Free Online Marketing Classes

Come one, come all, and learn how to adjust your web content and online opportunities to attract more volunteers!

Online Marketing 101: Can Volunteers Searching on the Internet Find You?

Learn how to drive volunteers to your website and online opportunities.

Unless you work on optimizing your Volunteer Center’s website and marketing it to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com or MSN/Live), volunteers searching the web WILL NOT FIND YOU. The steps are easy,
and you’ll leave with steps and templates to get started.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

Online Marketing 201: Benchmarking your Site, Registering with Local Search and Using Web 2.0 Communities

Have you attended the basic Search Engine Marketing Training and you're ready for more? You will learn about how you measure how effective your website is at attracting traffic (based on how well your competitors are doing), and then dive into how to register for local search engines and how you can use online communities like Facebook, Gather.com,and Craigslist.org to promote your volunteer opportunities.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

SEO Firefox Extension

The SEO Firefox Extension is one of the most useful online marketing tools that I've run across. It's a great way to not only determine your sites' SEO strength (based on age, number of inbound links, Alexa ranking, and other factors), but you can also snoop on your competitors based on the same factors!

You need to be using Firefox, and if you're aren't already, the Extension is well worth downloading the Firefox browser just to use the tool.

More Tips for Optimizing your Site for Yahoo or MSN

I found a great article about optimizing your site for MSN and Yahoo that I wanted to share. Here are highlights:

For Yahoo:
Likes older sites with quality inbound links
Likes sites that are W3C Compliant - so make sure that it gets the OK through Bobby (online compliance tool) and that you've filled out your alt tags!

For MSN/Live:
Website age is not as important
Likes large sites with lots of good, unique, relevant content
Doesn't require as many quality inbound links

Happy optimizing!

Feedback from National Conference on Volunteering & Service

I just received feedback from the workshop I gave at the National Conference on Volunteering & Service. Here are some of the highlights

• Great for non-geeks, very helpful, awesome & funny - good to laugh at yourself
• She's a great presenter.
• This is one of the best sessions I've attended so far.
• Great information - good job of connecting to a non-computer literate audience!!
• Great speaker - very enthusiastic & spoke in a way non-web savvy people could understand.

It looks like I'll be presenting a similar webinar for NTEN, so stay tune for those dates!

Optimizing PDFs for Search Engines

I know that many of us put brochures, event flyers, etc. on our websites for potential volunteers to download. PDFs are not naturally very search engine friendly, but they can be!

Here's a great article from Search Engine Land that explains how.

Writing An Engaging & SEO Friendly Volunteer Opportunity

How much time do you spend in writing your volunteer title and job description before posting it in 1-800-Volunteer.org?

A well written description is 100 times more effective in recruiting volunteers for two reasons.

1. A volunteer opportunity description and title that uses keyword phrases that a potential volunteer might use to describe the job is 100% more effective, because search engines are computers - they match the keyword phrases that are input into their search boxes with keywords used on the page. Your description and title are just that - words on the page. So don't use the word "docent". That's a term used by our industry, not necessarily volunteers. Use words like "museum guide" or "museum educator" instead. Not sure which keyword phrase people are using to search for this type of opportunity? Use a free online tool like Wordtracker to see the numbers of folks who have searched using those words.

2. Make your description detailed and enticing. If you're not sure how to describe the job, then take a look at our taxonomy document located in the "Resources & Training" section of your 1-800-Volunteer.org account. We've created descriptions for all volunteer jobs possible. Take our generic description, and edit it in such a way that it motivates them to respond and moves them to action. Make sure to include all the details about materials they need to bring, background checks they might need, etc.

It's a new world when it comes to posting volunteer opportunities online. Make sure to think keyword phrases - described how you think your volunteers might describe the job. Without keeping keywords phrases in mind, your volunteer opportunities might never be found, and your community's critical needs might go unmet.