goes down, it can really affect your business. That's why I have monitoring services on all of my websites.

There are free services you can use to notify you when your website goes down and when it goes back up. I highly recommend them so that you don't have to worry, monitor yourself, and know the instant your site is down, so that you can investigate.

Here are three free services you can use to monitor your pet business website:

SiteUptime.com - this is the one I use on my main site. One monitored site is free and you can pay a few dollars a month for multiple sites.

Ding It's Up - another free site that monitors sites. I haven't tried this one, but will be I will try out with one of my sites in the near future. With this service you can get alerts via email, text and Twitter.

Monitor.us - another free service for website monitoring, not only uptime/downtime, but application monitoring as well.

We highly recommend you use one of these, and save you time and worry.

The power of Pinterest for pet businesses.

You may have heard about Pinterest, and you may have signed up and are actively participating. If so, that's great!

If not, you will want to look into Pinterest as a way to boost your brand and traffic to your site, as well as attract attention for your pet business products and services.

At first I wasn't sold on Pinterest because of their early terms of service that stated anything that you pinned, they now owned and could sell. The terms also stated that all the liability of pinning content was on the user.

In the beginning their 'pin etiquette' actually encouraged users to 'avoid self promotion' because they state, "Pinterest is designed to curate and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you're proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion." That statement has also been removed from their 'pin etiquette.'

The old terms, along with Pinterest encouraging users to pin others content rather than their own created a major conflict. These issues have now been revised in their new terms of services released on March 23, 2012.

These early terms statements discouraged me from experimenting fully with Pinterest in it's early days. However since the change in these terms, I've reignited my test Pinterest account that I originally created for one of my other businesses, JohannTheDog.

So what is Pinterest?

Pinterest defines their mission as, "to connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests."

Pinterest has been rapidly gaining users over the past year actually surpassing Google+ and Linkedin. Here are the current number of users utilizing the most popular social media tools (at publication date):

1. Facebook: 7 billion
2. Twitter: 182 million
3. Pinterest: 104 million
4. LinkedIn: 86 million
5. Tagged: 72 million
6. Google+: 61 million

Since the change in terms of service, my experiment has been with pinning my own content and sharing a wide variety of blog posts for Johann The Dog and Raise A Green Dog, as well as my Squidoo lenses.

What I've seen has been pretty amazing. Here is an example of one experiment:

While I was not actively participating on Pinterest someone pinned my blog post on Raise A Green Dog that outlines a recipe for Homemade Frosty Paws. The pinning and repinning of that blog post drove a good amount of traffic to the Raise A Green Dog blog; increasing my visits by about 100%. So when I actively engaged with Pinterest after their terms of service update, I decided to create a 'Dog Yums' board and pin that same blog post along with some other recipes. Within just a few days it went semi viral, increasing traffic to my blog by well over 4000%.

So what's key in getting attention from folks on Pinterest and getting your pins, repinned (or reposted)? First, I think you need to understand the audience on Pinterest, so let's explore that.

An infographic from Mashable, outlines the current demographic audience on Pinterest, stating:

87% of Pinterest users are female, 23% male
Primary ages range from 25-54 with approximately 23-25% for each of the three segment breakdowns of those three age ranges.
Two primary income levels utilize Pinterest - $25-49,000 and $50-74,000

See any similarities? Yep, it's primarily the same demographic for pet product and service purchasers, which makes it a super audience for pet business marketing.

With that in mind, here are my top thoughts on what pins are most likely to attract attention for your pet business:

Extremely well written and thoroughly researched original content, whether written on your blog, or your website.
An article, blog post or similar that's unexpected, unique and not a copy of the same old, same old information out there on the web currently.

These items mean more work, but also can reap more rewards. More advice is to stick within the realms of your brand, staying true to your brand; and write about what you know.

Here are a few additional articles that may be of interest: