Marketing Maestro

Trump U's tag line is 'We Teach Success'.  I have been very critical about this line since I started in my role.  To me this is all about TrumpU and not about our clients.  Well, we are doing two things to correct this situation.

First, we are reevaluating this copy.  One idea we are playing around with is: Invest in Your Success. 

If you have other ideas let me know in the comments section.

Second and more importantly we are spending money and using our resources to promote our client's successes.  We are working with our clients and the press to share their stories with the world.  Early results from our clients have been very positive.  They are seeing increased traffic to their sites and inquires into their businesses.  Here are a few of the latest stories:

Recording Studio and Music Store Grows With Knowledge Gained from Donald Trump

Commercial Property Holiday Decorating Service Acquired by Trump University Student

Trump University Helps Aspired Entrepreneur Launch Global Recovery Service

There are three marketing strategies behind this effort.

1. We live up to the promise of helping our clients achieve success by promoting their business using our budget and resources.  Who wouldn't want a little free marketing and PR?
2. It is more effective if the Trump U story is told by a client who has achieved success then by any marketing we could do on our own.  The rest we hope is easy - the news gets picked up, people say I want to do that and they sign up for a class. 
3. Each press release we put out contains text links back to our site which helps build inbound links.  Those links help people searching the internet find us.

We are continuing this strategy going forward and will post the stories on our site as we send them out to the press.

Are your customers or clients telling your story?

What are you doing to help your clients succeed?

Let me know with a comment below.

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Over the last few months I have picked up a number of SEO tips and tactics that we have tried to use to help grow the Trump U business.  However once in a while a good (dare I say great) idea fails due to poor execution.  The 'big' idea this time was to utilize the popularity of reality tv and discuss the many shows that focus on real estate investing and development to drive a conversation on our site.  If done properly the effort would have created:

• links back to the site,
• some buzz and discussion on our blog and
• if you searched for some of the shows such as Flipping Out, Extreme Home Makeover, Flip This House, My House is Worth What? (Kendra Todd was an Apprentice winner), and many other shows our site would have been included in the listings for the terms. To make sure this effort was successful all we had to do was:

• Create a comprehensive list of TV shows with links back to their site
• Take a position on what Trump U thought about these shows and made it known
• Use a few key terms multiple times to get picked up

Well in this case our blog post didn't deliver.  As one friend pointed out we got a 'D' maybe a 'C' at best for this effort.   It happens, good ideas do go south but the question is - how do you prevent this from happening again?  Good ideas that can drive the business shouldn't be allowed to go south.  The lesson here is you need the right people doing the job.  Not everyone understands SEO or effective blogging.  In this case we needed to provide more guidance before the post was put up.

What do you think about our posting?  Did it hit the goals we outlined? What else could we have done differently to make the blog posting great.

There is a saying in public relations that all publicity is good publicity.  Today I am going to tell you that every press release no matter how polished or how much pick up it gets is not necessarily a good press release.

I learned this the hard way so I am going to share a little info here that will hopefully save you time and money.  In today's world a press release is not just an announcement of a new product or service.  You always need a hook or something of interest to write about. What makes or breaks a press release is how well it is optimized for the search engines and if your keywords are anchor tagged in the release.

We have worked with a number of companies to create and circulate press releases. This week is the first time I truly feel confident that we got what we paid for in a TrumpU press release.  I gave Franklin-Spirko a shot at improving our PR efforts and they delivered.  They gave us great content, increased traffic to our site, and provided ideas for future releases. 

If you're not using PR to help market your business you are missing out on a powerful communications and web tool.  Just ask Suhail Niazi, President and CEO of ReturnMoi (and former Trump U Entrepreneurship student) if our little press release helped his business this week.

Can you do your own press releases? Sure, but will you generate the same results as a professional?

Looking forward to seeing you in print and online.

Josef Katz

... needs to keep learning.

Here is a quick tip I picked up last week which might help you as you work on optimizing your company's website:

This past week Jack Spirko and I had a long talk about SEO and the value of an inbound link.  In case you didn't know this, all links are not created equal.  If you are working on ranking your site for specific keywords or terms try to create inbound links that use the keyword(s) in the anchor text (the words you click).  Other links to your site are helpful but they don't carry the same weight for your keywords.  Take this example: "Trump University offers real estate training"  this links to our site but without our keywords in the text link.  While "Real Estate Training at Trump University" uses the keywords in the text link.  The second version is going to help rank our site higher in natural search results when someone searches for "Real Estate Training".

Remember our squidoo lens?  Well you can set up as many links to your site as you want but only if you create your own lens.  Can you guess some of the other keywords we are targeting for natural search rankings?

If you visit our lens please take a moment to rank the page. Thanks.